The Oxford English Dictionary defines resilience as, ‘the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.’
A block of rubber is said to be resilient if it springs back into its original shape after it has had pressure applied to it. In human beings the pressure applied to us by the stresses of our world can knock us out of shape, too. The real problem for us is that, unlike the block of rubber, when the pressure goes away, we may not bounce back. Our mind will often stay focused on the negative situation so we feel the pressure as though it were still there.
In human beings resilience is our ability to not let difficulties affect us after they have happened. This is why learning to be more mindful helps to reduce our stress levels. Mindfulness is the skill of staying in the present moment and not thinking about the past or the future. When stressful things happen to us our mind will often lead us in the past or the future by asking questions like:
• Why does this type of thing always happen to me?
• This is awful. What am I going to do about it?
• What will happen if I’m unable to fix this problem?
If we can ensure we stay mindful when the stressful thing happens, we won’t explore those questions in our mind and we will immediately spring back into shape, just like the rubber. Unfortunately, mindfulness isn’t something you can just decide to do because the mind is too quick, and it will focus on the negative and start worrying about the consequences before we’ve even realised it. What we have to do is create new choices for the mind to use in these stressful situations.
We need some new neural pathways and new thinking habits. To create these new neural pathways, we need to practice mindfulness over and over again, which will mean that, with time, the new thinking habits will become automatic. That is why any good resilience course will teach meditation. Meditation has been proven to help us create those important new neural pathways.
If you need any more convincing, then I suggest you watch what the All Blacks do after a team has scored a try against them. They get into a group behind the posts and one of the senior players instructs everyone to focus on their breathing. This is a mindfulness technique to bring their minds back to the present moment. By doing this they stop thinking about a mistake they may have just made (the past) or about their ability to get back up and win the game (the future).
Our resilience will improve with our ability to stay mindful and to stay in the present moment. In order to improve this ability, we have to rewire our mind by learning to meditate.