Feeling a little COVID crazy?
Join the club. Rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and domestic violence are surging. Humans don’t like uncertainty, imposed change and social isolation, so many of us are popping emotional rivets. What can we learn from this collective adversity?
Well, if you ask shrinks which psychological attribute we need most for coping with COVID, there’s a good chance “resilience” will get the nod. This capacity is a mental toughness that enables one to bounce back from trials and tribulations fairly quickly. Resilient types usually display realistic optimism, confidence in their own fortitude and behavioral flexibility. They exemplify the oak-and-willow metaphor by conforming to the latter, meaning they bend but don’t break. When the psychological and social tempests blow, as they now are, bending becomes a mental survival skill.
Fair enough, but how does one acquire more resilience? Well, researchers have pinpointed the most effective way to build this attribute, and it’s not the usual self-care suspects like exercise, positive self-talk, meditation and the like. This particular secret sauce is readily available to most of us. It’s called learning. Studies show the process of acquiring new knowledge and skills grows resilience in powerful ways.
It makes sense. Learning requires stepping outside one’s comfort zone, opening the mind, absorbing new ideas or abilities, and then putting them to good use. This necessitates adopting new behaviors, and the broader the range of these behaviors, the greater one’s flexibility in the face of adversity. Basically, we acquire the ability to deal with change around us by first changing ourselves. It’s a bit like cross-training the mind—engaging in different mental and behavioral learning opportunities to build mettle and adaptability across a variety of challenges.
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Stymied, Stressed and Struggling
For example, Kim, a middle-aged mom, sought my counsel after losing her corporate job to the pandemic. Like many of us, she felt stymied, stressed and struggling. “I’m doing the job search, but I feel deflated and kind of frozen. Frequently, I find myself staring blankly into space. I just zone out,” she explained.
This sort of mental impasse and accompanying brain fog is a common complaint among those with insufficient resilience. When we don’t feel the wherewithal to flex and adjust around new challenges, we tend to freeze up psychologically and behaviorally. “It may help to learn new skills,” I suggested.
“You mean like stress management?” Kim wondered.
“No, it doesn’t have to be in the psychological realm. Just any new learning that challenges you to mentally stretch,” I replied.
“Well, I’ve always wanted to learn to play piano. You mean something like that?”
I did indeed. That’s where the cross-training principle kicks in. On the surface, tickling the ivories seems unrelated to building resilience, but it actually does just that, as can any number of other learned abilities. To increase this flex-and-bounce-back capacity, I’ve had clients learn painting, woodworking, knitting, a second language, fly fishing, photography ... the list goes on. Others pursue a more cerebral path, such as returning to school, taking online courses, joining a book or film club, watching documentaries, and the like.
Is this easy? Often, no. Early on, learning something new can be frustrating, even discouraging. This is particularly true for folks who are accustomed to paint-by-the-numbers living, like Kim. When one’s life is humming along nicely, as many were pre-pandemic, this autopilot mentality can damp down the curiosity and growth mindset that motivate us to learn new things. For Kim, and those like her, the challenge is to become more of a lifelong learner, not a steady-as-she-goes type.
One prerequisite for building resilience through new learnings is curiosity, which is a resilient mindset in its own right. For instance, when the pandemic took hold as a disruptive force in our lives, the curious among us quickly transitioned from alarm and angst to considering how its challenges also created opportunities to learn and grow. As always, it comes down to a decision. As author Caryn Sullivan said: “In the face of adversity, we have a choice. We can be bitter, or we can be better.”
For more, visit philipchard.com.
