2 tools for resilience

The human capacity for burden is like bamboo- far more flexible than you’d ever believe at first glance.

Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

When it comes to resilience - some of us are born with it, some of us need to train it. Regardless from what category you are part of, this article might bring something that could be useful for you. There is no ”must have resilience” everyone is different and in the face of trauma or stress each of us reacts different - but what you can do is work on how you respond to stressors.

Resilience (according to Wikipedia) is the Psychological resilience is the ability to cope mentally or emotionally with a crisis or to return to pre-crisis status quickly. Resilience exists when the person uses "mental processes and behaviors in promoting personal assets and protecting self from the potential negative effects of stressors". If you get into the reading of the mentioned article you will also learn about positive emotions - a theory developed by Barbara Fredrickson around year 1998. But about that in another article soon here.

Now returning to resilience and why is it important? First of all it gives you emotional elasticity that will provide you with the skill to recover fast after hard times. The stress and the anxiety will be there in a stressful time - but the thing you can do about it is to work on the level of stress and anxiety you feel. Train your brain to look further than the present moment, to draw from the past power to move forward to brighter days. And this will keep your body AND your mind healthy.

I will explore in the following lines how journaling for your mental health and a gratitude journal will offer you 2 great tools to provide support for your mental health.

• Journaling

  An old tool for new challenges. Even if journaling was present for as long as the world can remember to teach others to write - these days provides support for more present problems - like anxiety, depression, mental disorders.

  Journaling is an example of an expressive coping method, which is a technique that helps a person process negative thoughts, feelings, or experiences by releasing them. By putting these things on the page, they can have less power over you.

  One of the most quoted studies on how journaling can support you to cope with negative thoughts and feeelings is the one from Pennsylvania University and their researchers: Joshua M Smyth (PhD), Jillian A Johnson (PhD), Brandon J Auer (PhD), Erik Lehman (MS), Giampaolo Talamo, (MD), and Christopher N Sciamanna (MD).
  (Just to explain the terms let me make a short detour PhD - Doctor of Philosophy, is a research degree, which is one of the most common types of doctoral degrees, and is awarded to graduates in many different fields. *MD: Graduates of allopathic schools receive Doctor of Medicine.)

  In their 2018 paper they studied a total of 70 adults with elevated anxiety symptoms and several medical conditions to examine the impact of a 12 week long web-based Positive Affect Journaling (PAJ). The objective was to learn more about the psychological distress and the quality of life. The study concluded that PAJ may serve as an effective intervention for mitigating mental distress, increasing well-being, and enhancing physical functioning among medical populations. PAJ may be integrated into routine medical care to improve quality of life.
  
  So a habit of journaling your feelings - even 3 times per week with focus on the facts, what works and what are you learning from a bad period of time can create a new pattern in your brain that will be activated in stressful time. Like let’s say you have a minor car accident - instead of your brain focusing on the problem at hand (damage of the car) it will look in the archives for solutions - identifying how the challenge can be solved and what options are available for you to fix the care, be grateful that nobody was hurt or that you have people that can support you during these times.

  Also by journaling on what works for you it is a way of creating the habit of gratitude and learn to search for a small reason to be grateful for what the Universe provided you - each day. Might be a smile of a stranger, a solution oriented discussion, or a few minutes of quiet in the company of a loved one. And this takes me to the second tool to train your resilience:

• Gratitude journal

  There are several studies that focus on the impact of gratitude into the way we see life as a whole. This researches have found that people who consciously count their blessings tend to be happier and less depressed. In the ”The Gratitude Project” (edited by Jeremy Adam Smith, Kira M. Newman, Jason Marsh and Dacher Keltner) you can find a lot of information on the deep roots that this habit of thankfulness each day has in the human psychology and it can affect your brain. And to the bigger picture our habit to be grateful to people, to things, to our daily happenings in life will create a better and happier world.

  In a study done in 2016 300 random people were involved, mostly students who were seeking mental health support at the uni. They were randomly assigned in 3 groups, all received counseling but: group 1 had to write one letter of gratitude to another person / week for three weeks, group 2 had to write about their deepest thoughts and feelings on negative experiences. Group 3 had no writing activity. The findings included that the participants in group 1 reported a better mental health up to 12 weeks after the exercise ended, unlike those from group2 and 3. The researchers went even deeper and come up with other 3 things about gratitude - it unshackles from toxic emotions, it helps even if you don’t share it, it has benefits that take time.

  While doing the research for this article and reading all the white papers on the topic I took a decision to do the grateful thing in a more organized way therefore I bought a 356 day journal (20 lei - 4 Euros) where at the end of every day I note down what am I grateful for. And since it has plenty of space I decided to make it a 10 year gratitude journal - so every year in the first day I can look back to the moments that I was grateful for. Why? When times are hard I can always have in this a ”resource” to go back to see what were the reasons I was grateful for in order to be inspired and to see potential solutions, but also it is a way to create a habit of looking for facts and small things that bring me joy.

  Here are 2 other resources on my blog that you might find useful: healthy thinking rather than positive thinking and the 4F tool to support your reflections in a healthy way while you focus on facts, findings, feelings and future.
  So after reading this article - do you think that journaling might be something you can do?