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Building Resilience: 5 Tips to Help Cope with Life's Challenges

Building resilience in challenging times -

The super typhoon Rai devastated the Philippines last December 16, It passed directly over the Cebu province where I live at 7 in the evening and wreaked havoc for 4 hours — yet the damage it left behind lasted for more than 2 months and counting for all of us in Cebu. The first week after was like living in a post apocalyptic world.

My husband and I lined up for hours just to get money from the ATM, buy food, clean drinking water, and gasoline. We were without electricity for more than 3 weeks and yes, we spent Christmas and New Year in the dark.

Drugs and alcohol were also a problem. She lived in poverty with a single mother and experienced a lot of trauma and adversity. Eventually, she moved in with her grandmother, who taught her how to approach her fears without avoiding them, and to tolerate discomfort. The opposite is being the water.

You flow around the change. Years later, when Marques, now an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, was studying cognitive behavioral therapy, she realized that her grandmother had been giving her lessons in resilience. As stressors like war in Ukraine and the Middle East pile on top of the pandemic, inflation , layoffs, and growing rates of anxiety and depression, cognitive flexibility can be an important skill to hone and keep in our emotional toolboxes.

Though studies show that some people are naturally more resilient than others, just as some people are naturally more optimistic, there are ways to strengthen those muscles. The first step to becoming more resilient is to understand how your brain works.

When experiencing stress, one of the first things we typically do is appraise it to determine how taxing it may be. Social support is one of the biggest assets that plays into that appraisal, says Jennifer Wegmann, a professor of health and wellness studies at Binghamton University whose research focuses on stress mindsets.

Communities shifted in myriad ways during the pandemic years, and making friends as an adult has never been easy. Another big piece of reframing your view of stress is changing the way you talk to yourself. Make a conscious effort to give yourself the support you would give a friend.

To ease that fear, she recommends finding ways to make your stressor less scary. If you have a stack of bills piling up, taking the first step of opening the envelopes and not putting pressure on yourself to take a second and third step could ease the process in the long run.

Mindfulness can also help. A huge part of resilience is making sure that you make decisions that match your values. And though you may think you already know what your values are, Wegmann recommends sitting down and thinking about what matters to you. What is most important to me?

Keep tabs on what felt helpful to you during stressful times. Ask yourself: How did you deal with it? Did you choose a healthy strategy? How might other people have helped you deal with it? Mindfulness Training Can Promote Healthy Choices.

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Kendra Cherry, MS, is a chwllenging rehabilitation specialist, psychology Digestive aid for better digestion, and author of the "Everything Psychology Herbal weight loss tea bags. Amy Morin, LCSW, is challengng psychotherapist and challengibg bestselling author. Her books, including "13 Things Mentally Strong People Don't Do," have been translated into more than 40 languages. Her TEDx talk, "The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong," is one of the most viewed talks of all time. Resilience refers to how well you can deal with and bounce back from the difficulties of life. BBuilding, the world Building resilience in challenging times to be lurching from Buildint crisis rexilience another. Then Antioxidant-rich health benefits are personal Building resilience in challenging times that resilieence are also dealing with, tomes as the loss of a loved one, declining health, unemployment, divorce, violent crime, or tragic accidents. For many us, this is a time of unprecedented struggle and upheaval. Whether the source of disruption in your life is a global emergency or a personal tragedy—or both—living through difficult times can take a heavy toll on your mood, health, and outlook. It can leave you feeling helpless and overwhelmed by stress and anxiety.