How to strengthen and maintain resilience for stress management…
You’ve found a way to navigate and manage the stresses you encounter in life.
You’re feeling better about your day to day and have finally found the much needed balance you’ve been longing for.
You feel healthier and more alive than you have in a long time.
Your relationships are not as tense or fraught as they have been.
Life is finally beginning to feel good again.
But you have a niggling feeling that won’t go away.
How long can this last for? When will the next thing happen that will send you back to square one? How long will it be before your stress makes a reappearance?
It’s one thing managing your stress so that you can start to feel some semblance of normality. It’s another thing to try an ensure that you don’t end up back at, or close to square one.
I want you to know that you’re not alone in wondering if you’ll be able to keep stress from your front door.
You already know that we encounter stressful situations to varying degrees on a daily basis. You already know that you aren’t always able to control what happens around you or how people treat you. Even thought you’re able to manage your stress most of the time, you never know when you’ll come across the situation or person that has you unconsciously slipping back into your stress responses.
Stress responses you’ve worked hard on understanding and rewiring.
Now that you’re at a point where stress is more manageable or doesn’t derail you in the way that it used to, you get to start building resiliency so that when you do come up against future challenges you can continue to face them head on.
Why we need to be resilient…
You most likely already know why but I’ll share it anyway. When we are resilient, we are able to face adversity and challenges. We are able to adapt to change in our lives. In doing so we also improve our own sense of well-being.
Think back to before being able to manage your stress. How did you feel? My guess would be a combination of the following:
- overwhelmed;
- frustrated;
- angry;
- hopeless;
- anxious;
- depressed;
- helpless; or
- stuck.
I’m sure you could add a few more words to the list.
These are not feelings, emotions or states that we want to spend much of our time in. They are signs of a dysregulated nervous system and are necessary and valid at times. But we don’t want to prolong the time we experience them, so we need to know how to move through them.
This is where resourcing your nervous system comes in. Being able to create a nervous system practice or set of practices that help to maintain and strengthen your resilience will help you to meet those challenges head on.
Here are 5 ideas to get you started:
1. Emotional regulation
Get used to to understanding the emotions you are feeling and why you are feeling them. I use the Calm Feelings Wheel with clients. We have a base of six or seven core emotions. Most of us only name the surface level emotions that we feel and don’t go any deeper. When we are able to get to the deeper core emotions, we are able to see where our stress is truly coming from.
2. Staying active
If we’re sitting down for most of the day or barely moving, neither is the energy within our body. Energy can become stagnant and make us feel sluggish. Try to get some form of activity into your daily schedule. Yoga, walking, dancing, anything that gets you moving counts. And remember to make it something you enjoy!
3. Good quality sleep
We all know that 7 - 8 hours of sleep each night is beneficial. But the quality of our sleep is just as important. Tossing and turning in bed due to anxiety or worry for 7 hours won’t give you the same quality of sleep that sleeping soundly would. Sleep helps our body to repair itself and function optimally.
4. Good quality food
Eating food that contains vitamins and minerals is important for our health. It helps us to refuel so that all of our bodily functions are working at their best. When we are indulging in foods that make us feel sluggish or start to affect the way that our body works, it can impact the way we manage and react to stress.
5. Connecting with your body
Knowing what causes your stress is one part of the puzzle. Understanding how your body changes when stress occurs is another. But in order to understand this, you have to be connected to your body. And for most of us, stress management has meant that disassociation was the name of the game! Instead of tapping into what our body has been trying to tell us, we’ve been trying to avoid it. Having a daily practice such as a body scan, can keep you connected to your body and your nervous system.
This is only a short list, but each of these elements help to build and maintain a healthy nervous system, which in turn helps to build resilience to stress.
If you would like to know more about how each of these can be incorporated into your own stress management toolkit or strategy, please reach out to me.
Much love,
Harmesch x