The Basics of Strengthening Resilience

All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.

— Helen Keller

Life is full of challenge. We can't avoid that. No matter how hard we try, how earnestly we seek, or how good we become, life throws us curveballs and pulls the rug out from under each and every one of us from time to time. No one is immune from that reality of the human condition. Bumps and bruises, even occasional catastrophes and crises, are so inevitable in human experience that we don't have to take bad things happening to good people so personally.

We can't change the fact that shit happens. What we can change is how we respond, and that's what this book is all about.

Mishaps are like knives, that either cut us or serve us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.

— James Russell Lowell, Literary Essays

When something challenging or even devastating happens, we have the power — the flexibility — to choose how we respond. It takes practice, and it takes awareness, but that power always lies within us. This chapter gives you a clear map of how you can train your brain to respond to life's challenges in ways that are increasingly skillful and effective. You'll also gain an understanding of how the changes that occur in your brain pathways make the brain itself more resilient.

When Shit Happens: Developing Response Flexibility

When faced with external problems and pressures — car accidents, catastrophic illness, divorce, the loss of a child — or when we are called on to help others face sudden and disastrous shifts in their lives, we can hardly be blamed for seeking to fix the problem by changing the circumstances and conditions "out there." Even when we are tormented by internal messages about how badly we are coping — "I could have thought of that before. Dumb, dumb, dumb!" — we often still focus on fixing the external problem "out there" in order to make ourselves feel better "inside."

Of course, it's important to develop the life skills, resources, and wisdom to create changes in those external circumstances when we can, and to learn to cope well, again and again and again, when we can't. That's part of what resilience is all about. It's all good work, all necessary, all helpful. But every bit as important as focusing on what's "out there" is how we perceive and respond to what's "inside" — to any external stressors, to any internal messages about those stressors, to any internal messages about how well or poorly we're coping, and even to any implicit memories of danger from the past that are triggered by the current event and may feel very real right now. Our capacities for perception and response are among the most important factors determining or predicting our ability to be resilient and regain our balance going forward.

In trying to sort out what accounts for a person's ability to cope with stress, it is useful to distinguish three different kinds of resources. The first is the external support available, and especially the network of social supports. The second bulwark against stress includes a person's psychological resources, such as intelligence, education, and relevant personality factors. The third type of resource refers to the coping strategies that a person uses to confront the stress. Of these three factors, the third one is both the most important factor in determining what effects stress will have and the most flexible resource, the one most under our personal control.

— Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Thus the motto of this book is: "How you respond to the issue ... is the issue." (Deep bows to my colleague Frankie Perez at the Momentous Institute in Dallas, Texas, for that phrase.)

Shift Happens, Too

Whatever shit might be happening, the key to coping with the situation is how we shift our perception (our attitude) and our response (behavior). It may seem that there's no end to external stressors, or to negative internal messages about how we're coping with them. That's why creating a shift in perception (attitude) and in our responses to those stressors and those messages (behaviors) may be the most effective choice we can make to strengthen our resilience.

You can experience this power of shifting your attitude and behavior by refocusing your attention from what just happened to how you are coping with what just happened.

Darn! I dropped the plate! It's shattered in a dozen pieces. Double darn — that was the special plate my aunt gave me when I graduated. Sigh. I'll call my aunt to tell her. We'll commiserate. Maybe we can shop for another special plate next week — it will be a good excuse for a visit.

Three thousand bucks for a new transmission! That's a lot of money. And ... at least it's something fixable. The car will still run for another five years, and ... we'll take one less week of vacation this year, and ... in the very long run this is just a big bump on a pickle.

The doc wants to run more tests. Not such good news. This is really, really hard. Well, better to know, better to get the information I need to deal with this head on.

The big lesson of this practice is that if we can shift our attitude and behavior in these circumstances, we can shift them in any circumstances. Knowing this is the big shift.

Between a stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances.

— attributed to Viktor Frankl

This shift is how we move from "poor me" to an empowered, active "I." It's a shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, a way of keeping the mind open to learning. We can change any internal messages we may be hearing about how we are coping (or not) or have coped (or not) in the past. Strengthening resilience includes coming to see ourselves as people who can be resilient, are competent at coping, and are competent at learning how to cope.

Neuroplasticity

All of the...