What Is Stress Resilience?
The American Psychological Institute defines resilience as, “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress...”
We agree — not all stress is bad — it’s the way you respond that’s important. It’s not about learning how to grin-and-bear-it or simply push-through the difficult moments in your life. Resilience is about learning to become aware of what stress feels like in your mental and physical body, so you can skillfully manage your relationship to it.
When you are able to manage your relationship to stress effectively, short-term stressors can actually help you to develop a physical and psychological resiliency that allows you to cope with stressful moments with more ease, which can often lead to profound personal growth.
Increasing your awareness of how stress effects you will also help you to make decisions that are better aligned to your long-term health and happiness.
Sign up for: Crash Course in Stress Resilience.
Impact of stress on your physical health.
Research shows that, fifty-five percent of American’s spend the majority of their day in stressful situations and 82% of American workers suffered from work-related stress on a weekly basis. More recent research shows that, 7 out of 10 American’s say that this is the most stressful period of their entire careers.
Short-term stress can make it difficult for you to make healthy choices about your consumption choices, the amount of sleep or physical movement you get, or even your capacity to effectively respond to small, daily stressors.Prolonged exposure to high levels of stress, or chronic stress, increase inflammation in your body and can causes long-term health issues.
Mental health experts define resilience as how quickly you can recover from an acute episode of stress. Or how long it takes your heart rate, blood pressure, breathing take to get back to normal.
Overtime, chronic stress increases your baseline heart rate, blood pressure and breathing rate. Meaning your body has to work harder when it's at rest to keep you functioning normally. This can trigger even more health problems like heart disease, high blood pressure, and chronic pain.
The craziest part is, because American’s spend the majority of their time living in high-stress, you might not even realize how stressed out you are.
Signs of living in chronic stress:
Feeling overwhelmed, unmotivated, or unfocused.
Trouble sleeping or sleeping too much.
Racing thoughts or constant worry.
Problems with your memory or concentration.
Overeating or under-eating
Depression or anxiety.
Becoming sick more often.
Anger, irritability, or restlessness.
Feel more emotional than usual.
Changes to your sex drive.
Over indulging in alcohol or other substances.
Chronic stress can also lead to burnout. Burnout is usually accompanied by feelings of exhaustion, lack of motivation, cynical behavior, emotional distancing, headaches, gastro issues and even depressed or suicidal thoughts.
The good news is your body is extremely resilient and you can increase your capacity to deal with stress — both mentally and physically — by implementing supportive self-care practices.
How to build resilience and reduce stress
Life’s stressors won’t disappear, but how you carry your stress can change. Research shows when you’re happy and healthy you’re more productive, strategic, creative and collaborative. Helping you thrive in all areas of life. Making simple shifts in key habits — like creating self-care rituals and implementing a daily mindfulness practice — can profoundly impact your reaction to stress and help you to become more resilient.
Practice Self-Care
Research shows self-care decreases the impact stress has on your mental and physical health and helps you build resilience. Self-care — or what we refer to as stress resiliency tools — can help you stay away from unskilful or unhelpful thought patterns that occur when stress activates our primitive fight/flight/freeze brain, the amygdala, and move into higher brain states. This can help you see your stressors within a larger context, giving you more perspective to respond skillfully and creatively.
Cultivating new self-care habits is especially important during periods of life where you encounter high levels of uncertainty or anxiety. By filling your proverbial punch-bowls with healthy habits, you are better able to appropriately respond to unexpected circumstances and uncertainty about the future.
Many people often wait to implement self-care practices until they hit a major pain point in their lives —and that’s okay. Traumatic events like losing your job, major concussions, births, deaths, divorce, marriage, or even global pandemics can trigger a change in how you do things.
At those moments, you need stress resiliency tools the most, but you often have the least about of mental capacity to implement them. The key is to be intentional about how you shift old habits and add new ones. That’s why you’ll focus on introducing stress resiliency habits slowly and start with the ones that are proven to have the most impact.
Implementing the following self-care practices, you’ll start to build resilience.
1.Get Enough Sleep.
Getting enough sleep positively affects every single cell and function in your body. It is one of the best ways you can increase your resiliency to stress.
Adults typically need between 8-9 hours of quality sleep each night. Without it, your amygdala and your pre-frontal cortex don’t have enough time to reset. Essentially, this means your brain doesn’t have enough time to re-link the logical and emotional parts of your brain, which means you are be more likely to be reactive and more likely to swing from high-highs to low-lows— think tyrannical 3-year old who’s giggling and laughing before falling into a tantrum right before bedtime. When you’re overtired, you overreact — by as much at 60%.
According to the National Sleep Foundation and Dr. Matthew Walker’s prominent book, “Why We Sleep,” Among the American adult population, “65% fail to get the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep each night. In 1942, only 20% failed to get the recommended amount.”
“The percentage of the population that can survive on five to six hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percentage of the population and rounded to a whole number is zero!” - Thomas Roth, Henry Ford Hospital.
Improving your sleep habits can make a positive impact on health, wellness, productivity and creativity. Learn more.
2. Move More.
Movement is essential to feeling and functioning at your best. Research shows that you need thirty or more minutes of exercise everyday. If you can’t fit thirty minutes into your daily schedule know that literally every minute contributes to better health and wellness, so if you can only walk for five minutes, it’s worth it.
Daily movement reduces your risk of developing cardiovascular and diabetes and has been shown to help decrease back pain, a key issue cited by many people who have trouble sleeping. Exercise also increases your energy and leaves you feeling happier and more relaxed — an excellent tool for building stress resiliency.
The key is to find the type of movement that doesn’t feel like a chore — something that you get swept away in. Something that you enjoy.
Go for a walk, a bike, a swim. Play tennis. Take up running. Have a dance-off with your friends. Go rock-climbing. Try yoga, pilates, a barre class, kick-boxing, pole dancing, tai chi. Learn how to salsa dance. Jump-rope. Literally, anything that gets you moving.
3. Eat Healthy.
Fueling your body with the right foods helps to counter the impact of less active lifestyles, lower your chances of developing cancer, and improves your heart and brain health.
Eating healthy has also been shown to boost your mood as your gut is responsible for producing 90% of the serotonin (thats the feel good chemical in your body) and can help you to think more clearly and feel more energized.
4. Spend time in nature.
Research shows that spending time in nature —even as little as ten minutes — decreases the body’s response to stress. It helps to lower your cortisol levels, decrease your blood pressure and heart rate, and can even help to boost your mood and focus.
When you spend time in nature it’s important that you’re actually present in the experience. Make an effort to notice what you see and feel. This helps to ground you in the present moment and gain the most benefits from your experience.
5.Invest in your social network.
Living a happier, healthier, more resilient life isn’t just about making sure you eat the right foods and move your body more. It’s also about investing your time and energy into meaningful experiences and friendships.Spending time with friends and family who help to lift you up not only gives you mental support during difficult periods, but gives you the opportunity offer that same social support for others as well.
Research shows that friendships can also help to
This doesn’t mean you need to have throngs of friends— just a few close relationships are key. It also doesn’t mean you should never invest in other relationships. Discovering new friends can help you grow in unexpected ways. There’s a balance to be found in both.
If you’re looking to build quality relationships try reaching out to people who have similar interests to you own, but maybe haven’t connected with in awhile. You could also take a class, join a club, and accept invitations from others. Remember to stay positive. Building lasting relationships take time, but they’re worth the effort.
6.Get your daily dose of fun.
When you’re happy you’re more productive, more creative, and more collaborative.
It may sound counter-intuitive, but many people struggle to make time for fun. If you often feel guilty about doing the things that make you feel happy and content because you“should” be doing something else — something more “productive” — remember that it’s okay to take time to just be.
It’s important to take time to process difficult emotions, make time to be quiet and still, listen to good music, spend time with friends, get lost in an art project, or play some video games. These things help to counter the stress of your everyday lives and help to leave you feeling refreshed.
Research out of Harvard shows that doing the things that make you happy not only helps to relieve stress and make you healthier, but it can actually increase your productivity by as much as 37%.
Try combining your fun activity with people you care about and other healthy activities like going for a walk or a bike ride and sharing a healthy meal together,
7.Simplify.
Outer chaos often mirrors inner chaos you may be experiencing. Physical clutter leads to decision fatigue, which take a toll on willpower and your ability to make good decisions. Clutter plays a role in the accumulation of micro-decisions. You might not realize you processed that pile of Target returns in the corner, the dirty dishes in the sink, or that plant that needs to be watered, but you did. And all of these seemingly innocuous decisions add up, making it nearly impossible to find the mental capacity (aka: willpower) to handle things the way you want later in the day.
When your willpower is depleted you’re less likely to be patient with your friends and family, more likely to react poorly to stressful situations, and you’re more likely to choose coping mechanisms that aren’t in your best long-term interests.
Simplify the number of sub-conscious decisions you have to make on a daily basis. Remove duplicate items in your kitchen, clean out your car, get rid of beauty products you don’t use. You might even try creating a capsule wardrobe — a limited number of clothing items to select from each day that helps to reduce the number of decisions you have to make each day.
By reducing the number of items you have to think or deal with, you reduce the static in the background of your brain. That makes it easier to respond to bigger, more important stressors that may come along.
8.Practice Gratitude.
This lens was useful in our evolution because it helped us survive. Now, as your threat of becoming someone’s dinner wanes, its necessary to re-train your brain to notice and focus more on all of the good and positive things that are happening in your life.
Starting a daily gratitude practice is a great way to help you to begin scanning your environment for all the things that are going well. While a critical eye can be helpful in making continuous improvements on a project, performance, or skill it can be detrimental in your ability shift habits easily. Research shows you are better able to make changes when you are happy and you use words of encouragement instead of criticism.
Starting a daily gratitude practice can also improve your mental and physical health.
IMPROVED HEALTH.
Gratitude helps to improve your physical health. Grateful people experience fewer aches and pains and they report feeling healthier than other people. Gratitude can effectively increases happiness and reduces depression.
REDUCED TOXIC EMOTIONS.
Developing a daily gratitude practice can also help you to develop a greater sense of connection allowing you to show more compassionate toward others.
SLEEP BETTER.
According to a 2011 study published in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, Writing in a gratitude journal for 15 minutes before going to bed can help to improve your sleep quality and duration.
Research shows that gratitude not only reduces stress, but may also play a major role in overcoming trauma. Recognizing all you have to be thankful for – even during the worst times of your life may help to foster resilience.
9.Discover your purpose.
Everyone — yes everyone — has a purpose. If you don’t know what your’s is yet, your purpose is to allow for the space and time for you to find your purpose. Remember you are extremely valuable, worthy, and have so many skills to share. Your purpose may shift or change overtime, but you will never lose having a purpose.
You may find that starting a meditation practice can be helpful in developing a better sense of what your purpose is.
Often people find that their purpose has something to do with being of service to others. This shouldn’t become a self-sacrifice, but a reminder to make sure your proverbial punch is full enough to share your time, energy, and talents with others.
10. Meditate
A daily meditation practice literally helps you to re-wire your brain, so you’ll feel more at-ease, present, and connected. Meditation is an effective way to learn how to separate thoughts and emotions in order to reduce anxiety, depression, the effects of stress and build resilience. One or two minutes of meditation each day can make a huge difference.
“In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, you can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully.” —Shawn Achor, Psychologist
Benefits of increasing stress resilience
Resilience doesn’t mean that you won’t experience difficulty or distress, but just like any muscle, with dedicated time and attention it will strengthen. Here are the key benefits of increasing your resilience.
Increased Happiness & Contentment
You’ll be better able to live in the present moment without being sucked into a negative fantasy of what-if’s, or engage in bad habits that may make you feel worse in the long-run. You’ll feel more connected and be able to experience more pleasure, and have more energy to pursue things that are meaningful to you.
Increased Mental and Physical Health
You will be less likely to feel overwhelmed by stress, be able to let go of racing thoughts and worrying, and will be more likely to make better decisions about your consumption habits and engage in less risky behavior, supporting a healthier, future you. You’ll lessen your chances of developing a lifestyle disease.
Increased Compassion and Empathy
You will treat yourself and others with more empathy and compassion, have the ability to widen your perspective, and de-escalate potentially difficult situations by having clear seeing of the potential stressors at hand, which will allow you to respond with greater ease.
Improved Problem-Solving Skills
You will have more capacity to think clearly and creatively and become more focused and productive.
Ability to Sit with Ambiguity Longer
You will have the ability to move beyond black and white thinking, sit with uncertainty for longer, which can be helpful in making decisions about the future and de-escalating potentially stressful situations.
Build your stress resilience: Sign-up for Seek United’s Monthly Newsletter.
Stress Resilience At Work
Stress in our personal lives can impact our work and visc-versa. For most American’s, work culture is often the primary source of stress in their lives; caused by heavy workloads, short-deadlines, financial pressures, lack of empathy in the workplace, and overly demanding bosses. According to the American Institute of Stress, “Job stress carries a price tag for U.S. industry estimated at over $300 billion annually.”
While on-the clock stress is here to stay, you can learn how to improve your resilience at work by changing the way you perceive stress and making and effort to support healthy responses to stress during your personal time. Other benefits of stress resilience at work.
Stress Resilience Crash Course
Building resilience takes time. Kick-start your resilience training by taking an audio-only, Crash Course on Stress Resilience. Adapted from a 1/2 day workshop, this 90 minute class will help you learn how to successfully implement new healthy habits, how to effectively practice gratitude, and guide you through two types of meditation practices. You’ll get ten proven ways to increase your stress resiliency, how to re-frame your relationship to stress, and leave with real solutions to live with less stress and more success. Plus, so much more!