In this self-compassion practice, we use guided imagery to fill ourselves with the same warmth and kindness we more readily give to others others. Research shows that self-compassion is beneficial for mental health – improving mood, reducing anxiety, and increasing resilience – and there is some recent research showing it can improve tolerance to chronic pain. Most of us aren’t very self-compassionate, and it’s normal to be resistant to self-compassion. It may be worth for you to explore so that you can keep making the most of it!
Tag: resilience
Video: Are You Being a Good Friend to Yourself?
Building resiliency is extremely important when you have chronic pain or chronic illness. One of the best ways to do that is through self-compassion, and yet most people cringe when they hear that word. Self-compassion is treating yourself the way you would treat a friend. Would you treat a friend the way you’re currently treating yourself?
Keep making the most of it everyone!
Why Music Might Increase Your Resilience to Chronic Pain
I’m a musician. Not professionally of course, but it is definitely part of my identity. I began playing the piano at age 5. I took lessons until I graduated from high school. I took practical and theory exams with Conservatory Canada (formerly the Western Board of Music) to the point that I have Grade 8 practical and Grade 4 theory. In junior high and high school I played the alto sax in band and jazz band. In high school I sang in the choir, played they keyboard for one of our vocal jazz groups, sang in another vocal jazz group, and always had a role in the school musicals. To this day, I still play my piano daily and sing along with songs as they come on the radio. I can play about 3 chords on the guitar, and I swear I’m going to take lessons one day! As a mental health professional I have also learned a lot about music and resilience.
Resilience can be defined as the ability to adjust to change or difficulties in life. Resilience utilizes our emotional strengths and our awareness of and ability to use our coping mechanisms to overcome adversity (Merriam-Webster, 2021). Resilience is also key to dealing effectively with chronic illness and chronic pain. Why? Because things are constantly changing and adapting. We have strong emotions and thoughts about our situations and these can often lead to depression and anxiety as well. We need to and want to be able to cope with what is happening. Yet many of us struggle with resilience for several different reasons, from childhood experiences to the pain itself and a lot in between. The good thing is we can learn to develop more resilience.
There is a ton of research on the benefits of music, such as increasing self-awareness, being more socially connected to others, and it helps to regulate mood (Schafer et al, 2013). It also enhances self-regulation, initiative and helps to strengthen relationships with others, not just connect us with them. Resilience skills in general do the same with our self-regulation, awareness, mood, initiative and relationships. There is a lot of overlap, so it makes sense that music would be helpful for this. In terms of how music builds resilience specifically, there is the idea of ‘musicking’ or our musical life in terms of an I-Thou relationship (this is an interesting existential idea that allows us to engage in perspective-taking, which in itself increases resilience as I’ve seen first-hand with my clients). The relationships of sounds, bodies, and psyches as presented in musical compositions/song builds this perspective-taking ability (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2018). Beyond this, musician can communicate musicality in order to enliven both themselves and listeners. (Malloch & Trevarthen, 2018). Therefore, listening to music, not just playing it, can build reslience.
In a clinical setting, music can be used in two different way. Music Therapists use specific music interventions to help individuals with their specific goals, mood regulation, resilience, etc. in an individual or group therapy setting. There is specific training to be able to do this. The other is “music for wellness” which is having musical experiences – listening, playing, etc. – for the purpose of wellbeing and general functioning. As I’m not a music therapist, I encourage my clients to engage in the latter, which is also how I engage with music.
Music for chronic pain has also been studied. For example, in a palliative care setting, music was found to actually decrease chronic pain in patients, which I found super interesting. This really ties into the resiliency. Typically when we are more resilient our pain either actually decreases or just doesn’t bother us as much. Honestly, I’m fine with either scenario. The last few days my knee has been hurting a lot. I’m not sure if it’s related to my UCTD or my hyper-mobile knee joints (my physio thinks they’re related to each other). I do notice that when I play the piano, or even just listen to music while I’m on a walk, my pain is less noticeable. Perhaps because of distraction or perhaps because the music is building my ability to be resilient, not just in those moments but throughout life. Take a listen to this podcast episode with musician and music teacher Melissa, who has multiple chronic illnesses.
Pick a song to listen to, play, or sing along with today and see if that helps you to keep making the most of it!
How I Accommodate My Illness & Pain
There is a Taoist parable that tells of an old man who fell into a river that swept him toward a dangerous waterfall. There were people watching who feared for the old man’s life. By some miracle, the old man came out of the water at the bottom of the falls completely unharmed. The onlookers asked him how he managed to survive, and he replied, “I accommodated myself to the water, not the water to me. Without thinking, I allowed myself to be shaped by it. Plunging into the swirl, I came out with the swirl. This is how I survived.”
If the old man had struggled against the water, he may not have survived the fall. At least that’s how he sees it and is what the parable is suggesting. This is non-contention. I came across the parable when I was… well if you read this blog regularly then you can probably guess it… meditating. I was doing a guided meditation and at the end, the meditation teacher told this parable. It really spoke to me because I have heard this idea spoken in many different ways already, and it’s something I have been practicing for sometime. I notice that in my day-to-day life, when I am swept up by my pain or symptoms of my illness or thoughts about my pain or emotions such as anxiety that arise, when I struggle with these things, it just makes the day worse. It makes the pain (physical and emotional worse) and I feel less resilient. When I do the opposite – accommodate – then my days are pretty good. Thankfully I’ve gotten good at accommodating.
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While I’m sure some of you are also good at accommodating, there are probably many of you who are not. It takes a lot of work and practice to be able to do this. It’s way more natural for our minds to struggle because our minds think that it’s the best way to survive – I mean, thousands of years of evolution have told them this. Yet in modern times, the struggle often ends up being less helpful (but try telling that to the primitive part of your brain). I find that meditating is helpful for accommodation but I totally get that it’s not for everyone. I also find similar mindful practices like body scans, observing-breathing into-making room for-and allowing my feelings to also be helpful. And engaging in those values-based behaviours that I love. That doesn’t mean I push through my inner experiences. There is a delicate balance between pacing and going to my edge. And on days that I go to far and do too much, I offer myself some compassion because it is hard to be human, and it is hard to be a human with a chronic condition.
So, here’s what I suggest:
- try out some mindfulness practices, like the ones found on my YouTube channel
- incorporate more self-compassion into your life: kind words, soothing touching, remembering that it is human to have pain
- engage in values-based activities that allow you to pace and don’t take you past your edge
- seek mental health (and physical health) help from a licensed professional as often as needed.
As always, keep making the most of it!
5 Easy Chronic Pain Self-Management Skills
Today I want to take a slice of Pete Moore’s Pain Toolkit and share it with you. Who is Pete Moore? He’s a chronic pain warrior who came up with this incredible Pain Toolkit to help others struggling with chronic pain. Here’s the website: https://www.paintoolkit.org/ . The truth is, we can learn to self-manage our chronic pain. Like Pete, I have also learned to do so to a point where, yes I have pain, but no it does not affect my day-to-day life (that’s not to say I don’t have bad days, heck I had bad pain the other night and had difficulty sleeping). One thing we want to do when we have chronic pain is cultivate resilience. Now, I’ve written about resilience before in the past, so I’m not going to go into detail here. For those who aren’t familiar with what resilience entails, here are a few things: optimism, self-belief, willingness, self-control, being able to adapt, psychological flexibility, problem-solving, emotional awareness, social support, and humour, to name a few. So, here are 5 ways we can learn to do this.
- Goal Setting and Action Planning – I often set goals for myself, even on days that I’m not feeling great. In our third atmospheric river (basically several days of torrential downpour) since November in BC, Canada, I’m again feeling it in my body. But I know my body also needs to move. So I set a goal for how far I will walk in the rain (which is less than my goal would normally be but appropriate for the weather, my body at this moment, etc.). So, set your goals, and prepare for barriers to them. Here’s a podcast episode I recently did on that.
- Engaging in Activities of Daily Living – Getting out of bed, having a shower, eating breakfast, etc. All the regular stuff we do in our lives. It can be really hard to want to do them when you have an illness or pain, but doing them can also improve our overall well-being. Check out this episode of the podcast for more.
- Problem Solving – Problem solving can include a lot of different things. Pacing is important and I’ve done a post on that (December 1), prioritizing and planning your days, and really importantly, having a setback plan. What are you going to do when things don’t go the way you planned (in your goal setting and action planning stage). When I was recovering from hip surgery last year, I had to problem solve how to do all of my daily activities because I couldn’t put any weight on my left foot (for 6 weeks!) and I live alone. I still had to figure out how to cook, shower, dress, and even get to some appointments.
- Be Active – this will mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but it really means to move your body. It could be walking, exercise/going to the gym, stretching, yoga. Exercise itself is an evidence-based treatment for chronic pain (here’s the podcast episode). It can be light movement, as long as it’s movement. I can’t go a day without moving my body. Even when I notice I’m having the thought that I don’t want to move or I’m in too much pain, I inevitably actually feel better if I go for a walk or do some restorative yoga.
- Be patient with yourself – offer yourself some compassion. Change is slow. Like it’s an average of 10 weeks for someone to start noticing differences (in their minds or bodies) when they start to make any changes. If you find you’re having difficulty being patient with yourself, try this mindfulness exercise. I’m definitely guilty of wanting change to occur quickly for myself. But interestingly, when I offer myself patience and compassion instead of criticism, change seems to actually occur more quickly than when I’m only hard on myself.
I hope this helps you with some pain management. I know it’s things that have helped me and many others. So, just keep making the most of it!
Why Aren’t You Kinder To Yourself?
I’m going to be right upfront and say it, we do not treat ourselves as kindly as we treat other people. I’ll also admit that as much as I’ve worked on self-compassion over 4 years of going to therapy, and a 2.5 year master’s program to become a therapist, I still have moments where I don’t talk to myself kindly. But it has dramatically improved for me. People with chronic illness and/or chronic pain tend to be even less kind to themselves than other people, and those other people struggle a lot too. Think about your latest self-judgment or self-criticism. Just take a moment to get it. Now imagine you have this friend, Friend A, and he/she/they started to call you that judgment or criticism or label and said you’ll never change that’s just who you are. Now imagine Friend B, and this friend says to you, hey, I noticed you’re having a really hard time right now and going through all this difficult/painful stuff, and I just want to be here for you. Which friend would you rather have? I’m guessing you said Friend B, so think about whether or not you’re friend B to yourself.
If that brought up some emotion I’m not surprised. So let’s talk about self-compassion (or just kindness or friendliness if you don’t like the term self-compassion). According to Kristin Neff, the world’s leading researcher on it, self-compassion is made up of three parts.
- Mindfulness, which includes being present with our thoughts and feelings.
- Kindness, or acting with care and understanding opposed to judgment.
- Common Humanity, or acknowledging that all human suffer.
Kristin Neff also talks about some common blocks to self-compassion. And that’s what I want to talk about here. Because asking you, why aren’t you kinder to yourself, probably brought up something from this list, or a general, “I don’t know.” So let’s just address these now, in the context of chronic pain/illness.
Block 1: “It’s a sign of being weak.”
I can see how you got there, especially if you’re a male (because let’s faced it boys are socialized to believe emotions and compassion make them weak or girly). The research actually shows that people who are kind to themselves have more internal strength, better coping, and are more resilience. This includes if you have chronic illness or pain. This is so important for being able to live a good life when you have chronic illness/pain.
Block 2: “I’m being selfish.”
I’ve actually had a client say this to me before as a reason not to engage in self-kindness. This is another thought that isn’t compatible with the research, because what the research shows is that people who are self-compassionate are more compassionate to other, are more supportive of others, engage in more forgiveness, and are better at taking the perspectives of others. This is especially important if you have a chronic illness/pain and are also a partner or parent or caregiver. I have to say that as a therapist, practicing self-compassion has made me so good at building rapport with my clients because they feel more compassion coming from me.
Block 3: “I’m being self-indulgent.”
This implies that you’re using it as an excuse not to do hard things. And yet, what does the research show? People who are self-compassionate actually engage in more healthy behaviours. For chronic illness/pain this means they exercise more, have better nutrition, and regularly attend doctor’s appointments and follow doctor’s advice (podcast on that here). All of this has been shown time and time again to improve people’s lives when they have an illness.
Block 4: “I won’t be as motivated.”
I think this goes hand-in-hand with the last one, where you think you’ll just sit back and chill if you’re kind to yourself. Notice I said kind and not easy, because there’s a difference. Regardless, what does the research show this time? It increases our motivation. Why? Because we have less fear of failure AND get less upset when we do fail, and we take more responsibility when it comes to repairing our mistakes. Which means if you’ve struggled with certain parts of your illness before, you will be more motivated to fix them/do better in the future.
Where do we start with self-compassion? I’m going to leave these three meditations: lovingkindness, kind hand, and compassion with equanimity here. But if you don’t like meditation, that’s okay it’s not necessary. My favourite way to easily engage it in is to just take one of my hand, imagine it’s filled with kindness, the same that I’d give a loved one, and place it on the part of my body (usually my chest) that needs it the most. And I just hold myself kindly (sometimes with a half smile). That’s it.
I hope you’re kinder to yourself and keep making the most of it.
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Critical Coping: Problem-Focused vs. Emotion-Focused
I used to always use problem focused coping. Like 99.9% of the time. And it usually served me well, but not always, and certainly not always after my chronic illness snuck up on me. Then I started to use more emotion-focused coping, a totally different coping style. And here’s the thing, I now use both and you probably need to as well. But hold on! What the heck are problem-focused and emotion-focused coping anyway?
Problem-focused coping is typically used for solvable problems, ones that can be fixed, and make the problem go away. For example, if we lose our job due to company restructuring (this happened to me back in the day) then we would use problem-focused coping in order to find another job and make sure we can support ourselves in the meantime.
Emotion-focused coping is what we use when the problem can’t be fixed, and the problem will not go away. It is dealing with emotions that arise from an unfixable problem. Kind of like what happens when you have a chronic illness.
Both of these skills are necessary in life, but the problem is, most of us are taught more about problem-focused coping that emotion-focused.
Let’s look at problem-focused in the context of chronic illness or chronic pain. What are some solvable problems or areas in which we would use problem focused coping? Well, lifestyle changes are one area. We are told or we read up on different “diets” or exercise routines or incorporating meditation, etc that will help us with some of our symptoms. Or maybe it’s just taking medication as prescribed. We would use problem-focused coping because lifestyle changes and medication adherence are fixable problems. We’ll likely use SMART goals (specific-measurable/meaningful-attainable/adaptive-relevant/realistic-timebound) or other techniques to make these changes. And, while nothing is a guarantee, there is a lot of evidence supporting that certain lifestyle changes will help with symptoms, essentially “fixing” (I use that term loosely) the problem.
How about emotion focused coping in the context of chronic illness or chronic pain? While, chronic disease distress, anxiety and depression are all common in those of us with chronic illness. Our illnesses likely won’t go away and our emotions – well, we’re meant to have them. So with this I see a lot of acceptance practices being used and needed (here’s a link to one of my favourites). Self-compassion is another area where we are utilizing emotion focused coping (here’s a link to one of those practices). We have to learn to live with difficult emotions that come and go, and difficult sensations, such as pain. If you’re not good at this, I want to normalize it for you – most people aren’t! This is a skill set most people need help with.
Who can help you add these skill sets? Well, there are lots of places to go. A counsellor/therapist or health coach is one place. I would say the health coach would help more with problem-focused and therapist with emotion focused (as well as problem-focused). You can also look in the self-help section of your local library or bookstore. Those meditations I linked are another place, and I’ve done a number of episodes on these in my podcast (check out this episode on acceptance for example).
Once you have and start using both types of coping skills, you can start making the most of it!
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Book Review: When the Body Says No
If you haven’t heard of this book and you have a chronic illness you need to get in the know. And to be fair, and I hadn’t heard of the book until about a year ago, and I didn’t actually read it until recently. The author I had heard of. Dr. Gabor Mate. He has written several books over the years on topics ranging from chronic illness to substance abuse to ADHD, and he’s quite well-known in both the self-help and medical communities. So, now that I’m done reading this (must-read) book, let me share some thoughts and opinions, and hopefully help encourage you to also give it a read.
(I got mine from Amazon)
First, for those of you unfamiliar with Gabor Mate, he is a Canadian (now retired) doctor who spent his career in family practice, palliative care, and working with people who use substances in Vancouver’s East End. And he’s touted as being an expert in these areas. The book, When the Body Says no is about how “stress” influences chronic illness. Now, stress encompasses a lot of things here, which is why I put it in quotations. It includes life stress, attachment, coping styles, trauma, adverse early childhood experiences, adult relationships, and so on. Basically a lot of stuff, though Dr. Mate posits that it’s our early life stresses that have the greatest impact on us. The book takes a biopsychosocial approach. This means it includes biological, psychological and sociocultural influences on health and illness. This is the approach that science is backing when it comes to both physical health and mental health (literally my first class in grad school was “A Biopsychosocial Approach to Mental Health”). What’s interesting, if you go online to research most illnesses (come on, we’ve all googled our actual illnesses, as well as other potential ones) usually only biological causes are listed. And I will agree with Dr. Mate, that biological causes don’t tell the whole story (and neither to strictly psychological or sociocultural). For example, he writes (based on scientific research) that some people with biological markers for illnesses never actually develop one. Why? If it was strictly biological then everyone with the biological markers would clearly develop it. Again, there is more to the picture.
Like I said, I agree with a lot of the content in the book. I mean, many autoimmune diseases are diagnosed after a person has gone through a stressful experiences. It makes sense that the body would take on what our minds don’t want to – such as a repression of emotions. And clearly trauma can manifest in many, many ways (illness, substance use, psychiatric disorders, etc.). Many people will read the book and find themselves very well represented for whatever illness they have (and he covers a lot of illnesses from cancer to a variety of autoimmune diseases to Alzheimers and so on). My only problem with it is that he asserts that attachment issues (to parents) are the #1 determinant of illness, and that virtually all people with illnesses have more than one of these issues. And this is where I didn’t find myself represented. My attachment style with my parents has always been healthy. My early childhood experiences were really good. In fact, the first trauma I suffered was ongoing between the ages of 8-13 (being bullied at school). At the time, yes, I did probably repress a lot of my emotions, but as I got older, and certainly by the time I was diagnosed with my illnesses, and I was not repressing emotion (at least as often) anymore. Now, that being said, maybe all it took was that experience to account for the psychosocial part of my illness. I can’t say either way, but regardless I don’t feel I perfectly represent the picture Dr. Mate paints in his book, though I can appreciate that a lot of people do.
All of that said, I do highly recommend reading this book if you have a chronic illness OR if you have a loved one with a chronic illness. It gives insight into the causes, which some people find helpful. And if you’d rather live in the here-and-now, rather than try to decipher what caused your illness, the last chapter is called the “Seven A’s of Healing” and it really resonated with me, because for the most part, it is exactly what I work on with clients, and it is strongly evidence-based. So, go read When the Body Says No, it’s definitely worth it.
My podcast episode this week is on Creative Hopelessness, so if you’re finding it difficult to make changes in your life and/or you’ve been feeling hopeless, please check it out. Until next week, keep making the most of it!
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How Can I Become More Resilient?
This isn’t the first time I’ve posted about resiliency on this blog. The truth is, it’s a topic that comes up often. I see it on online support groups, on Instagram, and hear it in conversation with people. I also read it on other blogs, and many healthcare organizations post about it on their sites. Here’s the thing, if you have a chronic illness and you’re not feeling resilient, just know that you are not alone. A lot of people feel that way. Are people born resilient or do we develop resilience? I think it’s an interesting question and possibly a bit of both. Children tend to be more resilient than adults, suggesting we can lose some resilience as we age. In one of my courses for my graduate degree we had to more-or-less do a family tree. Except this family tree was supposed to trace something like a mental health or substance use issue. I chose to trace resilience, and found that going back just to my grandparents generation (that was the requirements for the project) there was a strong theme of resilience (my maternal grandmother/baba faced abuse, neglect, lost 2 children, and she and my mother were trapped in Siberia for a week during the Cold War – I know it sounds too crazy to be true). Yet she not only survived but was a loving parent to her other children and an amazing grandparent. Had my mom not shared my baba’s history I would not have know. She was that resilient.
The good thing is, that even people with chronic illness can develop resilience. Warning: it does require work on your part. Luckily, some of the work may not feel like work at all… it just requires consistent commitment to it. I want to add, that many of these suggestions overlap with what the National MS Society suggests, in case you don’t want to just take my word for it.
- finding meaning and committing to that action: what is the reason you get out of bed in the morning? If you don’t have a reason it will be difficult to do so. Is it your family? Or work? I know a lot of people with chronic illness go on disability, but work provides meaning and purpose for people. If you are on disability what is your purpose going to be instead?
- improvisation/adaptability/problem solving: I think these all kind of overlap and go together. We often have to improvise in order to do things we enjoy. Maybe we can’t go on the 5k walk with our friends, but we could meet them for coffee afterwards. How flexible and adaptable are you to changing plans? Or asking others to? What’s an alternative way you can participate or do the things you like to do? I would go as far to make a list of ideas (remember when brainstorming there is no such thing as a dumb idea) and try out some to see if they work.
- Self-care: we all know I love self-care, and this includes the basics (getting out of bed, making breakfast, taking a shower) and then doing activities like relaxation techniques, yoga, meditation, or prayer. What hobbies do you enjoy that you can participate in? Pick one a day. Reading is an example of something that is low energy and can be fulfiling.
- Being able to tolerate “negative” emotions: I personally don’t categorize emotions as negative or positive. All emotions are important because they tell us very important things. If you’re not used to be able to just sit with emotions, try out this mindfulness practice that aims at helping people do just that.
- Self-efficacy: I did a post on this recently, and you can read it here. Do you believe you can cope with your illness? Part of this is being a realistic optimist, being hopeful.
- Using skills such as curiosity and humour: When is the last time you laughed? Are you able to have fun and joke around (and not in a self-deprecating way)? Do you get curious about your situation or feelings or sensations or emotions? What are you noticing about them right now as you read this? The noticing self is a helpful skill to develop. We touch on it in this podcast episode (about half way through).
- Radical acceptance: This is a skill from Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) and essentially the same used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). It is about fully accepting your situation/thoughts/feelings/sensations/etc. Fully. Accepting. It doesn’t mean you have to like it. It’s hard to do a lot of the above without this kind of acceptance.
I hope this helps give you some ideas for building resilience some more. Well-being and a good quality of life do require us to be resilient, and trust me, it is possible even with chronic illness. Here’s the link to the MS Society page on resilience. Take care, and keep making the most of it!
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Mental Strength & Resilience for Spoonies
My mom actually suggested I do a post on mental strength and I thought about it for a bit because I find that it is very similar to resilience, which I’m fairly certain I’ve posted about before. However, I did some research and found that while there are similarities there are differences as well and to be honest, both are pretty essential when you’re a chronic illness warrior and can increase positive mental health. I’m going to give you an overview of each concept and how they tie together and some ways that can help you increase them (many of which I have personal experience with) so that we can all grow stronger together in our own separate battles.
First, let’s define resilience. Resilience is our ability to respond positively and to adapt to negative, traumatic, and stressful events, in a way that is constructive. Now let’s define mental strength. Mental strength is our ability to effectively handle stressors and challenges in our lives the best we can despite the situation we find ourselves in. As you can see there are similarities, what I think the biggest difference in is that resilience occurs in the face of significantly impactful events such as trauma, whereas mental strength helps us with less significant (yet still impactful) stressors. We often hear of mental strength in regards to athletes and their ability to practice the same thing over and over. People who are mentally strong like adversity because it’s a challenge not a threat.
The great thing is that both resilience and mental strength can be learned! According to the American Psychological Association (APA), the thoughts, and behaviours involved in resilience can be learned. They state that what makes up resilience includes:
- your ability to make “realistic plans” and accomplish them
- self-confidence and self-esteem
- problem-solving and communication skills
- emotion regulation
How does this apply to chronic illness? I see it as (1) making realistic plans is including limitations you do have because of your illness but not letting your illness limit you; (2) you can still have self-confidence and self-esteem with a chronic illness; (3) problem-solving and communication actually become more important when you have a chronic illness; and (4) emotion regulation is essential for everyone.
What are some ways we can build resilience? Let’s break each of these down further:
- making realistic plans & accomplishing them: includes gaining skills (like going back to school or just learning something new in general); and taking action toward the goals you make for yourself while keeping a positive and hopeful outlook on your ability to accomplish them!
- self-confidence and self-esteem: accepting change because nothing stays the same, including your illness; engaging in activities that help you learn more about yourself (try something new, be creative, get as active as you can, etc.); view yourself in a positive way (stop the negative self-talk and write down things you like about yourself); and of course, self-care!!!!
- problem-solving and communication: setting goals for yourself; and making connections with friends, family and colleagues because support is important.
- emotion regulation: controlled exposure (I would suggest with the help of a therapist); taking a realistic view of crisis situations (I like the phrase, “if that happened, then what would I do?”); and activities such as journaling, meditation and other spiritual practices can help with emotion regulation (I’ll probably do a longer post on emotion regulation at some other time).
So if that’s how we build resilience, what can we do to build mental strength? Turner (2017) states that the elements of mental strength include having a sense of control and purpose of your life and emotions; making a commitment by setting goals for yourself; challenging yourself when necessary; and having that self-confidence. Very similar to what we just talked about for resilience. I’ve got to say that I possess all of these, and I’m not sharing that to make anyone feel like they aren’t enough because they are currently not mentally strong. I’ve had times when I haven’t been strong, it takes a lot of work to get here. My point in sharing is that you can come from a place of anxiety and stress over your health condition and get to a point where you can deal with most things that come your way (I say most because no one can deal with everything perfectly). It just took me a few years of hard work to get here. Here are some ways you can develop your mental strength:
- gratitude – write down 5 things every day that you are thankful for. I also recommend taking the free Science of Well-being course offered by Yale University. Here’s the link!
- practice mindfulness – in whatever way you like. I prefer meditation and body scans, and throw in the occasional mindful walk.
- act “as if” – this is an interesting concept developed by psychologist Alfred Adler. He stated we should act as if things are the way you want them to be (essentially you get to reauthor your life). This one is a bit more complicated and may also deserve its own post.
Before I wrap up this very long post, I want to share research by Pickering & Holliday (2010). They stated that “mental strength contributes to resilience processes and resilient behaviour.” So basically develop your mental strength and you’ll develop your resilience. I mean as we’ve seen there is a lot of overlap between the two so it totally makes sense!
Let me know what you think of mental strength and resilience! Comment on the post or shoot me a DM on Instagram (@janeversuspain). I would love to hear from my readers! For now, keep making the most of it!
Chronically Living 