What small habits can strengthen my resilience?

When you feel resilient, you can usually process tension and emotions well within your window of tolerance. For people with traumatic experiences, this is often more difficult because their window is smaller, which causes them to become unbalanced more quickly. As a loved one, you may also notice that you window has become smaller. When you are under tension for a long time, for example due to worries about someone you love, powerlessness, or persistent stress, your resilience decreases.

Fortunately, there are ways to strengthen your resilience. This requires practice and time, but it helps you better handle life's daily challenges under pressure.

An important pillar for resilience is good self-care regarding your physical health. Healthy nutrition, sufficient exercise, and enough rest and sleep help keep your nervous system in balance. Conscious breathing, and in particular exhaling longer, also calms your stress system. In addition, short breaks, taking a warm shower, listening to music, or consciously relaxing your muscles help to release tension and make yourself more resilient.

In addition, it helps managing your energy mindfully to build resilience. You only have a limited amount of energy and you can only spend it once. Some activities or stimuli give you energy while others demand a lot from you. By gaining insight into what demands more or less of you and what recharges you, you can make conscious choices about what you do or do not do on a given day or in a week. It is also helpful to communicate about this with the people around you.

Finally, it contributes take care of your mental health contributes to resilience. That lies partly in how you talk to yourself. Thoughts like ‘I can't do this’ of ‘It's no use anyway’ can undermine your resilience. Replace them with kinder thoughts such as ‘I am doing what I can’ of ‘I can't do this yet’. 

Helpful and positive thoughts usually make you feel better. That makes it easier to achieve your goals. Also a growth mindset (Thinking in terms of chances and possibilities) can help to believe that change is possible. It can be a (major) challenge to learn to look at situations or the world differently. It is not at all strange if you sometimes need professional help with this, or seek support from a friend or someone else you trust.

Step by step, by taking good care of yourself and applying small, conscious habits, you can keep yourself resilient or become more resilient. Give yourself the time to discover what works for you.

You can read more in the article Daily habits that build resilience