As someone messaged me recently, 'You said to me that this feeling will pass, and it did.'
There are many terms used to describe our ability to get through difficult times - resilience, grit, flexibility, perseverance, determination, adaptability - the list is considerable. Our preference at WARN is to use the word adaptability; providing coping skills to enable people to adapt to our busy world.
As research has shown, our resilience - the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties - is founded early in life, generally within the first 1000 days. Nevertheless, we can all tap into our resilience reservoir by changing certain thoughts and behaviours.
It is necessary to have stressors in our lives, it helps us to build the range of tools that we are required when adversity hits. The greatest tool we can have is the ability to manage our emotions.
The thing about emotions is that they do not fully develop until our mid-twenties, some even say as late as our thirties. Moreover, if we experience too many emotional experiences at an early age it can have a long-lasting impact on our ability to cope later in life.
What does not kill us doesn't necessarily make us stronger, not if we aren't equipped or haven't used the tools necessary to process our emotions as we go through the challenge. And we know that the impact left in our memory is difficult to forget for it will now be a reference marker on our timeline for any future similar event.
To support this latter point, during a presentation I gave to a cancer support network, a person burst into tears when he described how hard it was to go through his new treatment following a second diagnosis of cancer. His emotional response was heightened further by having already been through the experience before. He was therefore more fragile this time because of his earlier experience.
A helpful way to learn how to cope with 'life' is to expose ourselves to situations that take us out of our comfort zone, to stretch us to do things that we never imagined we could, to possibly frighten us a little. Something to get us to feel our emotional response and learn how to process the feeling and reduce it.
The best time to start learning about managing our stress responses is as early as possible, beyond the first 1000 days when we have grown fully into our limbic system where our emotions are regulated.
There is a balance between empowering our young to prepare them for life's challenges and putting them under too much pressure. Maturity is an important aspect of managing emotions. As discussed, too much pressure at too early an age where the brain hasn't developed adequately may reduce their ability to cope.
Hopefully, this is helpful for you as an adult if you believe you aren't as resilient as others appear to be - it may have been something that was outside of your control. It's not necessarily our fault.
Let's talk!
Adaptability!