How Can I Bounce Back? Two Ways to Become More Resilient
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When I heard her story, I marveled at how well she was doing. She had suffered a series of traumas and great adversity throughout most of her childhood, but now as a young woman, she was happily married with three children, ran her own small business, and enjoyed good health. How was this possible, I wondered, given how much she had suffered as a child? She seemed so resilient.
Resilience has been studied for more than fifty years, so there is good data about the scope of resilience and the factors associated with it. Resilience is defined as the capacity to bounce back from adversity or to thrive in the midst of difficult circumstances. The first generation of studies focused on risk factors and identified variables associated with negative life outcomes. It was this research that observed that being raised in poverty is a significant risk factor, and that childhood maltreatment can lead to a host of later problems.
The second generation of research asked the question: What do resilient individuals look like? These studies concluded that while there isn’t a universal set of characteristics among resilient people, individuals who beat the odds typically have the following characteristics: persistence in the face of failure, spiritual beliefs or practice, optimism, a sense of humor, a belief that one’s efforts can change things, and social support.
An important finding from this second generation of resilience research is that resilience is not innate. People acquire resilience. It’s a learned behavior. Therefore, there are things we can do to promote resilience. This has been the focus of an exciting third generation wave of research.
How Do We Develop Resilience?
Using controlled clinical trials, researchers have identified more than a dozen simple strategies or tools that improve well-being and promote resilience. Some can be done in as little as a minute or two a day. These are now known as positive psychology interventions, or PPIs, because they help people achieve positive outcomes. Here, we have space to mention only two of them. Learn about more interventions or get more information about those mentioned here.
Three Good Things
The Three Good Things exercise is probably the most well-known strategy. It involves just three simple steps:
Each night, before you go to sleep,
1. Think of three good things that happened that day.
2. Write them down.
3. Reflect on why they happened.
This exercise prompts you to focus on the sources of goodness in your life and encourages you to remember events you might otherwise overlook. Numerous studies demonstrate that this daily, two-minute exercise significantly improves well-being and prevents depression.
Develop Optimism
Many authorities believe that an optimistic outlook is the hallmark of resilient individuals. They do not mean a Pollyanna, pie-in-the-sky kind of outlook, but a realistic and hopeful expectation for the future. It has to do with the kinds of explanations we give when good and bad things happen. The more optimistic our explanations, the more likely it is we will bounce back from setbacks and persevere when success does not come easily. Our degree of optimism depends on our genetic predisposition, environmental factors, and the attitudes we have learned over time.
The most important first step to building more optimism is to take a self-assessment and identify the kinds of situations in which we tend to react more pessimistically or optimistically. This is easy to do at www.authentichappiness.org, where you can take the Optimism Test and obtain your results immediately. They will tell you where you are on the continuum between pessimism and optimism in three different dimensions. Most of us are not nearly as optimistic as we think.
The dimension that matters most is permanence. It refers to whether we see the causes of events as temporary or enduring forever. When we believe that the causes of bad things will never change, our motivation decreases abruptly. Discouragement sets in. Why keep trying if things aren’t going to change? When bad things happen, pessimists tend to think in terms of always and never. They say things like:
I'll never get to . . .
It's always going to . . .
My friends will never . . .
Helplessness, hopelessness, apathy, and withdrawal can ensue when we believe that the causes of negative events are permanent.
Optimists, on the other hand, view setbacks as temporary. They think in terms of sometimes and recently. When bad things happen, they say to themselves things like:
I’ve been really stressed lately . . .
Sometimes this work is difficult . . .
She’s been in a bad mood recently . . .
Optimists are more likely to persevere in the face of adversity because they feel hopeful that things will change. They see the causes of disappointments as time limited, so they remain encouraged and energized.
In contrast, when they are successful, optimists and pessimists do the opposite. When things go well, it is optimists who believe the causes are permanent, while pessimists believe they are temporary. When they succeed, optimists say things to themselves like:
I did well with that presentation because I am good with words, or . . .
I’ve always been a good speaker.
Pessimists, on the other hand, say things like:
I did well with that presentation because the audience was very small, or . . .
I only had to speak for five minutes.
As a result, success builds confidence for those who have a more optimistic outlook, but has little impact on the confidence or self-esteem of those whose outlook is pessimistic.
Preserve Hope
She had suffered more trauma and setbacks in her thirty years than most of us experience in a lifetime, yet she was living a rich and happy life. She was resilient because she had an optimistic outlook which gave her a hopefulness about the future. Most of us are not born with resilience, but recent research on interventions that develop this capacity is extremely promising, giving each of us practical steps we can take to build our personal resilience and bounce back from adversity.
For more in-depth research on this topic, check out these links:
