Resilience is the ability to bounce back from stress and adversity. It is essential to the surviving and thriving of humans, human relationships, societies and businesses. Fortunately, science tells us that resilience and wellbeing are skills that can be learned and cultivated through training and practice. Resilience is, in fact, a behavioural outcome of a well-functioning prefrontal cortex in the brain. While it takes practice and awareness, studies show how mindfulness increases emotional regulation via increasing prefrontal cortex connectivity. In other words, resilience is teachable, learnable, and recoverable.
Dr. Richard Davidson and Brianna Schulyer describe wellbeing as having four key characteristics:
1) Sustained positive emotion
2) Resilience
3) Empathy and generosity
4) Mindful attention
A scientific study into the link between mindfulness and resilience found that “Mindful people … can better cope with difficult thoughts and emotions without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down (emotionally).”
In other words, mindfulness skills boost resilience and thus wellbeing.
Despite what we may think, it is not what happens to us in life that causes our stress and suffering, nor is it the difficult emotions that life’s challenges inevitably trigger that causes our distress, it is our psychological reaction to what happens and to our own difficult emotions that is most harmful and distressing.
When anger or fear is triggered, our survival brain kicks in to try and keep us safe. Otherwise known as the fight/flight/freeze or stress response, this automatic, whole body response switches us into a physical and psychological state ready to defend ourself or flee from a dangerous situation.
To provide sufficient energy to fuel this hard-wired, primitive fight/flight/freeze response, many other bodily systems and functions are switched off, not the least of which is our prefrontal cortex capacity for higher thought and executive brain function. With blood moving from our prefrontal cortex to our limbs and muscles in order to fight or flee, we lose our capacity for seeing perspective, self-awareness, as well as rational and higher-order thinking (who needs to ponder quantum physics while you are fleeing a hungry sabre tooth tiger, right?).
The more we go over the scary or angry story in our minds, the more anger and/or fear we continue to feel, the more we stay in auto-pilot survival mode and the more we get caught up in reactivity. The less we are able to pause, access inner resources and wisdom and effectively deal with the situation itself.
If we can introduce some mindful awareness in these moments of emotional reactivity, we can support our higher brain to see the bigger picture and respond with calmness and clarity instead of old habitual emotional reactions. This is where taking three deep, conscious breaths can make a huge difference to our ability to respond skilfully.
So, consider that mindfulness not only boosts resilience and therefore wellbeing, it makes you smarter in times of challenge and uncertainty!
Remember that well-being is our natural state and with the right training we can learn to quiet the incessant thinking mind, and return to this state of regulation regardless of what happens around or to us.
Feeling triggered? Need to calm and recentre?
Here is a 5 minute exercise to help you return to a more relaxed state where you can access natural resilience and wellbeing.
Front image by Christina Winter