MINDFULNESS
The author, Stephen Covey, wrote that “between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response.” For people who struggle with emotions, that space doesn’t really exist. They’re impulsive. Something bad happens, then there’s an immediate, emotionally-driven response, and it’s usually not good.
To be emotionally resilient, you need to guard the space, because it gives you time to feel whatever emotions are triggered by an adverse event (instead of reacting to them), while also creating the distance necessary to observe them without judgment. Only then can you reliably process your feelings into constructive action that benefits you.
This is the definition of mindfulness. You can get there in lots of ways. There’s meditation. There’s exercise. Some people use yoga or breathwork–deliberate breathing and deep inhaling are super important. Many use journaling (I’ll talk about this next.) Regardless of method, ten minutes of mindfulness work each day can absolutely rewire your stress response and put you in control of your emotions instead of your emotions having control over you.
JOURNALING
Journaling is a powerful tool that is critical for people who get stuck in their heads and tend to spin as they try to think their way through their emotions. Journaling allows you to trap your emotions on the page and deal with them using your logical mind. This is great to do in the morning, by the way, while you’re still fresh and the obligations of your busy life haven’t distracted you yet.
Do not kid yourself: you cannot outthink your feelings. Your unconscious mind will always be faster than your conscious mind. It’s running neurological response patterns like scripts in a software program that was built using our fight-or-flight responses from as far back as early childhood. Some of those scripts are good, but most of us have at least a few that are bad, and our job as adults is to rewrite as many of those as possible.
That’s where journaling comes in. Writing down your feelings and experiences allows you to consciously engage with them instead of letting those unconscious scripts drag you down dark rabbit holes where it’s very easy to be convinced that your emotions are true. Journaling gives your conscious mind a chance to logically evaluate your feelings and challenge them with the positive facts of your life. Done consistently enough, it can produce new scripts and patterns that result in greater emotional sturdiness.
THERAPY & PERSPECTIVE SHIFTING
When your unconscious mind has dominated for so long that it has tricked you into believing that feelings are facts, it’s easy to slip into a victim mentality where everything happens to you, not for you, and every bit of adversity is evidence that the world is against you. This mindset cannot be allowed. If you want a long life full of purpose and achievement, then you have to fight it. You have to find a way to challenge your own thinking and adopt other, better ways of looking at your experiences.
The best way I know is therapy with a trained psychological professional who can help shift your perspective. I am a huge proponent of therapy. We lean on teachers for education, coaches for sports, nutritionists for diet, trainers for fitness, mentors for work–why would we not lean on therapists for understanding ourselves and managing our emotions better? They’re really emotional coaches, when you think about it, and they are uniquely suited to help us change how we look at ourselves.
Perspective shifting, sometimes called ‘cognitive reframing,’ is one way therapists help you combat negative thought patterns and distorted ideas about yourself. It’s a psychological technique where you consciously choose an alternative perspective to look at the world with. It’s particularly helpful for people who struggle with failure as a reflection of their character. People who think that because they failed, they are failures, or because they lost, they are losers. The better, more productive perspective is to look at failure and loss as a chance to learn from the things you didn’t accomplish so you can grow and meet even bigger challenges in the future.
Emotional resilience is all about reframing adversity as an opportunity to show the world, and yourself, that you have what it takes inside to persevere. It’s hard to get better at ANYTHING, and you will struggle to get THROUGH anything, if you can’t change how you look at yourself in relation to failure and then work hard to push through that learning curve. If you need the help of a therapist to get there, more power to you.
GRATITUDE & GIVING
Emotional resilience isn’t just about building up your defenses to adversity. It’s also about going on offense, by focusing on the positive things in your life. There are two easy strategies for this.
The first is a regular gratitude practice. Once a week, write down a few things you’re grateful for. They can be big or small, but they should all be specific. You can do this in your journal or in the Notes app on your phone, but it’s much more useful if you write it on a notecard and put it somewhere you’ll see it throughout the week. And if you do this the night before the start of your workweek, as part of your bedtime routine, it will train your brain not just to notice positive things throughout the week but also to reflect on those things prior to sleep, where they have a greater chance of being integrated into your mind as knowledge and memories.
The second strategy is being of service. A great way to break out of an emotional funk is to physically do something for somebody else. Work at a soup kitchen, deliver meals to the elderly, help build a house with Habitat For Humanity, do a shift at a local food bank. It doesn’t really matter what you do, what matters is that you are actively in service. When you make an actual physical sacrifice on someone’s behalf, that’s when endorphins, dopamine and oxytocin kick in. You literally get a “helper’s high”, they call it. It’s an ideal way to protect against the emotional shocks of adversity and loss.
SELF-CARE ROUTINES
Interestingly, doing things for yourself has a similar impact on your emotional state. Specifically, taking care of yourself physically. Consistent routines around sleep, exercise and nutrition (read about these in more depth, in Part 1), have a direct, positive impact on your ability to regulate emotions under stress. Sleep delivers increased patience and focus. Exercise delivers increased stamina. Nutrition delivers increased energy. And together, they increase hopefulness. Just like a journal page can trap negative feelings, getting back to your routines like this can form a silver lining around dark clouds hovering over you.
Beyond the obvious downstream benefits of being well-rested and physically healthy, maintaining consistent daily routines can have a huge impact on emotional resilience because they provide stability and a sense of control. When adversity strikes, especially out of nowhere, it can very quickly feel like you’re no longer in the driver’s seat of your own life. You can feel helpless, which can produce panic, desperation and bad decisions.
Having regular self-care routines during emotionally turbulent times is like having anti-lock brakes and all-weather tires on your car when you hit a patch of black ice. As long as you don’t panic and do anything stupid, you’ll be able to recover from the spin and get things pointed in the right direction before everything goes in the ditch.
BOUNDARY SETTING
There’s a final piece to the puzzle of emotional resilience that goes beyond taking control of what’s inside your head. It’s taking control of what’s going on around you. Setting boundaries. Learning to say no. Protecting your energy and your time.
f you’re dealing with a lot of stuff and struggling to keep an even keel, you have to be a little selfish. This can be difficult as you get older and have more people who rely on you for things–family, friends, colleagues and clients. Ironically, this is when it’s most important to set boundaries and say NO.
It’s okay to say ‘no’ to people. Just because someone asks you to do something doesn’t mean you have to do it. Saying ‘no’ is a way to have a healthy respect for yourself, for the people in your life who actually rely on you (family, teammates, etc.), and even for the people who you are ultimately saying no to. By saying something like, “I would love to do this for you, but I’m a little overwhelmed right now and I need to take care of myself,” you’re acknowledging the request and your relationship, while protecting your time and avoiding the prospect of setting expectations that you know you’re not going to meet. People who love and care about you will understand. Like flight attendants say, you have to put on your own oxygen mask first before you can help those around you.
Taking control of your environment and saying ‘No’ more often isn’t an act of selfishness or fear. It also won’t eliminate adversity from your life. That’s impossible. It’s simply a way to protect that space between stimulus and response, so you have the time and distance you need to confront the challenges that life throws your way. And once you’ve learned how to consistently turn negative emotional experiences into positive learning experiences, there is no challenge you can’t overcome.
