 Welcome to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes. This podcast was created to provide you the information and tools Doc Snipes gives her clients so that you too can start living happier. Our website, docsknipes.com, has even more resources, videos, and handouts, and even interactive sessions with Doc Snipes to help you apply what you learn. Go to docsknipes.com to learn more. Welcome to Happiness Isn't Brain Surgery with Doc Snipes, practical tools to improve your mood and quality of life. Today we're going to talk about building resilience. Resilience is a process or lifestyle that enables people to bounce back in the face of adversity. Think back when you were little, or maybe when your parents were little. We had these things called weevil wobbles, and there were little characters that small children would play with, and you could push them down and they would pop right back up. And that's kind of what we're talking about with resilience. Resilience is the ability to pop back up in the face of adversity. It develops over time as you're exposed to and successfully navigate stressors, though. So you're not born resilient. You're not born with the ability to take something that's really devastating and just be like, okay, I've got the skills that I need to get back up. There are a lot of things that go into resilience, not only how you deal with a stressor, but how well you're prepared for the stressors before it happens. You need to have enough energy in your proverbial gas tank in order to deal with any onslaught that comes your way. When we talk about resilience, there are three things we're going to look at. Risk factors, which are things that occurred as you were growing up that may have made it harder for you to develop the skills that you needed to become resilient, or it may have prohibited you from successfully navigating stressors as they came up. Risk factors can include things like poverty that didn't allow you the experiences that would have enabled you to successfully navigate challenges. Prematurity. If you were born premature, you may not have had the same cognitive development as everyone else or may have some cognitive delays. Residential mobility and lack of family or community ties. We know that friends and social support are our greatest stressors, buffers against stress, and sometimes our greatest stressors, but I digress. When you haven't had the ability to form healthy relationships and learn to rely on other people, then it makes it harder for you to do that later, which is a risk factor in terms of, you know, when future stresses come your way, how are you going to be able to handle it? The addicted or dysfunctional family environment may have prevented you from learning the coping skills you needed because your parents didn't even have them. And if you didn't learn them from somewhere, then you don't know them. Does it mean you can't learn them now? No. The great thing is you can undo these risk factors. It just means that you may be starting on a different level than some other people who had other opportunities. In illnesses when you were younger, such as cancer or multiple sclerosis or Crohn's disease, which prevented you from getting out there, maybe from going to school functions, maybe from interacting with your peers as much as other people had a chance to, because of your illness may have prevented you from developing some of these resiliency skills or the ability to bounce back. I mean, think about it. When kids are little, they experience a lot of little traumas. And it's in the mind of a three-year-old, if somebody steals your swing, that's a big deal. If somebody throws dirt in your face, that's a big deal. So it starts back then helping children successfully navigate hardships and unpleasant things that come their way, and they learn how to deal with it. If a child was not able to engage in those because of illness or bouncing around to different foster families or whatever the case is, then they've been deprived of the opportunity. So they're going to have to start learning as adults what other people may have learned as young children. Vulnerabilities are factors or traits and things in the environment, which may cause a heightened response, sensitivity, or reaction to stressors. We call these vulnerabilities in dialectical behavior therapy as well. These are traits or situations that when life throws you lemons, it's a lot harder to deal with it. You are more likely to react more strongly or more negatively than someone else who doesn't have these vulnerabilities. I mean, think of a simple vulnerability such as being sick. If you've been sick for a while and you're exhausted and you're drained and you just don't have any more energy, then when something else comes at you, it may feel like the end of the world. So these are the vulnerabilities, risk factors or things you never developed. Vulnerabilities are situations that make it harder for you to deal with life on life's terms in the present. Some of these can include permanent cognitive impairments such as fetal alcohol, spectrum issues, autism, lack of social support, being someone who is highly emotionally sensitive and prone to emotional dysregulation, having ineffective coping skills, or currently having mood or addictive disorders. If you're already depressed, if you're already anxious, then when something comes at you, you may feel it a whole lot more strongly and react a whole lot more strongly than you would have if you weren't currently experiencing a depressive or anxiety episode. Effective factors are things which enhance or promote your resistance and may moderate the effect of risk factors. We can't make unfortunate things go away. Sometimes life just sucks and we can't change that. What we can do is help people develop skills or we can develop skills that reduce the impact of negative events. So when something bad happens to me, for example, I rely on my family. I will call them, I will rely on them for social support, I may go out for a run to clear my head. I may pray about it. Those are protective factors, coping skills, if you will, that I have that help me reduce the impact when something big comes along. But I've also, other things that reduce the impact include preparing for it ahead of time and staying rested enough so I'm not on my last lick of energy. Being prepared so I know that if something happens and I need to drop everything and fly to North Carolina to be with my mother that I can do that and I have the ability to do that. So protective factors, there's a lot of stuff that we're going to talk about there that goes into reducing the impact. Another thing protective factors do is reduce the negative chain reactions to risk factors. So when something bad happens, you may feel it, you may feel devastated, but protective factors can help you deal with it right there. Devastation can be a normal reaction to something. But if you react to that devastation by self-harming or drinking or using drugs, then those are negative chain reactions. Something bad happens and then it kind of spirals out of control. So protective factors would help you stop it right there and go, okay, this really is unpleasant and painful right now, but I can deal with it instead of having to escape from it or lash out in some way. Protective factors also promote resiliency traits. Those things that we're going to talk about which include a sense of competence in your own abilities and a sense of character. You know who you are, what you want and what's important to you. So you can figure out the best course of action to move forward based on those things. And protective factors also set up opportunities for success. One of the easiest ways or most obvious ways that they do that. Protective factors encourage people to ask themselves, all right, what now? I can't change what happened. I need to accept the fact that this happened. What can I do now to keep moving forward and deal with this and integrate it into what I call our life narrative? There are two types of protective factors that you want to develop. Assets are positive factors that reside within you such as self-esteem, self-confidence, and social confidence and communication skills, the ability to ask for what you need and set boundaries and say no to things when you just can't do it anymore. You need to protect yourself. You need to use that energy for something else that's important. You would love to help your friend move. You would love to babysit for your friend's kids. But right now you just can't take on one more thing and continue doing what you need to do to live your highest quality of life. And that's not selfish. It sounds selfish because there's a lot of use in there. But it's not selfish because if you are broken down, you're not good to anybody. So stepping back and going in order to maintain my sanity and keep moving forward, I just can't do this right now is important. That's an asset. And the ability to say it in a way that creates a win-win so nobody gets their feelings hurt is another asset. Resources are the other type of protective factors and those are outside of you. You can do so much yourself, but you also have to have resources. If you go to the store, you may know what you want to buy, but if you don't have money, you can't buy it when you are exposed to stress. You know what you need to do maybe to deal with stress, but sometimes that means relying on other people to help you out. So social support is an imperative resource. And for a lot of people, having good friends and good social support is difficult. So that's one thing that you want to look at working on is who is it that you can count on? And how can you nurture these relationships so when the chips are down for you, somebody else can help you out? Other resources include the opportunities to learn and practice skills. I mean, you can read about communication skills until you're blue in the face, but if you do it and sit at home and never interact with anybody, then you're probably not going to develop those skills. You'll have the knowledge, but not be able to translate it into something useful. Once you're out and able to practice those skills, set boundaries, have successful relationships, and you're going to have more confidence in your abilities. So when the time comes to rely on other people and even rely on yourself, you'll feel more confident, which will reduce your stress and help you bounce back. And general wellness programs, I just kind of put this as a garbage term. You need to be healthy. If you are exhausted, if you are sick, if you are in pain, you are not going to function as well. You're not going to deal as well with adversity because you're in a bad physical space. Your brain is not able to focus on making happy chemicals. And you're probably not sleeping well, which depletes your ability to deal with stress. So wellness programs just generally means taking care of yourself. Eat well, get some exercise. It doesn't have to be at the gym. Just go out and walk around your neighborhood or play with your dog. And get good rest. Good quality rest is essential. So to develop resilience, it's important to prevent and mitigate risk and vulnerability factors. So anything that you can cut out that's going, you know, is just going to make you stressed out. If you can prevent it, great. If you can't prevent it, then figuring out how to mitigate it. One place I used to work, we had a monthly meeting that was always extraordinarily stressful. And we all dreaded going to it. In order to mitigate the stress involved, we developed our own little coping skills for how we would kind of get through this meeting and deal with some of the negativity. So it's important to figure out for those things that you can't eliminate, how can you make them a little bit more tolerable? Sometimes it just comes down to positive self-talk throughout the situation. I'm a big sissy when it comes to needles. I hate needles. But I have learned over time that I can just, you know, I try to relax and tell myself it's going to be okay and keep talking to myself through it. And when I'm giving myself positive self-statements, there's no time for the negative statements to come in that say, this is going to hurt. This is going to be awful because I'm telling myself the positive things. Kind of drown out the negativity, if you will. So preventing and mitigating these factors. Sleep is another one. You know, you can figure out how to get good quality sleep. And if you can't, you need to talk to your doctor. But those are things that you can do ahead of time to make sure that you are running as efficiently and effectively as possible before a big stressor comes your way. Enhance protective factors by learning new coping skills, enhancing your relationships, making sure that you've got close relationships. And, you know, whatever else works for you, if it's your higher power, if it's your friendships, if it's your artwork, know what you can do to help protect yourself against stress. And when stress comes your way, you can help use it as a shield, if you will, to prevent the stress from completely overwhelming you. Provide resources to reduce the impact of stressors. So make sure that you've got resources available. You know that, you know, if you get sick, that you've got somebody who can cover your shift. Or if your kid needs to be picked up from school because they got sick, somebody can do that. Have backup plans for things that you can plan might happen. You know, your kid might get sick at school, your car might break down. You might have to work overtime who's going to pick the kid up from the sitter. If you have these resources and minimize these kind of regular stressors that happen, then you're going to save more energy and you're going to have it there for when life really throws you a curveball. When you have a curveball, though, focus on what parts were successful. You know, what did you do right in this situation? And when you've encountered things like this before, and maybe it's just when you've encountered a super stressful situation before, what did you do that helped? So focus on your successes and your strengths because that will help you take those parts and apply it to the current situation and keep moving forward. It's important to remember, though, resilience must be learned and practiced. So over the years, if when life has thrown you a curveball, it's knocked you on your butt. Don't expect at the end of this podcast to be able to be like, okay, stress isn't going to bother me anymore. That's not the way it works. You've got to develop the assets and the resources, just like you would do if you were building a business. Think about what you need to have in your bank, if you will, in order to prepare and be ready to deal with stressors when they come your way. If you like this podcast, you can subscribe on your favorite podcast app. Join our Facebook group at docsknives.com slash Facebook, or join our community and access additional resources at docsknives.com.