Emotional resilience is your ability to emotionally or mentally deal with an emergency or to get back to normal pre-crisis condition quickly. Emotional resilience exists when an individual uses “emotional processes and behaviors in protecting self against the potential negative consequences of stressors.” It takes a combination of education, social support, and a good family support system to build resilience.
Some forms of emotional resilience are more common than others. People that suffer from post traumatic stress disorder are considered to have higher levels of emotional resilience. The symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder include mood swings, nightmares, insomnia, and other physical complaints. Often, individuals that experience this disorder are extremely sensitive to criticism from others so the disorder can often lead to depression.
If you have high levels of resilience, you will be able to bounce back from major changes or adversity very quickly. Many psychologists believe that resilience helps you to manage your daily life. If you are able to bounce back from trauma very quickly, you can see significant improvements in your quality of life. Those that do not have this ability will often feel paralyzed by the stressors in their lives.
There is a difference between people that have low levels of emotional resilience and those that have above average levels. A healthy level is about one-half to one-third as you would expect for someone in their thirties to be. People in their forties would have a normal range for this trait. However, the longer someone goes through a stressful situation or event, the greater the risk of losing their ability to bounce back from difficult events in their daily life.
Those that are really resilient will bounce back from life changes even when there are major setbacks. They also know that it will take some time to get back to where they need to be emotionally. It can be very upsetting to have a major incident in your life and then never know what you can or should have done differently. In many cases, the best thing you can do for your emotional resilience is to learn from your experience and how to deal with the aftermath.
In order to improve your emotional resilience, you need to develop effective coping strategies to deal with those setbacks. Those that don’t learn to use effective coping strategies or who don’t find ways to deal with their problems are doomed to live a life full of setbacks. Emotional resilience is not something that will just disappear if you don’t learn to manage it. Effective coping strategies help you overcome your challenges by developing skills and using strategies that will strengthen your resolve and enhance your resilience.
One of the best ways to enhance your emotional resilience is to work on reducing the stress in your life. Having a lot of stress in your life makes it much more challenging to deal with certain events in your life and setbacks. Some of the most common challenges to living with emotional resilience are divorce, abuse, trauma and poor relationships.
Each of these things causes extreme stress and the last thing you want is to have ongoing stress in your life that is difficult to manage. Some good ways to reduce your stress level are joining a group that you can discuss your issues with, writing down the stressful events in your life so that you can manage them more effectively, taking time to rest and decompress, and finding new and creative ways to deal with issues such as divorce.
Emotional resilience is built on resilience. When you are able to manage your emotions, you become more resilient and this will increase your ability to face difficult times and to fully recover from them. Emotionally healthy people are able to face and deal with difficult times in their lives without losing their cool or becoming depressed. If you think you have what it takes to become emotionally resilient, then you are ready to face the world without being afraid of your emotions.