How resilient are you?

Welcome to our new Contact series, the self-checkout. In these stories, UQ experts will share the central questions we can ask to learn more about ourselves, along with research-backed strategies for personal growth.

For our first instalment, we asked psychology expert Emeritus Professor Kenneth Pakenham from UQ's School of Psychology to take us on a deep-dive into resilience.

His research and clinical practice spans over 40 years, with a particular focus on the experiences of those dealing with serious and chronic illness – helping them to live fully despite the adversities they face.

What is resilience?

We all experience adversity at some point in our lives. How we and others cope with it and become more resilient is what's truly important.

The critical role of resilience for survival and optimal functioning during tough times became a lived reality for me as I coped with numerous significant adversities in my early life. Later, my understanding of resilience deepened through observing clients in my clinical psychology practice manage immense and diverse hardships, and through my scientific research into resilience protective factors and resilience training interventions.

While there is no unanimously agreed upon definition, at its core resilience refers to the ability to adapt successfully to adverse events. Adversities vary widely with each presenting unique adjustment challenges that change over time.

A key element of successfully adapting to a hardship is therefore flexibility in adopting coping techniques that effectively manage the specific demands of an adverse event.

Difficulties can arrive at any time. Taking a proactive look at how you respond to every day challenges may help you to prepare for the future.

Here are 4 key questions to help you to take a deeper look at your resilience. I've included examples of how these might arise in the workplace, which we can all relate to, but they can be applied to a wide range of circumstances.

Ask yourself:
Do I stay connected to the present when I’m under stress?

Do you get lost in ruminating about past and future? For instance, if an unexpected urgent work task arrives on your desk, you might begin worrying about how you will cope with the extra workload or rehash a previous similar situation where you feel you didn’t perform well.

If your mind goes to over-analysing the past or worrying about the future, you miss out on important information about the present which can guide your choice of optimal coping strategies. Effective action can only be taken in the present.

Ask yourself:
Do I observe my thoughts and identify thinking that is unhelpful?

Do you get lost in unhelpful thinking? For instance, you might overthink the situation and obsess about not coping with the extra work demands or how stressed you felt when faced with a similar situation previously.

Observing or reflecting on your mental activity can provide perspective and reveal the mental drivers of your behaviour. Changing or simply letting go of unhelpful thinking will enable you to invest more energy in helpful thinking and corresponding actions.

Ask yourself:
Do I accept the things I can’t control and change the things I can when I’m under stress?

Or, do you simply reactively revert to flight (avoidance) or fight? For instance, you might put the work task aside and rationalise why you need to prioritise other tasks (flight), or you could reactively drop all other work responsibilities and bullishly charge ahead with completing the task (fight).

Another option is to ‘stand back’ and carefully reflect on the situation and your reaction to it and identify what is and isn’t controllable so you can determine where flight, fight and acceptance strategies are likely to be most effective.

Fighting against what can’t be changed is fruitless. It creates and intensifies distress. Accepting what can’t be changed brings peace and options for successful adaptation.

Constructively changing aspects of your situation that can be controlled is empowering and represents positive forward steps.

Ask yourself:
Do I adjust my goals when the demands of a stressful situation require this?

Do you rigidly hold your goals despite significant changes to your circumstances? For instance, you might retain the same work output goals despite the substantial changes imposed by that unexpected, urgent work task.  

Adversity may require adjusting personal goals, so they are more realistic and are a better fit to the changed circumstances. Just ensure your adjusted goals remain aligned with your personal values.

Strategies to strengthen your resilience

A critical element of resilience is choosing coping techniques that help you adapt to the unique characteristics of the adversity you're facing. They must also be a good fit with who you are as a person.

This process involves flexibility in responding to the adversity. The following psychological flexibility strategies help you to choose the most effective and resilient coping techniques for meeting the demands of an adverse event.

1. Practice getting grounded by connecting to the present.

Grounding techniques like meditation are helpful, but you can also use other strategies like simply ‘checking in’ to what is happening now – internally (‘what am I thinking and feeling’) and externally (‘what can I hear, see, touch, smell’). The key is to simply observe the present without judgement or evaluation. Grounded present awareness provides the most informed and balanced position from which to take effective action.

2. Practice observing your mental activity, particularly thinking, by listening into your thinking as if you had a ‘third ear’.

Identify unhelpful thinking – mental activity that derails your actions aligned with your personal values and goals. Simply let unhelpful thoughts pass or make them more constructive. Awareness of your mental activity helps you become less reactive (i.e., takes you off auto-pilot) and offers a small window of opportunity to choose your actions.

3. Practice accepting or riding the constant fluctuating flow of inner experiencing.

This includes feelings, thoughts and bodily sensations and contrasts with the external aspects of your life that can’t be changed (e.g., diagnosis, past abuse), or those things that you decide not to change (e.g., relationship, employment). Acceptance helps you make peace with elements of your life that can’t be changed, or you choose not to change.

Growing from adversity and finding strength in your values

Personal values are like a lighthouse – showing the way ahead in troubled times.

Review, refine and re-prioritise your personal values as necessary. Our goals should serve our personal values. In adversity you may need to adjust your goals so they are realistically achievable given the changed circumstances, but always check that your altered goals still align with your values. While goals may be modified during adversity, personal values provide lifelong direction irrespective of life changes – they form our life compass.

Using these strategies in your daily life helps to build resilience muscle so that when confronted with significant stress or adversity, you will have the psychological flexibility skills to successfully adjust to your changed circumstances.

Caution: hardship elicits personal discomfort, including anxiety, sadness, fear. The temptation is to focus on trying to remove this distress rather than accepting it as an inevitable and natural aspect of hardship. Ironically, struggling to remove legitimate distress only intensifies inner discomfort. Accepting the reasonable and ‘organic’ distress that hardships in life bring frees us to invest our energy in getting grounded in the present and aligning our mental activity and actions with our pursuit of values-based goals.

The effective use of flexible and contextually sensitive coping strategies to manage adversity not only enables successful adaptation but also personal growth. In this regard, adversity has the potential to deepen and broaden our perspectives on self, others and the world and open new opportunities for personal enrichment.