Resilience Through Crisis

Showing resilience isn’t pushing through to breaking point, it is making choices in a moment that support your well-being in order to continue to succeed. Running on adrenaline works temporarily and can be beneficial for short periods of time, but is not fundamental to success.

A certain amount of pressure is healthy and can help us to flourish, in fact when we don’t feel challenged, we can become disengaged. But when pressure increases past a certain point our body and mind become stressed. If this level of stress is maintained our performance and well-being decline which can eventually lead to burnout.

We need to ensure we protect ourselves by being mentally and physically fit, this allows us the capacity to cope positively with stress and adversity through physiological, psychological and organisational coping mechanisms. This is resilience.

Whether we are disengaged, thriving or stressed our body and mind send us numerous signals, for example, when we are thriving, we may feel energized, alert and our thoughts might be more upbeat. When we are stressed, we might feel more physical cues such as insomnia, aches and pains or mental cues such as anxiety or guilt.

Functioning on autopilot we tend to ignore these cues and we make a fundamental error of judgement – we assume that the activities that nourish us are optional. They are not.

In these moments we need to start making conscious decisions, responding more thoughtfully, being aware of the signals your body and mind are sending you and choose your actions rather than acting habitually.

For many of us, the past two years have brought about a heightened sense of stress and crisis from social restrictions, shifts in environments and increased financial pressures. It’s tempting during these periods, particularly with regards to financial pressures to become more mindful of spending decisions whilst simultaneously reprioritising time to focus on work.

Although understandable, this is quite literally the worst thing that you can do, as in times of high stress self-care becomes fundamental to survival. We must put time aside to look after our mental and physical health. We must learn to learn to put our own metaphorical oxygen mask on first in order to be able to effectively look after those around us.