Stress can be described as an organism’s total response to environmental demands or pressures. Resilience can be described as the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties and toughness or as an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change – according to dictionary definitions.
Since the beginning of life on this beautiful planet – stress has been experienced and resilience has been a necessary part of its reality.
Recently the fires, that have and are causing catastrophic results and overwhelming hardships in our country and for its residence, has created a multi-layered effect where Australians (and other amazing friends and organisations to our country and its citizens) have had to embrace this value of resilience within themselves to deal with such overwhelming situations of survival. On every media option available world-wide, there is so many reports and news stories of how this characteristic is evident and I have found this to be so heart breaking and heart warming.
I am in awe and have deep respect and gratitude of so many people, in so many different and vital roles. Not only on the front lines, but also in the background been there supporting in all different way. The outpouring of support from so many, and even children doing small fund-raising events to donate to very worthy and much needed organisations, to support our communities within this much loved country. Resilience will continue to be needed by so many in the near and distant future.
Very often this characteristic/trait is not given recognition by us, when we enact it on a regular basis in our day to day challenges and have a sense of achievement or acknowledgement that you were successful with this task or that problem/challenge.
Regularly though we can recognise when it is missing. By the evidence in our ability to deal with our problems/challenges; but it may be observed in a different way or displayed to us in symptoms such as feeling stressed and/or anxious, or depressed, difficulty with sleeping, struggling to control our emotions, increasing addictive behaviours or a starting a new negative pattern which is not a caring manner for our health and wellbeing, and many other exclusive indicators which is unique to each and every one of us.
There are so many different services/modalities/options/assistance available to us to assist with building, and re-establishing resilience within ourselves; which can create a ‘ripple effect’ for the person to feel supported, learning, changing old beliefs and values that are not appropriate for us now and creating new beliefs and values that are supportive to us now, been adaptive, allowing flexibility and becoming solution orientated.
May this article encourage you to enhance this amazing trait – resilience – to support every aspect of you and the steps you take in your life.