Develop your emotional resilience
for better emotional health

Emotional resilience is an extremely important part of being emotionally healthy. Even the luckiest and most emotionally well people experience setbacks, and resilience is what divides those who crumple under pressure from those who come back stronger than ever. To some degree, this seems to be an inborn trait – some people seem to be simply less emotionally affected by stress and are optimistic and determined by nature. The great news is that emotional or psychological resilience is something that everyone can develop, even those of us who get easily overwhelmed by our emotions and find it hard to see anything good in upsetting circumstances.

Photo credit lydur

Characteristics of people who have good emotional resilience

• View obstacles as challenges and find meaning in life through overcoming challenges. Do not see themselves as victims
• Determined and persistent. Do not give up easily
• Set realistic and positive goals, work to achieve these goals, and then learn from any mistakes
• Emotionally aware and understand their emotions
• Optimistic with a sense of humor
• Have good self esteem and are generally satisfied with their lives
• Have strong social support networks and can turn to people for help
• Believe that they are in control of their own lives – if not the events, then at least they control their responses to events

These are people who bounce back and keep going forwards when others would get stuck in despair. Some people are just like this and can't see behaving any differently, whereas other people have hardly any of these traits and need to work to develop them.

So how can you develop better emotional resilience?

• One of the most important things you can do to become more resilient is to decide to become more resilient. You have to want to have many of the above characteristics, not just want to stop feeling so hopeless
• Challenge your negative self talk, especially thoughts that portray yourself as a victim or helpless (e.g. I can't deal with this, nothing ever works out for me, I might as well give up). Choose to change how you view yourself and to recognize your own power to control your life
• Develop a more optimistic attitude. Don't blame all your failures on your lack of skill/intelligence and all your successes on luck or circumstance
• Build a social support network. Becoming emotionally resilient is much easier when you have someone to help you out when you feel down and remind you why you're working so hard to be emotionally healthy - as well as just to bring some comfort and fun into your life
• Develop your coping skills. Knowing a variety of coping strategies and believing that you are capable of coping will help you to recover from setbacks
• Laugh. Even if it's just at how unlucky you were today or how silly your own thoughts can be sometimes, keep your sense of humor and notice how funny life can be instead of treating everything as a serious problem

Emotional resilience is about being in control of your own mind and life

You are always in control of your responses, even if that's all that you have control over. Maybe none of your choices are good, but you still have choice.

When you see yourself as working towards emotional health instead of trying to fix your emotional pain, you've taken the most important step to being emotionally resilient. Keep reminding yourself of what you want to achieve and be patient and understanding with yourself when sometimes the effort is just too much. Resilient people view setbacks as just that – setbacks, not the end of the world or their own failure. If you try to cultivate this attitude, it will eventually become automatic for you and it will surprise you how well you deal with things that would have seriously upset you in the past.

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