What is personal resilience or sometimes termed resiliency? Simply, it is the ability to rebound from life's challenges. Some of us have the skills to do so with ease while others find it difficult to rise above the mire of despair. Over the next few days, I am going to explain a bit more about resiliency and identify ways that you can help yourself to bend and sway with the hurdles that life brings.
If you are already in a difficult mental state then the best thing that you can do for yourself is to undergo psychological counselling from a registered provider. When you are low it is not the time to try new things without expert advice first. In the same way that you need to seek medical advice from a Doctor before starting a fitness programme, seeking advice from a psychologist before starting a 'brain fitness' programme is a good idea.
So let's start with your brain, what's going on up there? It is said that we have 70,000 thoughts a day going through our brain. Quite how this figure was arrived at I have no idea. What brain experts are saying is that our brain is full of lots of stuff and the stuff is going flat out all the time. The brain consists of 100 billion neurons, little electrical nerve signals that provide us with thoughts, ideas, and emotions. The neurons are continually searching for things to do.
Our brain is fascinating in the way it works and there are some rules around how it operates and how you can control it. Your brain is wired in such a way so that it is always looking for ways in which to keep you safe. Sometimes it goes too far to the detriment of our well-being. Give your brain half a story and it will make up the rest, in other words you can guarantee that the end of the story will be a negative one.
If I was to tell you that your company is going to go though a change with no further detail about it, by the end of the week your brain would have you looking for another job because you were going to be fired. The reality in fact may be that the company is about to expand and become stronger but I couldn't tell you that because it was confidential. Not much reassurance for you during the interim period was it? Your brain is wired to look for ways to keep you safe, it does so by looking at everything in a negative light.
When was the last time that you worried about something and it never eventuated? I bet it happens most times? If it did happen it was never as bad as you thought it would be. The reason this happens is associated with our fight or flight response. Evolution did this to our brains so that we would be kept safe.
The first part of resiliency is to understand that your brain is looking at the negative side of life. It is sometimes good to examine the negative things but know that your brain is exaggerating the information.