Resilience is the ability to carry on in the face of challenges and to bounce back when bad things happen. Resilience helps to get good outcomes in spite of serious threats.
Interestingly the USA army have resilience training programs to help recruits deal with bad situations that they are likely to encounter on the battle field. Actually resilience training is helpful to all of us as we all face battles in our daily lives.
Several factors that build up resilience include optimism, good problem solving, faith, a sense of meaning, self efficacy, flexibility, impulse control, empathy, close relationships, and spirituality. The resilience training program used by the USA army was originally developed for children in late childhood and early adolescence to learn life-skills. A similar program was also developed for college students to help prevent depression and anxiety.
Are you a pessimist or an optimist?
The program refers to pessimism or optimism as ‘explanatory styles’ or how you explain the cause of something that has happened to you.
Pessimists tend to give the causes of negative events to permanent, uncontrollable, and pervasive factors. Not surprisingly depressed people are more pessimistic than non-depressed people, and people with pessimistic styles are at greater risk for developing depression than those who are optimistic.
Optimists on the other hand, tend to give the causes of negative events to temporary, changeable, and specific factors. Although optimistic explanations act as a buffer against depression, if the explanations are inaccurate they can interfere with problem solving.
Optimistic thoughts, just like depressive thoughts are not always grounded in the truth. For example an optimist might say ‘everything will be okay tomorrow’ or a pessimist might say that ‘tomorrow can only get worse’. Neither statement is true as we can’t predict what tomorrow holds. Have you been told ‘hey, don’t worry, things will be better after a good nights sleep/ a cup of coffee or whatever? Well meaning advice, but really a load of rubbish as no-one can predict the future.
Predicting the future leads to anxiety. When I catch myself ‘predicting the future’ I remind myself that I don’t know what tomorrow or the future holds. With that I bring my thoughts back to the present and start problem solving in order to have a good outcome to my dilemma rather than relying on tomorrow sort of magically being better.
Pessimist or optimist? Whatever your style, start becoming aware of your thoughts and words and rationally evaluate them to see if they are accurate. Doing this will help you become an effective problem solver.