Tag: daily resilience

Daily Resilience: Tool of Attention

One of my favorite things that I learned from becoming a Social Resilience Model trainer is the power of attention. This may sound like such a simple concept, but we can build resilience, decrease stress, build new habits, and retrain our brain simply by paying attention. This fills me with so much hope!! We don’t have to be stuck in a habit or way of life. We can retrain our brain!

Attention & The Brain

Our brain builds neuropathways to support the hobbies, habits, and lifestyles we give our attention to. This is why when we first start a new habit or activity it feels hard at first and it requires a lot of thought. But eventually as we keep doing it, it comes more naturally and we don’t have to think about it as much as we first did. This is because our brain has built a neuropathway in order for us to do the activity more efficiently.

Consider a time when you started something new. How did it feel at first? Was it challenging? After a month or two had it become easier? Does it now require as much thought as it did at first?

The Tool of Attention For Resilience

Attention is a key concept in the Social Resilience Model. Using attention to increase our resilience is a great way to increase our overall wellbeing. Here are some ways to use attention to help build resilience:

  • Attention to Tracking Your Stress. A big part of building resilience is tracking how your body experiences stress and calm. When we pay attention to how stress impacts us, it can become easier to notice and do activities that increases calm within ourselves.
  • Attention to Grounding. This is putting your attention to a solid surface around you. This is a great way to increase feelings of calmness within ourselves. When we experience calm instead of stress our body functions at it’s best. We think more clearly and thrive when we are not overwhelmed by stress.
  • Attention to Good Resources. This means putting our attention on the good things in our lives. The things that bring us joy and fills us with peace. This could mean thinking about your favorite pet, hobby, place, season, item, or memory. When we put our attention on these good things we can increase our calm and resilience.

Choose a way this week that you can practice using one of these tools of attention!

Daily Resilience: Grounding

Resilience is something that we can practice daily. There are many tools to build resilience. I wanted to share a time recently when I used grounding.

Practicing Grounding

I was starting to feel overwhelmed and my thoughts were spiraling. I could feel the stress increasing in my body. For me this feels like a pit in my stomach and my body tightening. Before I learned about resilience I would feel this way and let myself continue to spiral. This time I knew I needed to decrease my stress. I stepped away and went outside. I sat on a bench and closed my eyes and grounded myself. Here are some of the ways I did this:

  • I put my attention on the support of the bench beneath me and against my back.
  • Then I put my attention on the feeling of the breeze against my skin.
  • After that I allowed myself to put my attention to the sound of the birds around me.

Grounding is all about allowing your attention to totally shift from your stress to one of your five senses. Taking this moment to take care of myself was huge! I felt so much better and my stress decreased. I could now think clearly and wasn’t spiraling anymore. Sometimes stepping away is essential!

How could you use grounding when you get stressed?

The more you practice grounding, the easier it will be to use it to decrease stress.

Comment below with your favorite way of grounding!

Daily Resilience: Shift & Stay

This is a great tool to build resilience from the Social Resilience Model, which was found by Threshold Global Works. When we are focused on things that overwhelm us and make us feel stressed, it can be difficult to build resilience and be in our resilient zone. This is a tool I use a lot in my self-care because I tend to overthink or ruminate on things so it is helpful to intentionally shift my thoughts.

Shift & Stay

The shift and stay exercise is all about shifting away from what is overwhelming and shifting to something that is calming. Shifting allows us to increase feelings of calmness and not be overcome by stress. What are some things you could shift to instead of stressing? Here are some ideas:

  • A good thing that happened to you today
  • An item or place that brings you joy
  • A person that you have a positive relationship with
  • Anything positive or calming

Practice!

The more we practice the more our brain will support and adjust to a new habit. Here are some ways to practice the shift & stay:

  • When you start to feel overwhelmed intentionally think about something else more positive. Once you are feeling more calm you can then address the previous situation.
  • When feeling overwhelmed by negative thoughts pause and take a moment to journal about a positive memory or event.
  • When having an overwhelming conversation allow yourself to step away and think about something else to calm.

Resilience & Self-Care

Resilience and Self-Care

We talk about self-care often and it can sometimes feel like a cliche. Lately, I have been going through a difficult season, as we all do sometimes, and people have been telling me to take care of myself. Internally I question, what does that even mean? Self-care can look different for each of us and can look different across your lifespan. Here are some questions to consider…

What areas in your life are you feeling empty or drained in?

What does thriving in this season of your life look like?

Why is self-care important to you?

How can you intentionally practice self-care in a way that is helpful in your current season?

Self-care is more then bubble baths and ice cream. Self-care is taking care of ourselves in the areas that are most important to you. This can include taking care of ourselves mentally, physically, spiritually, sexually, or emotionally.

I love this idea of considering how building resilience is related to our self-care. Being intentional about building our resilience is a vital part of taking care of ourselves.

Resilient Self-Care

There are two main ways of building resilience and both of them relate to our self-care!

  1. The first way is through sensation-based resilience which is all about increasing sensations of calm and decreasing sensations of stress. This directly relates to our self-care because being overwhelmed by stress can be unhealthy for us emotionally, mentally, and physically. Practicing skills of resilience can help increase calm and holistic wellness.
  2. The second way is thought-based resilience, which is all about managing our thoughts and emotions to increase well-being. Being overwhelmed by our thoughts can increase stress within our body. How we think directly impacts our perceptions, actions, and the words we say. It also impacts how we view ourselves and interpret the world around us. When we use skills to increase resilience through positive and calming thoughts we are practicing mental and emotional self-care.

Tools of Resilience

There are many tools to help build and increase our resilience. Consider choosing one or two of these tools to practice this month!

Sensation-Based Resilience Tools:

  • Tracking calm and stress sensations within your body
  • Practicing grounding techniques

Thought-Based Resilience Tools:

  • Focusing on things that brings you joy
  • Practicing yoga
  • Journaling

Daily Resilience: Boundaries

Making boundaries is hard! Sometimes it can feel like having boundaries is not loving or kind to the people around us. But in reality it is a great way to love others and ourselves. Often when we are in situations or in relationships with no boundaries it can lead to those things becoming toxic. Take a minute to reflect on these questions:

What does having boundaries mean to me?

How do I implement boundaries in my life?

Where are areas in my life that I know I need more boundaries?

What are boundaries?

I think of boundaries as how much access others have to you. Access to you in whatever way is a privilege not a right. We can set limitations and boundaries on how much access someone has to us emotionally, mentally, spiritually, physically, and sexually. This also applies to access to your time and physical items (Campbell, 2021). These types of boundaries are applicable to all areas of our lives and we get to decide what they look like in various relationships and settings.

This is not easy!! It can be very difficult to set boundaries with people. It’s also hard to accept within ourselves the boundaries we need. Consider taking some time reflecting on these questions:

What area in my life do I feel like I need more boundaries?

What category of boundaries is most difficult for me to implement?

Which of my boundaries is most important to me and why?

Resilience & Boundaries

  1. Boundaries help facilitate safety. This is so important to building resilience! It is very difficult to build resilience while we are in spaces that we feel unsafe. That is because our brain and body are detecting that we are mot safe, whether that be emotionally, mentally, or physically, and will trigger our body to be on alert and possibly release stress hormones. This then triggers us to be in a survival mode and not in our resilient zone. When we have boundaries it allows us to be comfortable with the access people have to us, which helps us to feel safe.
  2. Boundaries help us regulate stress. When we don’t have boundaries we can find ourselves in situations that are stressful and possibly triggering. When we have boundaries we can set ourselves up for success in situations that allows us to not be overwhelmed by stress.
  3. Boundaries allow us to identify and communicate our needs. Having boundaries helps us to communicate our needs to our friends, coworkers, and loved ones. It can be hard to communicate what we need, but having boundaries established a head of time allows us to know what we need and implement that.

References

https://psychcentral.com/lib/what-are-personal-boundaries-how-do-i-get-some

Daily Resilience: Grounding through Sound

Grounding is a great way to experience sensations of calm in our body. Grounding is focusing your attention on one of your senses. Often when practicing grounding we focus on a solid surface supporting us or that our body has contact with. But we can also use our other senses. I was thinking of this today as I heard the rain falling and allowed myself to tune into the sound of the rain. When we focus all of our attention on our senses we are able to distract ourselves from what stressors we are experiencing and allow our mind and body to rest in that sense.

I recorded the rain with my phone to share with you. Try listening to the sound of the rain and focus all of your attention on what you are hearing. Feel free to close your eyes if comfortable. If a thought starts to distract you let it pass you by as you refocus on the sound.

Daily Resilience: Beyond Survival

Have you ever felt so overwhelmed by stress that you find yourself just reacting?

Have you ever found yourself reacting impulsively when something reminds you of a past trauma?

These are possible situations where our body is in a survival zone. When we are feeling overwhelmed by stress, experience a trauma, or our body detects a danger our brain signals our body to release stress hormones to get to safety. The danger could be emotional, mental, or physical and our body is working to get to safety through enacting a survival response. This is a good system our body has when we are in danger and needing to get to safety. But when we stay in these zones for long periods of time it can have impacts on our brain and body. It impacts how our brain perceives safety and may cause our body to be in a survival zone when we are actually safe. This can impact our decision making, our ability to accomplish our goals, our relationships, and the way we perceive safety within ourselves. We will briefly look at the four survival zones and then discuss how to move beyond our survival modes when we are safe.

Survival Zone

The survival zones are fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. For most of us we probably experience a mixture of these survival reactions in our lifetime. There is not a linear answer when looking into our own stress and survival responses.

Fight

  • Emotionally reactive
  • Physically and verbally acting out in aggression
  • Being stuck in this survival zone can cause the body to release excess stress hormones

Freeze

  • Feelings of numbness and disconnection
  • Not being able to physically or verbally respond
  • Being stuck in this survival mode may result in it being more difficult to work through the stress

Flight

  • Emotional reactivity
  • Physical or mental reaction to get away
  • Being stuck in this survival zone can cause the body to release excess stress hormones

Fawn

  • Seeking safety by pleasing the people around you
  • Satisfying others at the expense of your own needs to feel safe
  • Being stuck in this survival mode for long periods of time may cause excess stress hormones when interacting with others we are trying to please.
  • In this survival response our safety is linked to appeasing other people which could impact how we experience safety within ourselves.

Beyond Survival

Working through our stress and trauma involves a variety of steps and looks different for all of us. Here are some possible considerations when working through our own survival responses, stress, and building resilience.

  • Working to increase calm in our mind and body on a regular bases. We can do this by practicing resilience skills like grounding, focusing on things we love, and shifting our attention when we are getting overwhelmed.
  • Consider talking to a mental health professional. This can be a really helpful option to work through past and present issues that are impacting your stress levels.
  • Practicing yoga. I am a big fan of yoga specifically for increasing calm in our mind and body. Practicing yoga gives us a safe space to tune into our body and to release stress and tension through slow movements. This can be a great thing to add into your life to release some of the stressful energy and to incorporate into your daily calming techniques.

Daily Resilience: Growing Resilience

One of the best things about the resilient zone is that it can grow! This is because our brain adapts as we grow in managing our stress.

The resilient zone is a concept from Social Resilience Model and is the space in which we function at our best. When I first learned about this it seemed vague. A simple way to think about this is that it is the zone where we experience balance between calm and stress.

This does require us to pay attention to our body and mind to see how we are experiencing stress and calmness. When I pay attention to myself I know I am getting stressed by noticing my heart is beating faster, having a pit feeling in my stomach, tightness in my chest, my body starts to clinch up, and my thoughts become scattered. In comparison when I am feeling calm I notice I’m breathing deeper, my shoulders and body relaxes, the tightness in my chest loosens, and my thoughts become more cohesive. This is what it looks like for me, but it is important to notice what stress and calm looks like for you.

As we build resilience we are able to tolerate more stress and have more balance. When our resilient zone is small we can become overwhelmed by stress more easily and it can become more difficult to calm ourselves. Often our resilient zone in smaller because we have experienced trauma in our lives or have been stuck in one of the survival modes, flight, fight, fawn, or freeze, for long periods of time.

Author Matthew Bennett talks about a great analogy of this concept using various sized glasses. In his book Connecting Paradigms A Trauma-Informed & Neurological Framework for Motivational Interviewing Implementation, Bennett discusses the concept that being outside of our resilient zone is like having a cup that is overflowing. When our cup or resilient zone is smaller it does not take much for the cup to overflow or for us to be overwhelmed by stress. But as we practice tools to build resilience our cup gets bigger and we can withstand more without being overwhelmed.

There are many ways that we can build resilience. But one of the most powerful things we can do is to notice and pay attention to our body and mind. Tracking within ourselves and paying attention to ourselves is powerful and can help us to see the resilience we already have and allow us to build even more resilience. This doesn’t have to be complicated and can be simply noticing or journaling about your observations.

Reference

Bennett, M. (2017). Connecting Paradigms A Trauma-Informed & Neurological Framework for Motivational Interviewing Implementation. Bennett Innovation Group, L3C.

Daily Resilience: Affirmations

Affirmations & Resilience

Think about a time when someone said something kind or affirming to you. Or a time when you received a compliment that meant a lot to you.

How did you feel in these circumstances?

How did it impact your day or week?

Did you do anything differently after that experience?

Positive words can have a big impact, but unfortunately negative words can often weigh on us and impact us a lot more. I’ve heard people say it takes ten positive words to make up for one negative.

Take a moment to consider this concept in regards to your thought life. How often do you think negative words about yourself in comparison to positive words?

Negative thoughts or self-talk can be a barrier to meeting our goals, building resilience, thriving, and feeling mentally healthy. One of the ways we can work to change patterns of negative thoughts is by practicing affirmations. This isn’t a magic fix, but when we stick with it can make a big difference.

Practicing affirmations can also be a great way to build resilience! Capturing our thoughts and focusing them in a positive direction helps us to regulate internal stress and feel the effects of relaxation and joy. What is an area that you find yourself thinking negatively about? How can you transform that thought into an affirmation? An example might be if you think negatively about body and your looks. Then you might practice an affirmation like this:

My body is able, strong, and resilient. My body is beautiful and worthy of being taken care of. My body is unique and special. My body was created for a purpose and will accomplish all that it is meant to.

What a difference it would make if we transformed all of our negative thoughts into empowering ones!!

Daily Resilience: Communication

Resilience & Communication

Our resilience impacts how we communicate!! When we are in our resilient zone we are able to communicate a lot better then when we are in a survival mode.

When we are overwhelmed, stressed, or triggered out of our resilient zone it is very difficult to problem solve and think situations through. The reason is because when we are in these spaces our brain tunnels are thoughts more towards just reacting to survive instead of processing with our thinking brain. In this situation we might experience these communication difficulties:

  • Reacting aggressively to the people around us
  • Overreacting or reacting inappropriately
  • Difficulty problem solving

This can also have huge impacts on our relationships and feeling safe within ourselves.

In comparison, when we are in our resilient zone we are able to problem solve, respond thoughtfully, and think through the situations around us. This is because we are processing the situations around us with our thinking brain, meaning we are able to intentionally think through and respond instead of just reacting to survive. This can allow us to thrive, work towards our goals, and make intentional choices to create better relationships and circumstances.

Take Away

When I am noticing myself reacting instead of thinking through a response or feeling overly stressed and having difficulty communicating I have learned to take a pause. For me this often looks like walking away taking deep breaths, grounding by focusing on a surface around me, or redirecting my thoughts to something that brings me joy. These activities often allow me to calm and think through what’s going on. If I am overreacting because of a trauma trigger then I will ground myself by reminding myself where I am, that I am safe, and just orient myself to my present moment. Often when we are triggered it it is because our focus is on something that happened in the past.

Daily Resilience: Yoga

Yoga & Resilience

I have loved practicing yoga and it has been a huge part of my journey of learning how to build internal resilience. For me yoga has a similar effect as grounding exercises. I wanted to share specifically how this has worked for me and maybe some of these ideas will be helpful to add into your routines. Talk to your doctor or a local yoga instructor for how these practices could look for you and be beneficial for your health and well-being.

Yoga & Resilience

Yoga is such a great way to tune into your body and strengthen. I have gone to yoga classes but it was really during the beginning of the pandemic that my love for yoga sparked. I was home and had time to create a routine for myself. I knew the goals I wanted to accomplish and looked up exercises and poses for those goals. I had no idea that it was also helping me in a mental and emotional way as well. There are a few key ways that yoga has contributed to my resilience:

  • Breath-work: deep breathing and coordinated breathing with yoga poses is a core concept in yoga. Deep breathing is actually a quick way to access our parasympathetic nervous system. This part of the nervous system is also called the “rest and digest” system and is what facilities how we experience calm and relaxation. This in it self allows me to be in my resilient zone and to really practice calmness and release stress in my body.
  • Tuning into the body: I go through a lot of my day often without tuning into the body and just busy living life. When practicing yoga you are kind of forced to tune into how your body is reacting and feeling during the poses. This tuning in is something that I’ve learned to carry with me throughout other activities as well. When I am having a stressful or busy day, I will often take a few minutes to just do some deep breathing and yoga poses to tune in and calm. This is a great way to build resilience.
  • Learning to Reset and Pause: something about yoga that has been huge for me is that it calls you to be present. One of my favorite things about going to yoga class was that the instructor would begin by saying take a deep breath in and breath out all the stresses of the day. When practicing yoga you can let go of all the other things going on around you and allow your mind to just be present in the yoga practice.

Daily Resilience: Barriers to Resilience

Barriers to Building Resilience

Weathering through life can be so difficult. Throughout our life we display resilience by moving forward when things get hard. When we talk about building resilience, we are talking about how to expand our resilient zone. Living in our resilient zone allows us to not be overcome by stress or consumed by traumatic triggers. In the resilient zone we experience a balance between calm and stress. This balance allows us to creative problem solve, think clearly, and thrive. There are two main barriers to building resilience:

  1. Stress: stress can be toxic to our physical and mental health. There is no way to completely avoid stress, but when we live in stress for long periods of time it can have a huge impact on us. This can be a barrier for us when trying to build resilience or even to experience balance of calm and stress. Often in these circumstances we can start to live in survival modes, which can impact our relationships, health, reactions, and the quality of our lives.
  2. Unresolved Trauma: Trauma has an impact on our body in so many ways. It not only impacts us emotionally, but it also changes the way our brain processes information and circumstances. It can change how we interpret safety, our relationships, how we view ourselves, and others. Trauma has an incredible impact on our bodies. But there is hope! As we heal, process, and resolve trauma we can experience balance, safety, and building resilience.

Overcoming Barriers

These might seem like pretty big barriers, but here are some practical ways to consider overcoming these barriers!

Overcoming Stress:

The greatest combat for stress within our body is calm and relaxation. Try these things for increasing calm and decreasing stress:

  • Do a grounding exercise. This can be as simple as just focusing in on a solid surface supporting you or focusing your attention on one of your five senses.
  • Think of something you enjoy doing. This is also called resourcing. Think about your favorite hobby, memory, and place and allow yourself to think about all the things you love or experience when you are doing that activity.
  • Distraction can also be helpful. Sometimes shifting to thinking about something you are grateful for, something positive that happened during your day, or just doing a brain exercise can be a great distraction. When I need to distract myself I often choose a letter in the alphabet and think of or say out loud all the words I can think of that start with that letter. I love word games so this is a good distraction for me.

Resolving Trauma

We can experience trauma in several different forms and trauma is unique to each person. Because of this there is no simple answer to resolving trauma. One important consideration when thinking about resolving trauma, is considering if you are still in the situation, relationship, or circumstance where you experienced trauma? Are you feeling safe? When we are in ongoing situations that are traumatizing it can be difficult to begin resolving trauma, Definitely if you are in a situation where you are experiencing abuse or exploitation, consider reaching out to a local domestic violence shelter, police, or the domestic violence hotline.

You are the expert of your life. You know what you need in a time when you have experienced a traumatic experience. But here are some things to consider when working to resolve trauma:

  • Practicing Acceptance: This does not mean condoning what happened, but to simply accept that this occurred and is apart of your story, but that it does not define your whole story. Accepting ourselves and our experiences can be freeing.
  • Recognizing Triggers: This can be difficult and is not necessarily easy to work through. But noticing what causes a survival response or what causes us to have a large emotional response can be helpful in seeing what is unresolved. When identifying these things it can feel overwhelming. Take time to notice and shift your attention to something else that brings your joy or something positive. An example of this is I recently learned of a policy at work that I was unaware of for years, but everyone else knew about it. Though this seems small and my response could have been to learn and then transition to practicing the correct protocol, I felt overwhelmed by all this emotion. In reality my reaction, emotions, and the negative thoughts that were triggered had nothing to do with the policy at work. It was really about something that happened to me years ago where everyone else knew something and I didn’t. Once I found out years later, I felt shame, embarrassed , and let down that I hadn’t looked deeper into what was going on around me. I did not know that previous situation had impacted me so much and it allowed me to recognize that it was something I needed to process and work through.
  • Mental Health Services: This is not a helpful solution for everyone, but it can be a helpful process to be able to work through trauma and make sense of our feelings and thoughts about what has happened to us.
  • Journal: Journaling can be a safe space to process and work through your feelings. Journaling has helped me get through difficult and traumatic experiences. You can start by just writing out what you’re thinking about, writing your story in third person, or just doing a word dump and just writing out everything on your mind.

Daily Resilience: Capturing our Thoughts

Capturing Our Thoughts

There are a lot of things we don’t have control over in our life. But something we do have control over is our own thoughts, words, and actions. Today I wanted to focus on the impact of our thoughts!

There are two main ways to build resilience, which are sensation-based and thought-based. When working on building resilience or practicing resilience we can use strategies to manage stress, increase calmness, and build our capacity for handling stress by refocusing our thoughts. I was previously trained as a sensation-based resilience educator specifically for Social Resilience Model. Because of that I often share about sensation-based ways to build resilience. But there is so much opportunity for us to increase our well-being and resilience by incorporating these thought-based strategies as well! No matter how you chose to build resilience, the important part is incorporating strategies and ideas in our daily lives to thrive and live fulfilling lives. We will dive into a lot of thought-based strategies for building resilience, but for today I just want to list a few ways that we can do this and offer an opportunity for us to reflect on what methods could work best for us in our individual lives.

Thought-Based Resilience Strategies

  • Yoga
  • Meditation
  • Prayer
  • Journaling
  • Distraction or shifting to another thought to avoid spiraling
  • Challenging our thought process
  • Exercising
  • Changing the narrative

There are many other ways to build resilience through thought-based strategies, but here are just some to think about. Below are some questions to reflect!

Which of these strategies works for you when managing stress?

Would you consider trying any of these when feeling overwhelmed by stress?

Has practicing any of these regularly helped you cope with life better on a day-to-day basis?

Daily Resilience

Resilience looks different for all of us, but the one thing that is the same is that it allows us to carry on when life gets hard. There are many ways that we live out our resilience every day. One of my favorite things about resilience is that it can grow! The basic way we grow resilience is by learning to balance the stress we feel inwardly with calm. When we have this balance, we are in our resilient zone.

The picture above depicts the resilient zone, which is a concept from Social Resilience Model. We are able to be our best selves and think more clearly when we are not overwhelmed by stress. The goal is to have an eb and flow of stress and calm so that we are not controlled by the stress and living in survival mode.

What helps you to feel calm?

When is a time when you felt resilient?

Daily Resilience

One of the ways we can build resilience is through something called resourcing. It is a concept that I learned from Social Resilience Model that helps increase feelings of calm and relaxation.

Resourcing

The key to resourcing is to focus your attention on things or activities that bring you feelings of joy, safety, happiness, and comfort. The resource can be a pet, hobby, place, memory, or item. It’s not recommended to think of a person for your resource because often relationships have both joy, sorrow, and complex feelings associated with them and it might not bring about the same kind of feelings of calmness. When practicing resourcing you will want to focus on details about your resource:

  • Where do you enjoy your resource?
  • What details are associated with the resource, such as color, feel, or temperatures?
  • Think of how you experience the resource with your five senses.

The resource I often think for myself is bookbinding. I think of the process of sewing a journal and the feel of the waxed thread in my hands. I think of the sound of the paper when I cut it and the smell of the glue when I’m preparing the journal cover. For me I can’t see images in my mind, so I often look at my bookbinding supplies or pictures when doing this activity.

Resourcing can be a great habit to practice and way to cultivate resilience. It does take practice! To start practicing resourcing first pick a couple of resources. And practice thinking of different qualities of those resources. This could be a great activity to even practice through journaling.

Daily Resilience

There are so many great tools to use daily to practice and build resilience. One of my favorite tools is grounding. This is the practice of putting your focus on the here and now by paying attention to a solid surface around you. I use grounding all the time to help center myself when struggling with anxiety. One of my favorite parts of the grounding script I use is the beginning, “Look to the left and to the right and remind yourself that you are here, right now in this space.” I love this!! This simple statement has helped pull me out of some big moments of anxiety. Many times when we are anxious, worrying, or fearful our attention is either on the past or the unknown future. Sometimes reminding yourself that you’re not in the past in those moments that caused such anxiety and that you can’t be in the future to know what will happen is huge. This can be a great way to help us to build resilience and stay grounded.

Daily Resilience

Today I want to talk about our brain’s neuroplasticity. This is so cool! Our brain has the ability to generate new neuropathways and neurons! It can literally adapt to our habits and decisions. This might sound like a boring topic, but it is life changing!! Since our brain is malleable and able to create new pathways it allows us to change our lifestyle, the way we think, and how we live. Our brain creates neuropathways to allow our body to work efficiently. This is why it can be so hard to break old habits because our brain and body have adjusted to the old habits and have neuropathways to support those. But there is hope that our brain can build new pathways to support new habits. Can you think of a time when you first started a new habit and it was really hard? But when you stuck to it and kept practicing it got easier and easier, this is because of neuroplascity. How can we use our brain’s neuroplasticity to support our new habits? The key is the tool of attention! Using your focus, energy, and attention to work towards the new habit. This is very practical to do. How can be use our attention as a tool:

  • Focusing your attention daily on the new habit through journaling and tracking
  • Practice the new skill or habit regularly
  • Make a vision board to focus on your new goal
  • Training your brain for the new habit by doing research or making a plan for implementing the new habit
  • Talk about your new habit regularly with an accountability buddy or group
Resilience sign with wooden cubes on background

Daily Resilience

There are so many ways that we are resilient and we weather through so much in our lives. The key to building even more resilience is to be able to focus our attention in directions that brings us feelings of calm, joy, and keeps our body from being in survival mode. When we do this we are able to respond instead of react, our body doesn’t release stress hormones, and we can thrive physically, mentally, and emotionally in our lives. One of the ways that I grow my resilience is taking time to go outside and listen to the sounds around me. I often close my eyes and just listen. There is often birds, traffic, and sounds of people golfing. It is so calming to redirect my attention from the daily stresses of life and instead to tune into my immediate surroundings. Here is a recording of the sounds at my home when I was doing this the other day.

How can you practice tuning into your environment and just listening to the sounds around you? If you do give this a try comment below with how this worked for you!