Leading Libraries Series: Leading for Resilience
The Leading for Resilience set consists of the following modules:
You are in the Mental resilience module
Mental resilience
The big idea
It is important to realise that mental resilience is not simply the rather trite concept of ‘positive thinking’. Simply putting on your rose-tinted glasses and believing that everything will come right is not a resilience strategy. Truly resilient
people don’t just find ways through their difficulties; they also find meaning and learning from bad events, which demands specific cognitive and emotional abilities.
One key learnable skill is the capability for detached analysis – the ability to stand back from the situation and view it from an ‘observer’ perspective. People who show long-term resilience in highly stressful environments are able
to do this for themselves: they can imagine being outside the situation, looking in and asking themselves sensible questions like:
- How bad is this situation in the context of my life as a whole?
- Do I need to get out of this? If so, what is my strategy for doing so?
- Can I get support from other people or form alliances to improve things?
Unfortunately, after difficult experiences, many of us tend to be prone to less positive mental habits like ‘rumination’ (the tendency to dwell on difficult past events, fall into self-criticism or rehearse different things we ‘should’ have
said or done).
Rumination tends to go around in circles and can, in itself, create responses like anxiety or frustration which, in turn, lead to more rumination!
Catastrophising is another unhelpful habit – imagining the difficult situation out into the future and seeing only the further (exaggerated) downsides and negative possibilities.
If we want to build our mental resilience, regularly practicing useful mental practices (and, importantly, reducing unhelpful habits) gradually leads us to develop an attitude of realistic optimism – and the key word is ‘realistic’.
Unfounded optimism, naive belief in others and ‘hoping for the best’ are actively harmful – they make you more prone to regular disappointment and so less resilient in the long run. But being able to stop unhelpful ‘catastrophising’ in its
tracks is vital.
Luckily, there are now a wide range of simple tools from cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT), neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and other psychological and therapeutic techniques that can help us understand our own unhelpful thinking or behaviour
patterns as well as showing us how to build more positive habits.
Stress and mental resilience
Our personal ability to cope with change and adversity is affected by the things that happen to us – external stressors like interpersonal conflict, work overload or more serious crises – but it is also affected by our own psychological tendencies.
An unhelpful tendency can make us more prone to stress, prevent us from feeling that we have choices about how to act and even cause vicious cycles of anxiety and rumination.
Research into the experience of personal stress suggests that there are three key psychological needs, which if they are not met, led to specific stress related emotions:
- The ability to solve the problems that confront us
- The ability to control our environment
- The ability to make sense of our social relationships and wider social context.
Mental needs and stressors
Over time, repeated or unresolved stressors reduce resilience by causing fatigue, loss of confidence and loss of personal agency. When we are not able to manage an aspect of our lives, one of these three stress tendencies tends to show up.
We tend to:
- Get frustrated with our inability to change our circumstances
- Feel anxious about the future and how things are likely to turn out
- Ruminate (go around in negative thinking circles) about the issue, usually making our feelings worse
The mental recovery cycle
Regardless of the level of stress you find yourself under, there are a few key things you can do to help yourself be more mentally resilient and avoid the vicious cycles of rumination that make us feel anxious and powerless.
As with emotional resilience, the first step is to notice that you have been knocked off equilibrium by a stressor and take steps to calm yourself down. We are all more likely to get stuck in negative thinking if we are under pressure from
our fight or flight system!
Once we are more relaxed, we can start to deal with negative thinking and move into a more effective problem-solving frame of mind.
The additional resources for this topic contain ideas and exercises that can help you:
- Detach from the (universal) human tendency to fall into negative thinking
- Decode unhelpful mental habits
- Maintain a sense of control when you are feeling overwhelmed.
Taken together, the ideas and practices outlined can improve your ability to maintain a positive outlook, develop a healthy sense of detachment and stay curious, even in difficult times.
Continue to: Building mental resilience
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