What is resilience?

We often see resilience defined as “bouncing back” or “recovering quickly from adversity” – but resilience is more than simply returning to baseline. Resilience means responding to challenges in a way that makes us stronger. If we conceive of resilience in this way, it flips the script on how we typically think about stress. Stress is not just something we need to manage, reduce or eliminate – instead, every instance of stress becomes a possibility to increase our resilience and our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual strength. In order to approach stress in this way, we need a solid foundation to build on.

What are the foundations of resilience?

The most important foundational skill of resilience is the ability to step back from our thoughts and reactions and view them as though we were watching them play out on a movie screen. This is easier said than done! Our brain automatically creates associations between all the information streaming in through our five senses and our current emotional state. For example, I had a close childhood friend who’s clothes always smelled like flowery dryer sheets. Years later, after I had moved away and lost touch with my friend, I passed someone in a hardware store who must have used the same brand of dryer sheets – the smell stopped me dead in my tracks and I almost started to cry! I had to make a serious effort not to follow that person around the store like a weirdo smelling their clothes.

This is an example of a positive association – but just as often, our brain records automatic negative associations between sights, sounds, smells, tastes, sense of touch and our internal emotional states. Our brain does this for the sake of efficiency. By tagging something as threatening, dangerous or stressful, we can take quick steps to avoid it next time we encounter it. However, this process is highly imperfect, and when we let our automatic associations dictate our actions without ever stopping to re-evaluate, we can end up in a constant state of emotional reactivity.

Can you think of any examples of automatic associations that you’ve noticed in your own experience? Are they positive or negative? If these associations aren’t helping you, can you imagine taking a step back, observing the association as it comes up in your mind, and making a conscious choice for how to respond?