Resilience: taking your time to bounce back
Resilience is often described as bouncing back from adversity, but sometimes it can take time to recover from difficult circumstances. While it’s important to have the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, it’s also important to take your time to reflect on what you’ve been through and work out a way forward.
Take your time
First, don’t assume that because you’re not straight back to where you started that this means you’re not resilient. We all react differently to events, so rather than putting pressure on yourself or comparing yourself with others who appear to bounce back quickly, spend some time regaining your energy and moving forward at a slower pace.
It can be hard to feel resilient if you have been through one stressful event after another with very little space in between. When this happens, you may not have had enough time to recover from the first event before being hit with the second and third and so on.
It doesn’t even need to be a hugely traumatic event. Relentless pressure or stress can wear you down, reducing your energy levels and making smaller things harder to deal with. If you don’t give yourself enough time to deal with the stress associated with one event, you’ll carry it with you to the next event, making it even harder to deal with.
Go back or move forward?
Consider whether you want to go back to where you were. Would it be better to try to move forward rather than devoting your energy trying to go back to being the person you once were? Resilience involves adapting, so you might find you don’t go back to your former self. Instead you might become a different person with evolved coping mechanisms – someone who can build on their experiences to work out the best way of moving forward.
Be kind to yourself
By taking time to regain your strength, you are taking responsibility for your wellbeing. Many people are much harder on themselves than they are on other people, so try to recognise if you are being particularly hard on yourself and show yourself the same compassion you’d show others. We all cope differently with whatever life throws at us. No one else is on the same journey as you.
Learn from your experience
When you’re in a better place, reflect on your experience and work out if there is anything you could do differently the next time you find yourself in difficult circumstances. Is it possible to find something positive about it? This doesn’t mean you’re minimising your experience or how you feel about it. Finding meaning in whatever has happened to you will make it easier for you to move forward and make it easier for you to cope the next time you experience stressful events.
Giving yourself time to recover and learning from your experience will help you in the future. Observe how you coped and use that knowledge to help you move on. Taking time to recognise what you’ve been through is essential for your recovery and will help you increase your resilience.