Resilience is commonly understood as "bounce-back" — how a person springs back from adversity. In reality, the process of resilience covers whether a person can stay psychologically healthy when stress appears, recover from adversity, and grow afterwards. When the surrounding environment changes, people with high resilience will still have a stress response, but its severity does not damage their psychological health or cognitive ability. The individual can still recover quickly from a stressed state, with better psychological resources to face the next round of stress.
What is resilience?
Resilience is not a single psychological trait, nor an unchangeable part of someone's personality. Resilience is better understood as a complex process shaped by a range of factors. Living in a society full of competition and pressure, Hong Kong people would all do well to try learning to cultivate their own resilience — not only to adapt and survive under stress, but to train the mind in the process.
How can we improve our own resilience?
Because the academic literature offers a great many theories and models of resilience, a single article cannot introduce them all one by one. Today I will first share with you several perspectives that can help us reflect on our own lives and make changes, in the hope that readers will come away with something useful.
Negative thought patterns
The Negative Thought Pattern is a concept closely tied to both mental health and psychotherapy. In relation to resilience and negative thinking, Martin Seligman — regarded as the father of modern positive psychology — proposed three key concepts: Personalisation, Pervasiveness, and Permanence.
We can take a moment to reflect on our usual ways of thinking.
When we run into a problem or a failure, do we habitually attribute the problem to our own personal shortcomings? Do we direct too much self-doubt or self-blame at ourselves?
When we hit a setback, do we let the failure of a single event spread into other areas — deciding, because of one mistake, that we are a failure of a person who will succeed at nothing?
Do we tend to take a short-lived failure and conclude that we will always fail?
These negative thoughts saddle us with too heavy a mental burden and make it hard to keep moving forward through adversity. Seligman's 3P theory gives us a framework for self-reflection, letting us know ourselves through introspection, change our negative thought patterns, and build resilience.
Positive emotions
Research shows that positive emotions are one of the greatest sources of resilience. Perhaps your first reaction is that this is simply obvious — a happy person is able to face stress in a happy frame of mind. But have you ever wondered why? The Broaden-and-Build Theory in positive psychology may be able to answer this question.
According to the Broaden-and-Build Theory, positive emotions such as joy and love can broaden our behavioural responses — for example, finding different ways to have fun and to explore — and while we exercise creativity, we can also build resources that are useful to us, such as fresh ideas and social resources. These responses and resources allow us to face external difficulties and negative emotions with a more mature psychological outlook.
For life to be full of positive emotions, relying on external, material enjoyment alone is not enough. Practising meditation and gratitude exercises are both methods backed by a body of scientific evidence for improving a person's mood, allowing us to cultivate from within our own powers of observation and positive thinking towards the external environment, with more resources to face adversity.
Meaning in life
When it comes to meaning in life, we cannot avoid talking about Viktor Frankl. Viktor Frankl was a psychologist who once lived in a concentration camp, and there he observed that if people were able to find meaning in their present moment, they had a greater chance of surviving. He later, drawing on his own observations, developed the well-known meaning-centred psychotherapy known as Logotherapy. In the study mentioned above, the team found that people with a sense of meaning in life were better able to adapt to adversity, and that faith and spiritual practice can likewise raise a person's resilience. The link between meaning in life, faith and resilience may be because they all allow a person to feel more Internal Reward, so that a person can stay psychologically healthy without relying too heavily on external factors. How to find meaning in life is another big topic; interested readers may refer to "Always Feeling Lost, Unsure of the Meaning of Life? Three Directions to Help You Explore Meaning".
In closing
Living in this turbulent society that is Hong Kong, if we want to make changes we must first adapt to this environment, so that we can survive under adversity and stand up to pressure. When the pressures around us are not something we can change in an instant, perhaps we can first care for our own minds and learn how to look after ourselves in the midst of difficulty.
TreeholeHK now offers a psychological service. The service is not aimed only at negative problems; at the same time, it hopes to help you improve your own psychological resources and find the life you want. The psychological service lets you talk things through freely, provides appropriate guidance and emotional support, helps you re-order past experiences and come to know yourself, and draw on your inner resources to face life.
Comments
No comments yet — share your thoughts.