How to Build Resilience in Tough Times » Yale’s Climate Connection

Tough times are around us. For ourselves, our communities and the planet, resilience is key to lasting, recovering and transforming during difficult times.

What is elasticity?

Resilience is the hidden inner strength revealed in the most difficult times of life, which allows us to grieve healthily through setbacks, through challenges, endure hardships or through losses.

Noriko Morita Harth, director of the UC San Diego Mindfulness Center and Mindfulness Teacher, describes this in this way: “Personal resilience when we face challenges or difficulties in life It is the ability to recover and grow. It is not about avoiding challenges, it is about facing challenges and leading to situations.”

Who is resilient? Sarah Newman, executive director of the Climate Mental Health Network, said the network is a resource hub for supporting and serving collective well-being. “It's a matter of strengthening the resilience that already exists,” she said. “This is the time when we are most challenging, and we can promote and foster the responsiveness we deserve.”

What is elasticity?

We all meet people who are resilient, or at some point in our lives, I embody resilience myself.

Our resilience dictates most of our responses to major personal life, community and social difficulties. People with strong elasticity not only rebound, but also rebound.

This resilient rebound forward may mean that people may encounter new parts of themselves, discovered during difficult times in their lives. If certain relationships disappear, resilience welcomes new relationships into life. Resilience helps people adjust, modify and or decide if old plans explode, then more meaningful directions and goals for life can be achieved.

You can't choose when you're having difficulties, but flexibility allows you to choose how you react.

It is rare to return to the time before the hardship, but flexibility supports people giving up the time before and focusing on the time now and ahead. Tough times are fertile times of self-transformation. Resilience is the key factor in changing better.

“Each of us has a responsibility in this world, and that's the role we play,” Newman said. “Each of us has power and responsibility and so on. That's the case with this self-awareness and resilience.”

Tough times are also fragile times, and those with less resilience may face serious struggles.

“Resilience is like the immune system,” Haas said. “When my immune system is low due to stress, it may take longer to recover if I catch a cold. When I have a lower elasticity, I may easily be overwhelmed. I may feel pessimistic and isolated.”

Reduced flexibility is usually not the fault of the individual. Traumatic events, adverse childhood experiences and forms of structural violence, such as environmental injustice, are all associated with reduced resilience.

How do you build resilience?

The good news is that according to the American Psychological Association, resilience can be cultivated and practiced.

Harth recommends starting with finding external resources and support systems: emotional, mental, physical or public. You may turn to places of comfort, whether it is the nearby forest, your church, temple or mosque, or pets. You may seek professional care from a therapist.

A resilient person is also associated with their inner resources: confidence, agency, compassion and trust. First, try this self-summoning rest guide.

Newman said it might help to recall stories of difficult times in his early days in life and remind himself how to endure and recover. She said she found the resilience of reading others and chose to believe that she had the same ability.

Resilience is not about bothering difficult times or suppressing feelings of sorrow, anger, or pain. In fact, resilience is exactly the opposite: “It’s important to be able to name our feelings,” Newman said. The climate emotion wheel is a useful tool for identifying emotions related to climate change and other related emotions. Guided meditation and diary tips can also be a way to connect and deal with difficult experiences.

HelpGuide.org and Mayo Clinic provide additional tips and strategies for building resilience.

More elastic than one person

Climate change averages show that individual well-being is interdependent with community well-being.

“With climate change, like the wildfires in Los Angeles, experience is collective. Individuals are suffering, affected, but they are not alone,” Newman said. “When we talk about a person’s emotional resilience, it really binds in the resilience of the community.”

Community and personal resilience work together in the feedback loop. When individuals can make sense and find goals after a disaster, participate in recovery efforts with their neighbors, and embark on their own path forward, they also support their communities to find ways to travel and go out.

“Individuals contribute to the resilience of the community, and they also benefit from the resilience of the community.” Community can Bounce forward, Individuals in this community may also increase resilience and rebound.

Dekila Chungyalpa said the resilience of individuals and communities is related to the resilience of the entire planet. Her paper, “The Deep Resilience Framework in the Anthropocene,” believes that personal happiness is closely related to everything – Moreover, the ability to resilience comes not only from individuals or communities, but also to a healthy, resilient planet. (Chungyalpa’s courses are free if you don’t have a certificate option.)

“Inside, community and planet resilience are interdependent,” Chungyalpa said. “You can’t just achieve any of these things. You have to work on these three aspects because they are interdependent.”

Newman provides an example of this relationship: salmon return to Northern California streams, as Native communities and conservation workers gather to restore the salmon population. In other words, people's elasticity makes the elasticity of salmon more likely.

Tough times are inevitable, but we have internal and external resources that not only survive but also transform into better people to get the experience. Tough times also provide opportunities to build or deepen connections with friends, family and larger communities, and strengthen these connections to respond more resiliently to the next tough times.

“Resilience is about being hopeful, trusting you and your community to do and moving forward together,” Newman said.