đŻ What Is Emotional Resilience?
Emotional resilience is the ability to respond to difficult emotions in a healthy and productive way.
đ Examples of Emotional Resilience
- Staying focused in high-performance situations despite fear of failure and self-doubt.
- Accepting feedback without acting defensively or personalizing. Or, giving honest feedback despite feeling anxious about how the other person will take it.
- Managing your temper instead of lashing out in anger or impatience.
- Continuing to socialize despite feeling sad and grieving the recent loss of a loved one.
- Enforcing good boundaries despite being afraid of how people will think of you as a result.
- Following through on a creative project rather than procrastinating as a way to avoid feelings of inadequacy and fear of rejection.
đŹ Problems Associated with Low Emotional Resilience
- Chronic worry and anxiety. Most chronic anxiety results from a pattern of anxiety avoidance where people get short-term relief from their anxiety by avoiding it only to see it grow stronger over time because of emotional fear learning. Ultimately, the only way to undo chronic anxiety is to improve your ability to tolerate and be willing to have anxiety rather than avoiding it or trying to fix it. In other words, you must be resilient in the face of anxiety rather than running away from it.
- Depression and low self-esteem. Similar to chronic anxiety, many forms of depression and low self-esteem ultimately stem from emotional avoidance: rumination, self-criticism, social isolation, substance abuse, self-sabotage, and the like are all frequently motivated by a desire to avoid feeling sadness or shame rather than confronting them. Itâs only when you learn to be resilient in the face of these difficult emotions that you can work through them in a healthy way.
- Relationship conflict. Most of the behaviors that contribute to relationships deteriorating stem from one or both partyâs inability to manage difficult emotions well: The husband who stonewalls in the face of his wifeâs anger; the business partner who communicates passive-aggressively in the face of difficult feedback; the mother who tries to âfixâ her childâs emotional struggles because she canât tolerate her own anxiety.
- Procrastination and motivation issues. People who procrastinate frequently often have a belief that they canât do good work until they feel good. Consequently, any time they try to work but feel anxious, insecure, embarrassed, etc. they give up and avoid or procrastinate. On the other hand, when youâre resilient in the face of those emotions, you have the confidence to do the work despite how you happen to feel.
- Chronic Stress and Burnout. Much of chronic stress and burnout comes from the inability or unwillingness to be assertive: to ask for what you really want and need or say no to the things you arenât willing to tolerate. But this capacity to be assertive depends on a healthy relationship with your emotions: the ability to tolerate anxiety and speak up anyway; the ability to validate your fears and set a boundary despite worrying about what others will think; the ability to sit with your self-doubt and speak up to share you ideas anyway.
đĄ Key Insights About Emotional Resilience
- Emotional resilience is not about regulating your emotions; itâs about regulating your response to your emotions. We do not have direct control over our emotions, which means itâs unwise to try and control them: to make yourself less anxious; to be less sad; to be more happy. Instead of trying to regulate how they feel, people who are emotionally resilient focus on controlling the things they actually have control over: their thoughts, their attention, and their behavior. A few examples: You canât regulate your anxiety, but you can control your worry, which will eventually lead to less anxiety. You canât turn down your anger, but you can ruminate less, which will eventually lead to less anger and better decisions. You canât change your sadness, but you can choose to spend quality time with people who love you despite ânot feeling it.â
- Emotional resilience comes from what you do, not what you know. While some degree of emotional intelligence is necessary for emotional resilience, itâs not sufficient. Emotional resilience requires a combination of emotional intelligence (what you know) and emotional fitness (what you do on a regular basis). Just like you canât become an expert pianist merely reading books about piano, you will not become emotionally resilient simply learning about emotions and chasing insights. For example, you might understand intellectually that itâs possible to acknowledge an unhelpful thought pattern like a worry and refocus your attention on something more productive (that email you need to write), but unless you practice controlling and strengthening your attention, youâre unlikely to be successful.
- Emotional resilience is about your behavior in the present, not the events of your past. Of course, everything thatâs ever happened to us shapes who we are to some degree. But by far the biggest influence on your emotional resilience is your habits in the present, not the events of your past. Someone who was the victim of a horrific trauma as a child, is capable of profound levels of emotional resilience as an adult. And by extension, a wonderfully rich and supportive upbringing by no means guarantees a resilient adulthood. How you feel, and how well you manage those feelings, are primarily the result of your actions and habits in the present, not what happened to you in the past.
đ ď¸ Tips and Tools for Improving Emotional Resilience
- Name your emotions plainly instead of intellectualizing them. Intellectualizing means you are in the habit of using conceptual, metaphorical, or overly-abstract language to describe how you feel emotionally as a way to avoid the discomfort of using plain emotion words. Saying you feel overwhelmed when really youâre afraid, for example. This has two detrimental effects: 1) It lowers your emotional self-awareness and emotional intelligence. After all, how are you supposed to understand your emotions if youâre constantly avoiding them? 2) It lowers your confidence in your ability to tolerate and manage difficult emotions. Because if your brain sees you constantly avoiding emotions, itâs going to learn that theyâre dangerous. So, practice describing how you feel with plain emotion words: sad, afraid, angry, guilty, etc.
- Be compassionate with difficult emotions, not judgmental. Just because an emotion feels bad doesnât mean it is bad. After all, if you donât have direct control over your emotions, how can they be morally good or bad? Unfortunately, many people learn to treat painful emotions as enemies to be avoided or eliminated, which in turn leads to a habit of judging or criticizing their emotions. But like intellectualization, this only leads to emotional fear learning, more frequent and intense emotional reactions in the future, and less confidence in your ability to handle difficult emotions well. Emotional resilience comes from being compassionate with your emotions, not judgmental.
- Practice validating your emotions rather than trying to regulate them. A good way to break the habit of emotional judgment is to build the skill of emotional validation. Simply put, validation means reminding yourself that however uncomfortable you feel emotionally, itâs not bad to feel any emotion. Whatâs more, on some level, it probably makes sense that you feel the way you do given the circumstances. Put another way, emotional validation just means being supportive with yourself when youâre struggling emotionallyâthe same as youâd do for a good friend or loved one.
𧊠Learn More
- 3 Healthy Ways to Stop Bad Moods â
- 4 Ways Confident People Think Differently â
- 5 Emotional Blindspots Most People Never Notice â
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