Resilience is the capacity to cope with life’s inevitable ups and downs. It involves being able to recover quickly from adversity, let go of negative emotions, and meet the storms of life with flexibility and adaptability. Mindfulness for resilience helps you gains skills to cope well.
Just as you can physically train to run a marathon, you can mentally train for greater resilience. A study conducted in India compared mindfulness, life satisfaction, emotional state, and level of resilience. Greater mindfulness correlated with greater resilience and life satisfaction. Resilience is an important source of subjective wellbeing.
For midlife women, mental health during peri- and menopause is a resilience issue. The storms of life tend to increase. Understanding the extent to which you can take control is resilience in action. Studies have looked directly at psychological resilience during the peri-menopause, and how resilience factors influence both psychological and physical adjustment. Core resilience, control, optimism, emotion, and self-related resilience are all associated with reduced symptoms and better quality of life. Also, with less stress and depression.
Using mindfulness for resilience
Sometimes mindfulness is thought of as clearing or emptying the mind. And that somehow a place of nirvana can be reached, where there are no negative emotions. Neither is accurate.
Mindfulness is not about stopping difficult emotions. It is about relating to them more wisely. Experiencing them, without ruminating or getting overwhelmed by them. Mindfulness meditation can help you let go of what does not help you. Through meditation practice as part of mindfulness, you can learn to be an observer of your difficult emotions, creating space to allow the storm to pass. Use the bringing your mind back from thoughts practice to help.
The seven attitudes of mindfulness can help you become more resilient:
- Acceptance – acknowledge difficulties, fear, anxieties, head on. You learn, grow, and become emotionally strong by dealing with reality.
- Patience – particularly with yourself. Noticing and naming your difficulties can help you be kinder, more supportive to yourself. And it can also help you persevere – learning is a process and patience helps you make mistakes without getting discouraged.
- Letting go – once you acknowledge difficulty, you can let go of habitual thinking patterns. By not getting drawn into rumination, you can experience stress, for example, or anxiety, without getting overwhelmed or shutting down.
- Non-judgement – when the fight/flight/freeze part of our brain takes charge, it can convince you that the worst will happen, and you will not cope. Mindfulness encourages you to be in the present moment, not get drawn into ‘what ifs’, and deal only with what is under your control.
- Non-striving – helps redress the human tendency to want to push negative emotions away. Emotions cannot be controlled but you can control what you pay attention to. Mindfulness reminds you not to strive to alter the present moment, but learn to sit with it, and embrace difficult times for the teachers they are.
- Beginner’s mind – helps you get curious about what you are experiencing. The human tendency is to avoid painful emotions, which trains your brain to be fearful. The more you avoid, the more you fear, which then magnifies the difficulty. Get curious instead.
- Trust – the more you notice the stories you tell yourself, the more you can change your internal narrative. Reflect on all the times you have faced challenges and met them successfully. Develop a quality of trusting yourself to handle whatever comes.
When you stop identifying with your thoughts, your mind can relax. Resilience increases when you can see your mind’s patterns and let them go. Staying calmer means you can be more flexible, and better at problem solving.
Resilience in action
Living in India has been an almost daily lesson in resilience and problem solving. And I would be lying if I did not admit that on occasion, the metaphorical ‘toys’ go out of the pram.
I receive almost weekly opportunities to learn not to waste energy getting angry about the things I cannot change. I’m still learning, hence why I get the chances to practice!
Among life’s frustrations is the stability, or otherwise, of our Internet connection.
We have three wifi connections, and two mobile phone operators. Sometimes none of them are working. Usually when I have a network meeting, or a Live, or some other online ‘stuff’ to do!
I bounce back better than I once did, thanks to a change in my inner narrative. Along the lines of ‘it has already happened, so stop resisting what is’. ‘It is out of my control – so do my best with the things I can do.’ ‘Be patient with myself and trust that however the situation turns out, it is for the best’. ‘People will understand if I am suddenly AWOL.’ ‘Be grateful for the many things that do go well’.
In the grand scheme of the world today, it is small stuff.
The key is to practice mindfulness when you do not need it, so you can use it more easily when you do. Here is a guided meditation on being an observer of your emotions, to help you cultivate mindfulness for resilience. The practice is 12 minutes long.
