How to be resilient and bounce back from sh*t life throws at us
How to be resilient, I recently felt is a basic life skill that only life can teach us. They can’t teach us in school or colleges how to be resilient. They don’t teach us at jobs how to be resilient. Well, they can, but indirectly.
Yes, we talk about happiness on this blog. But life is a rollercoaster and we cannot be happy all the time. It is just not possible.
Life isn’t designed that ways. I have written about mental toughness previously on this blog, but that’s not the same thing as resilience.
Let us get down to the basics.
What is resilience?
Resilience is our ability to bounce back from difficult situations quickly. It is the ability to recover, to be able to get up, when life pushes us down.
How can we be more resilient in life?
In order to understand how to be more resilient, we need to understand the different types of resilience. So, we can understand how to be more resilient in a holistic way. Now, during the journey of our lives, we can be affected in multiple ways.
We could fall physically sick, which would need physical resilience.
Mental health problems would warranty mental or emotional resilience.
We could suffer financially, which would need financial resilience.
We may suffer spiritually, warranting spiritual resilience.
Therefore, the question- how to be more resilient is a complex one to answer. We will try to solve the problem of different types of resilience one at a time.
How to be resilient- Physically
1. Exercise everyday
The important thing we need to understand about resilience is that it needs to be planned and prepared for. Everything that follows in this article, will emphasize the same point. I understood it the hard way, just like most things in life.
If you want your body to be resilient against attacks like sickness, laziness, lack of energy etc., exercise is one of the most powerful ways to build resilience. No, exercise doesn’t guarantee permanent health, but it does provide an ability to lead a fit life, with less sickness, and quick recovery, when sickness occurs.
2. Sleep for physical resilience
Just think about vulnerable you feel physically when you don’t sleep well. Sleep is one of the core pillars of health. When you sleep well, your body and mind is in a shape to perform to the best of their abilities. When you skip sleep, you feel tired and are prone to falling sick. Therefore, to be physically resilient, make sleep a priority for yourself.
What you eat is an important part of how you feel, physically and emotionally. The food we eat is nutrition for both the body and the mind. Eat thoughtfully, and avoid junk food to feel physically active and energetic about yourself. When we eat mindlessly, we feel physically and mental weak. Treat your body like a machine and only add fuel that makes it work better and harder.
4. Avoid injuries with proper form and training
If you work out in the gym, it’s important to train under the supervision of a trainer, especially when you are new to the workout regime. If you try stuff that you are not familiar with, especially when you are working with weights. There is a lot of information available on the internet about proper ways to do weight training. Read, watch videos, and educate yourself. If you end up hurting yourself, which may still happen, keep a reference for a physiotherapist ready. They are medical professionals who can help with physical injuries, and how to heal them faster.
Now that we have looked at a few ways to be more physically resilient, lets us move to emotional resilience. How to be more emotionally resilient? However, do you understand what emotions are, and how do they affect our lives?
Emotions are how you feel in any particular situation. Resilience is our ability to bounce back from difficult situations, or from adversity. Marrying the two, emotional resilience is our ability to bounce back to a state of positive emotions, like joy, from a state of negative emotions like pain.
Let us now look at a few ways to be more emotionally resilient.
5. Build a cocoon of caring relationships to be resilient
Let us be honest. None of us are strong enough to live our lives alone. We depend on others to carry us through when we are down. In order for that cocoon to work, it needs to be taken care of, all the time. If you want to be taken care of, care for others, when they need you.
Your family, if strong and caring enough, is your cocoon. If you are not that fortunate to have a caring family, build a cocoon of friends. You need others to feel more resilient. We can depend on our internal strength when we are struggling, but we need others as well, so that we know we aren’t alone.
Your life at any point, is what you believe it to be. To be more resilient, believe that you have the physical and mental powers to bounce back, from the adversity that you face. Listen to positive literature. Remember all the situations in the past, when you were in a difficult situation, and you bounced back. It will improve your confidence in your belief that you will bounce back, this time as well.
In order to build more resilience, also avoid situations where there is a possibility of hardship or adversity. For example, if you think a relationship may go down a few months down the line, causing you a lot of pain, end it now, or don’t even enter it.
7. Study people who had really hard beginnings and went on to live successful lives
There have been a lot of stories in the world of people who started life with nothing but pain, in the form of abusive parents, volatile political environments or difficult work situations.
They worked hard on their lives in spite of the challenges they faced, and created a successful and inspiring life story for themselves. I am talking about people like Nelson Mandela, Heler Keller, who are two of most inspirations. I am sure you can find several more people who had tons of adversity facing them, but their resilience carried them through. They refused to give in to the difficulties of life.
If they could, so can you.
8. Accept what has happened to be emotionally resilient
One of the hardest things to do when something really painful happens, is we struggle to accept, and keep asking why did it happen to us. Most of the time, what has happened has no reasonable rationale.
If there were a reasonable rationale available, we would find it easier to accept life’s unpleasant situations. However, there is hardly anything on offer in terms of an explanation.
So, if we want to be more resilient, we need to accept what has happened. If you are reading this, you have lost your job, or a family member or a loved one, or a friend who was dear to you, or have had an accident. Life offers no reasons when it throws us under a bus.
We are just left to deal with the situation on our own. The first step to deal with any unpleasant circumstance emotionally is to accept it.
Be hard to break. The world is a tough place, and there is a lot of competition, meaningful or otherwise. Someone is always trying to take your position. Someone is trying to pull you down. Bad things happen to good people. The world isn’t run by a kind God.
Develop thick skin, and do not let difficult circumstances break you when they happen, for they will happen. Life has a way of testing if we still believe in our ability to go through difficult circumstances and see it thorough. It has happened to me, several times in my life, and while I know it, it doesn’t get easier to deal with adversity every time it happens.
Be hard to break to be resilient in the face of life’s difficulties.
10. Ensure survival and be resilient
Here is the important thing about life and difficulties. They will affect you mentally and physically, but you need to survive. You need to exist to be able to fight back to life. Therefore, do not kill yourself. Life is a roller-coaster. It does down, then it goes up, and when it goes up again, it goes up with a higher velocity, if you are able to handle yourself when things are not going your way.
11. Make a plan to get out of the situation
Make a plan for yourself. Let us say that you have lost your job, or lost a loved one. It will take you some time to accept it emotionally, because suddenly, your world, as you knew it has changed, and you need to get used to your new reality.
You cannot get out of a hole by feeling sad about being in a hole. You need to have a plan on how to get out of the hole.
So, make a plan and start working on what you can still work on. If that means looking for a new job, make a plan as to how you would go about it.
If you need to find new company or friends, start making a plan about joining some social gatherings, or use some of the meet-up apps available in the market.
Whatever your situation is, you will need a plan to bounce back to normalcy.
Yes, work really hard. May be something you were working on didn’t work out the way you had envisioned. If we continue to be with the being a hole metaphor, the harder you work on your plan to get out of the hole, the faster you may get out. You will get tired in the process, and you will feel emotionally and physically drained. Rest, when that happens.
But get up, and start working again. Working every waking hour. Your life depends on it. If you stay in the hole, you will eventually die, and trust me, nobody will care. The world has its own problems to deal with.
It is your job to have a plan A, B or C to get out of the hole, and you must work till you drop to make it happen.
Action creates the emotion of hope. You need hope to be more resilient and keep going in difficult circumstances.
13. You need help, so seek help
Scream for help. You are in a dark hole, and although you will do whatever you can to get out of it, help could come out of unexpected quarters, if you ask for it. Reach out to people you may know, who could be in situations where they could help you.
The world is not a really bad place, and some people may be willing to help you out. When you are out of your situation, because of someone’s help, be always grateful to them, and available when they need something from you. Pay it back.
Alright, now that we have looked at ways to be physically and emotionally resilient, let us also look at some other perspectives of resilience.
We need to also consider how to be financially resilient, since money is the fuel of life, and if we don’t have enough fuel, we cannot carry on with life.
So, how to be financially resilient?
14. Build a financial cushion
The strategy of financial resilience should be a part individual and corporate lives. A lot of companies and people died during Covid, not because of medical, but financial reasons as well.
Lack of money can make you emotionally vulnerable and kill your confidence, in difficult circumstances. So, ensure that you have saved some money for hard times. There will be hard times, when they happen, you will have some cushion, while you work to improve your situation.
15. Invest in important assets to build financial resilience
From an individual perspective, a home is your most important financial asset. If you have a roof over your head, you will be able to go through temporary financial challenges, since other expenses beyond the house, are rather manageable. If you do not have a home, the house rent, could kill you financially.
Other important assets you should consider investing from a financial resilience perspective is a car, and electronic gadgets that you need like a laptop or a smartphone.
Invest in these assets while you have the resources, so the lack of them, doesn’t become a burden when times get hard.
16. Be connected to higher purpose for spiritual resilience
Most people drift through lives not knowing why they do what they do. It depletes their energies and makes them feel less energetic or resilient enough to deal with their problems. This blog is fill of notes of how to be more aware and lead a purposeful life.
Even in difficult circumstances, your purpose would be your guiding light.
Always bounce back. No matter what you face, I am here to tell you that you have the skills and the power to get out of your situation, if you don’t give up. A lot of people give up when life gets hard. Nobody cares about people who give up. They drift away.
Keep working till breath. Keep fighting- you are a fighter. You will bounce back.
In Conclusion-
Our ability to bounce back from difficult circumstances is one of the key life skills we need, to carry with our lives. There are times in most people’s life, when things happen which throw us into situations where there seems to be no way out.
There is a way out, if we are resilient. We just need to find it.
Why do I write this blog?
The purpose of this blog is to help you find your happiness. Please read the other posts on the blog, and follow so that you get updates when new posts are published. Please share the post with your friends so that they can also find their happiness. If you have any feedback for me, please leave it in the comments and I would be happy to work on it. If you would like to support my writing and this blog, you may please send a donation through PayPal here.
I appreciate the time you spent in reading the blog and wish you happiness.
Love,
Amarvani
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