A Three-step Roadmap To Greater Stress Resilience
In today's constantly changing world, who doesn't need more stress resilience? What's the roadmap to adapting to what life throws at us and bouncing back stronger?
In a previous post, we looked at resilience—whether we are talking about stress resilience, emotional resilience, or physical resilience—ultimately being about energy management. The simplest approach to build resilience is to approach it at three levels:
Body
Mind
Environment
This is how we build resilience so that day in and day out we can face peaks of stress and uncertainty and quickly recover our ability to take action, and even to become stronger and better equiped for the next time.
Get Stronger: The Body and Physical Resilience
An obvious path to resilience is wellness, to become physically stronger with regular exercise, sleep, and good nutrition—the basics I'm always talking about. Exercise, for example, is a minor stressor that builds up our capacity to withstand greater stress. There are other ways to build resilience with mini-stressors, such as taking cold showers, doing intense breathwork, or eating bitter flavors. Additionally, not doing the same thing all the time keeps the body on its toes.
For exemple, while I spend most of my year enjoying meals specifically designed to fuel my energy, focus and concentration, come any holiday or vacation, I let it rip, eating too much, enjoying way too much fine wine, and staying up way too late with friends. My resting heart rate shoots up. My deep sleep crashes. At the end, I feel slow, bloated, and tight in the jeans. Where's the resilience in that? It's in getting my energy back in a matter of a few days. I go back to my usual eating habits, morning sun to regulate my circadian rhythm, do a single 24-hour fast and an ice bath, and my readiness scores bounce back to normal, according to my Oura ring. That's one fun way to test resilience and exercise it, I say.
The key idea here is that we can practice our stress resilience, and the more practice we get the better we will be able to withstand other stressors and bounce back quicker.
When it comes to getting stronger in the body, what counts most is to remember that the formula includes rest—no amount of hormesis will make you stronger if you don't have sufficient rest and recovery.
Get Stronger: Mindset and Emotional Resilience
It's helpful to train your brain to withstand stressors as it strengthens your ability to adapt to stress. In an episode of Dave Asprey's Human Upgrade podcast, bestselling author and investigative journalist Scott Carney points out that discomfort actually happens in your brain: “Sensation comes in and it’s more or less meaningless. It might change your heart rate. It might change your thermoregulation. It might change some immuno-pathways and that’s just like hardwired into what you are, but still doesn’t have any meaning.”
So, the stressor has no meaning until the brain processes it. And until the brain processes it, you can change your body’s reaction to it. Neat! How do you do that? The idea is to build up tolerance little by little with, for example, repeated exposure, increasing intensity, and the notion of experiencing and accepting rather than avoiding. And, yes, it is easier said than done.
In the end, being resilient does not mean that you don’t experience stress, emotional upheaval, and suffering. Rather, you experience it the same, perhaps with some mental toughness—or not. Experiencing it is key.
As Jalaladdin Rumi writes in his poem The Guesthouse, "This being human is a guest house./ Every morning a new arrival./ A joy, a depression, a meanness,/ some momentary awareness comes/ As an unexpected visitor./ Welcome and entertain them all!"
In her book Bittersweet, Susan Cain talks about the power of sorrow and the opportunity it provides to transform pain into creativity, transcendence, and connection—absorb the energy and then release it. This is how you work through an experience, reframe it, and take what you can. We do that quicker and quicker with practice.
Get Stronger: A Resilience-Building Environment
How can our environment make us stronger and increase our ability to bounce back? Resilience researchers talk about the importance of community and social support, of building strong connections with what gives you meaning and purpose. I would add that building a personal environment that is low in stress also helps conserve energy so you have more when you need it. In her book The Aesthetics of Joy, designer Ingrid Fetell Lee explores how the spaces and objects we interact with every day have surprising and powerful effects on our mood. Imagine what effect they can have on our resilience—wearing us down or building us up.
And finally, I would add the notion of amplifying whatever is good and kind, giving it just a little more attention than all the rest, speaking about it to others, pointing it out. It's astonishing how something so simple can encourage the return of a subtle balance.