POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY: How we can learn to bounce back – and bounce forward - from adversity

EARLIER this year we ran a practical half-day workshop on how to build resilience using positive psychology skills.

At times, we all face significant stresses in any of a number of areas of our lives, for example, health, relationships, financial security.

When we have come through a personal crisis or trauma, resilience is what helps us to 'bounce back' and recover our emotional and physical wellbeing. One definition of resilience that we both like is that of clinical psychologist and author, Dr Tony Bates, and refers to the ability to bounce back.

“An object is resilient when it springs back into shape after being squashed or stretched. Resilience is what helps us when life takes a turn for the worse. We may bounce back, but we may also bounce forward”. (Tony Bates 2020).

However, resilience for most of us is a work in progress. We have to work at bouncing back from adversity. Some people seem to find it easier than others.

However, the good news is that resilience can be cultivated by all of us. As psychologists we try to teach skills that will help our clients (and ourselves) become more resilient.

It can be very difficult to be resilient because of the negative bias. Because of our innate ‘better safe than sorry’ mindset, we pay much more attention to negative than to positive thoughts.

Negative thoughts alert us to threat, while positive ones towards engagement and embracing new opportunities.

In fact, research shows that we need at least three positive experiences/thoughts/feelings to equalise one negative one and more than that to flourish psychologically.

Dr Maureen Gaffney has a really good explanation and summary of this concept in her excellent book 'Flourishing'. All humans have a highly sensitized threat system and some of us are more prone to pessimism than optimism.

In addition, what we pay attention to gets bigger so it can be hard to contain the negative thoughts. We teach our clients to become aware of unhelpful thoughts, to pause, to become aware of where our attention goes and pull it back rather than go down a (predominantly negative) thought rabbit hole.

The best way to train attention is to become more mindful of what is actually happening in our lives, right here, right now. Meditation can be used to focus our attention on one thing at a time; for example, we can focus on the breath (the inhale, the exhale) or we can focus on the waves crashing on the beach, the flame of a candle in front of us.

It can be useful to think of attention as a muscle, and meditation as a workout for it. MRI scans demonstrate that meditation can actually calm the activity of the amygdala (that part of our brain that is similar to a watchtower, scanning for danger).

Research by psychologists such as Kristin Neff and Chris Germer in the US and Paul Gilbert in the UK has shown that self-compassion helps us to become more resilient, more able to bounce back from tough times.

Modern science has shown again and again that mindful self-compassion helps build resilience and has a profound impact on our minds, health and happiness.

Ideally, we need to learn to deal with emotional pain without making it worse. Compassion involves warmhearted concern for emotional pain and suffering and a commitment to try to prevent and relieve it.

We need to practise self-acceptance, to develop awareness of the ways in which we self-criticise and we need to explore how we can care for ourselves in a compassionate way.

In clinical practice, we both really like using compassionate imagery with clients. Also, compassion focussed meditations such as the loving-kindness meditation can be very helpful.

We need to cultivate hope and optimism. The good news is that both can be learned. With regard to hope, research suggests that if we have the perspective that something better is possible in the future, then, we can better endure our struggles today.

It is important to surround ourselves with hopeful and optimistic people. We need to celebrate wins. Optimists approach challenge and scale down threat, rather than avoiding or thinking about all the possible things that can go wrong (pessimism). We need to actively search for the good in our lives, even amongst the bad stuff.

Having a daily gratitude practice is one way of doing this. We encourage clients to write down one or two things each day that they have enjoyed, felt grateful for and been satisfied with; these are simple things, for example, “I enjoyed sitting in my garden with my cup of coffee this morning”.

When we are dealing with tough situations in our lives which are really challenging our resilience sometimes we have to practise mindful acceptance. This is where we accept what is going on (for example, my child has a chronic illness), we don’t like it, but we ask ourselves what it is we need to help us accept this situation.

It could be that as a parent you need to practise self care so that you can help your child. Self care can be emotional and psychological but physical aspects of self-care are also important if we are to be resilient in the face of stress, for example, good diet and exercise.

We always encourage clients to take a holistic view of their mental health. We encourage physical exercise as it is the best form of exercise for our heads.

Physical exercise releases endorphins and brain derived neurotropic factor (good for attention, memory, cognition…) and helps us emotionally regulate.

Research has demonstrated that eating well, taking in foods rich in certain vitamins and minerals such as magnesium, zinc, tryptophan can aid our mental health. And of course, getting good sleep is so important if we are to clear out a lot of the 'daily debris' and get the next day off to a good start, ready to meet whatever life throws at us.

Julie O'Flaherty and Imelda Ferguson (pictured above) will be running an online version of the resilience building workshop. Contact us directly for more information: Imelda 087 2271630, Julie 087 2399328. Julie O'Flaherty and Imelda Ferguson are chartered clinical psychologists, both based in private practice in Tullamore. Through Mind Your Self Midlands, they run courses on Positive Psychology and mindfulness throughout the year. They can be contacted through the Psychological Society of Ireland www.psychologicalsociety.ie (Find a Psychologist section) and also on their Facebook page, Mind Your Self Midlands.