Resilience

Do you have a go-to activity for when you're feeling distressed? Perhaps it's exercise or talking it out, music or using distractions. Perhaps you think it through with logic, or plow ahead until the situation is resolved.

What happens if life throws a curve ball and that go-to isn't available or effective anymore? This tends to be where we get into trouble.

If we're using a single approach to support our mental health, we aren't able to respond flexibly to challenges. We've trapped ourselves by over-relying on an approach that might generally work, until that one time it doesn't or isn't available. In the process, other important skills that are beneficial for our long-term mental health are neglected.

To plan ahead for life's curve balls, we do want to ensure we have established ways of maintaining our mental health that we can rely on. But if we really want to build our resilience, this means we need to be able to respond to challenges in a flexible way. We can do so by building up our "resilience tool box," so we have a larger range of ways to navigate challenges. By expanding your repertoire of mental wellness skills now, you'll have many methods of coping available to you that can help you navigate challenging times successfully in the future.

To build up your "resilience tool box," here are some helpful components to consider:

- Social supports (cultivating healthy relationships that can offer emotional and practical support)

- Physical health (healthy habits related to exercise, nutrition, sleep hygiene)

- Self-esteem (belief in one's worth and abilities; maintaining fair expectations of self)

- Coping skills (ability to recognize, accept and navigate emotions in appropriate ways; ability to recognize which activities typically drain or energize you, soothe and comfort you, motivate you, help you reflect or process, etc.)

- Sense of purpose (living by one's values and engaging in meaningful involvement with others)

- Healthy thinking (having awareness of thought processes; reducing unhelpful rumination; developing logical thinking skills and the ability to see things from different perspectives; cultivating mindfulness skills)

Looking at the above list, reflect on your situation. Which areas of coping do you feel are strong and tend to be your "go-to" approach during hard times? How might you use that strength in different ways (get creative here)?

Is there a particular area you may have been neglecting and would benefit from cultivating further? What could be a starting point to help strengthen this area?

Building up our resilience allows us to navigate challenges flexibly and effectively. Each area of coping listed above offers another layer of protection for our mental health, so we are able to respond to challenges before they have the opportunity to escalate into a crisis. With this in mind, I'd encourage you to reflect on how you can build up your own "resilience tool box." After all, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.