Develop Mental Toughness
CULTIVATE A RESILIENT BRAIN
If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn’t pass it around. Wouldn’t be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it.
—OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.
—ELISABETH KÜBLER-ROSS
Chris had struggled with anxiety and trouble breathing when he first came to see me. He was sixteen years old and had a condition known as Goldenhar syndrome, which meant he was born without his left jawbone. He had undergone twenty-one operations to fix his deformity, which included bone grafts from his own body. His face was severely scarred like an old railroad yard. The sense of panic started when he was on the operating room table being intubated for the last two surgeries. His mother, Maria, was concerned, as Chris had been a very resilient boy, and she brought him to see me. He had at least two more surgeries to go. A few sessions of relaxation training and hypnosis easily cleared up his anxiety.
As I got to know Chris, I came to believe that despite his anxiety reaction, which didn’t occur until his twentieth surgery, he was the healthiest person I had ever met. He was president of his tenth-grade class. He was a straight-A student and had a girlfriend he adored. He also had very clear goals for his future and a great attitude, despite the multiple surgeries and distorted face. After his anxiety abated, I continued to see him for a few months without cost. I felt driven to understand why he was so healthy, despite his circumstances. I had other patients, who had not faced nearly his stress and challenges but who were emotional wrecks nonetheless. For the most part, psychiatrists study illness, not mental health. I came to believe that there were four reasons for Chris’s resilience.
First, Chris’s mother never allowed his illness to be an excuse for anything. Maria was loving but firm. Inside, Chris’s illness deeply pained Maria. Like all good mothers, she hurt for her son, but early in Chris’s illness she realized that babying him would only handicap him and she would have none of it. He still did chores, he was expected to excel at his schoolwork, and he participated with other kids even when they made fun of him. She helped him rehearse what to say when they were cruel, which they were. When the other kids found that Chris did not get upset by the teasing, but expected it and laughed along with them, they stopped teasing and befriended and admired him. Their petty complaints seemed small compared to what Chris endured. Second, because of Chris’s behavior, he had a strong peer group. His group of friends often came to the hospital to see him after his surgeries and he spent a lot of time with them. He was a good friend. Third, Chris was an optimist. In listening to his speech, he almost always saw the upbeat side of issues. He did not see his condition as a handicap. When we talked about it, he said, everyone has something. “This is my problem,” he said. “At least I do not have cancer or something that will kill me.” Lastly, I did not need a SPECT scan to know that Chris had a great brain. He was flexible, goal oriented, focused, passionate about his life, and positive and honest in his thinking. I often wish I could bottle Chris’s attitude and give it away to my children, patients, and even take a dose or two myself.
Psychiatrist Robert Pasnau, past president of the American Psychiatric Association, once said at a lecture to the residents in my training program that coping requires three things: information, a sense of control, and self-esteem. Chris clearly had high self-esteem. He also knew what was happening; he was very informed about his condition and what must be done. His anxiety started when he felt as though he was losing control. He was not supposed to be aware of being intubated (this is where a metal tube is placed in your throat to keep your airway open for breathing during the anesthesia and surgery). The anesthesiologist had not given him enough medication on the twentieth surgery, and he was aware of the tube in his throat and felt panicky and out of control.
How Childhood Sets Up Resilience or Vulnerability in the Brain
Evidence from both animal and human studies shows that children who experience extreme, uncontrollable stress, such as physical or sexual abuse, are more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression and are more vulnerable to stress later in life. At birth there is substantial flexibility in the brain’s ability to respond and adapt to stressful events. Some research suggests that there may be a critical period in the first few weeks of life, during which time traumas are particularly harmful to the brain’s ability to handle stress. Studies of humans who survive child abuse have found changes in the functioning of the brain circuits responsible for handling stress. A study of women who were abused as children found that they had an increase in their stress hormones compared with those who were not abused. Long-term exposure to stress hormones has been found to kill cells in the hippocampus, part of the limbic brain deep in the temporal lobes, involved with memory, learning, and emotion. Smaller hippocampal volumes are found in people with depression and chronic stress disorders. Early abuse or stress can cause longstanding changes in brain circuits associated with resilience and learning. Women who are abused are more likely to stay with men who are abusive, in part because of their own anxiety, erratic memory, and low self-confidence. These findings suggest that child abuse can lead to long-term changes in the brain and may help to explain why mistreatment is passed down generation after generation.
An interesting twist on the research, however, occurs when children are exposed to milder, more manageable forms of stress. It appears that these stresses actually aid in building resilience. Some stress, it seems, is good, even important. This is known as stress inoculation, based on the analogy to vaccinations against infections. The theory is that when a person is presented with a mild form of an infectious disease, he or she develops immunity by learning how to fight it off. Children who are faced with and overcome moderately stressful events, such as family moves, parental illnesses, or loss of a friendship, are better able to deal with adversity later in life than people who were never exposed to trouble as children. Children who learn to cope with stress seem to have a better ability to deal with hardships over the long term. In one study, teenage boys who survived stressful childhood events experienced less overt signs of stress, such as increased heart rate and blood pressure changes, when performing challenging tasks compared with their counterparts who had not struggled with earlier trouble. Research on animals lend credence to the stress inoculation theory and provides insight into its brain mechanism. Young monkeys separated from their mothers for one hour every week (a manageable stressor) experienced acute distress during the separation periods, and temporarily increased levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. Later in life, however, the same monkeys demonstrated lower anxiety and lower baseline cortisol levels than monkeys who had never been separated from their mothers. Furthermore, these stress-inoculated monkeys demonstrated improved performance on tests that measure prefrontal cortex function. Poor control of prefrontal cortex function has been associated with depression and impulsivity in humans.
It seems that it is the amount of early stress that matters. Too much is clearly a problem, but too little leaves you without the skill to manage trouble later on. This research highlights an important point. Try not to protect your children from every hardship they may face. As a father of three children, I never wanted my children to suffer, yet if I did everything for them and never allowed them to experience stress, they would not develop the ability to deal with the hardships that inevitably come their way. It would be as though I never vaccinated them against stress. Likely, this is why Chris did so well. His mother never allowed his handicap to be used as an excuse. Even when he was stressed by being teased by the other children, he had to keep dealing with it and therefore learned how to deal with it. Social skills are now his strength.
Ten Ways to Boost Resilience
All of us have adversity in our lives. All of us have faced physical, emotional, financial, work, and relational stresses. Self-doubt, fears, failure, loss, anger, and disappointment reach into all of our experiences. It is during these times, when we are stressed or pushed to our own personal limits, that our behavior defines our character. Over the past decade, research on resilience, on people like Chris, has grown, giving important clues to why some people persevere and others give up. In this chapter I will synthesize this research and show you ten ways to boost your own ability to bounce back when adversity strikes.
1. Gather information.
2. Develop a personal sense of control.
3. Build self-esteem.
4. Keep your pleasure centers healthy.
5. Clear up past traumas.
6. Face your fears.
7. Strengthen your ability to deal with adversity.
8. Use positive emotions, especially laughter.
9. Rely on a moral compass.
10. Nurture social support.
1. GATHER INFORMATION
Psychologist Abraham Maslow noted that what you do not know has power over you, whereas knowledge brings choice and control. Most of us handle adversity better when we know what we are up against. Chris knew what needed to be done for his face, so he was better able to handle the inevitable pain. Not knowing what to expect increases anxiety and decreases resilience.
At no other point in history has information been more readily available than it is right now. Immediate information abounds on everything from financial stress, marital struggles, child rearing, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and work challenges. Amazon.com lists nearly two million books, and Yahoo! and Google are the constant companion for so many of us. Still, many people sabotage themselves by not accumulating enough information on their challenges. There are a number of reasons people do not become adequately informed, including failing to ask the appropriate questions, not knowing how to gather accurate information, magical thinking that says, “I should know all,” and fear of the truth.
Asking the right question is the most important step to getting the right answer. It is a sign of curiosity and indicates a willingness to learn. The fear of appearing stupid, however, often prevents questions and stifles learning. How many times have you wanted to ask a question, yet when it came to saying the words, fear of embarrassment kept your mouth shut? How many times have you not gotten the information you needed because of the fear that you would be a nuisance to the other person? You may be the victim of misconceptions. Many people see those who ask questions as interested and willing to learn, not stupid. Second, many people feel good if they can help others and enjoy sharing their knowledge. If you’re bothering them, you will probably be able to tell and you can ask them another time. Even better, you can start by asking if this is a good moment for them to answer a question. In business, if you do not have all the information you need to do your job, but you are afraid to appear stupid by asking questions, think of how much worse you’ll feel when it’s discovered you’re not doing the job right. Most supervisors wish to teach because they, like most of us, get satisfaction from helping others to do something well, especially if they’re held responsible for the kind of job you do.
There is no doubt in my mind that the failure to ask questions and gather information damages many relationships. When we are confused about others’ behavior or think we may have gotten the wrong information from them, it is crucial to clarify the meaning of their behavior. Without clarification, our assumptions take over, and little things may turn into monsters. The worst thing that can happen when you ask a question is that someone may refuse to answer it, give you an answer you don’t like, or make you feel stupid for asking. I think ignorance is worse than those three things. You can lessen the chances of a negative response by asking questions in an appropriately respectful way at the right time. But when you have questions, ask them! They will get you more information, which will bring you closer to your goals and help you manage difficult times and situations.
Expecting yourself to know something without being taught is what psychiatrists call magical thinking. It is like a person who has never been somewhere before refusing to ask for directions when he is lost. This magical thinking of “I should know the answers” occurs in many situations. I see it most frequently with parents who expect themselves to be good parents of difficult children despite never having had a role model to teach them. Pride is often an excuse to cover ignorance. Be kind to yourself and don’t expect more from you than is reasonable. If you don’t know something, admit it and find the answer to it.
Another reason people don’t ask questions or become informed is that they are afraid of the answers. I see this most commonly in people who marry after knowing each other for only a few weeks. They are generally tired of being alone and want to be in a relationship so badly that they leave common sense behind. Ignorance, they think, is better than information. But this usually backfires. Often, hidden information surfaces, and one or both parties feel betrayed. Some are too eager to trust before finding out if a person is trustworthy. This may also be true in business or personal issues when something is wanted so much that denying reality is preferable to denying the opportunity to obtain the desired goal. The following statements summarize the importance of information:
• What I do not know has power over me, whereas knowledge brings choice and control.
• Information is power.
• My fear of being ignorant overcomes my fear of asking questions.
2. DEVELOP A PERSONAL SENSE OF CONTROL
A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.
—JOHN BURROUGHS
The perceived degree of personal control that you have over a stressful event plays a key role in determining whether the event will lead to subsequent vulnerability or resilience to stress. In one animal study, rats exposed to uncontrollable and unpredictable shocks developed exaggerated fear responses and heightened anxiety states; animals subjected to predictable shocks from which they could escape did not develop this learned helplessness. Furthermore, rats that learned to have control over a stressor (by learning to escape predictable shocks) were less likely to develop learned helplessness when they were subsequently exposed to unpredictable shocks. This finding in rats supports the observation in humans that learning to manage one stress enhances subsequent resilience to many other unrelated stresses. For those people who experienced severe early life stresses, it is critical to know that they may be more vulnerable to the effects of stress, and to become resilient they would be wise to work hard to strengthen their brain’s ability to resist stress.
In my clinical experience, this sense of control is one of the most important factors in managing stress and succeeding in life. You can tell when people feel out of control, because they blame others for their situation in life. When something goes wrong at work or in their relationships, they often find someone to blame. Fight this tendency. It makes you a victim with little to no control over your own life.
Additionally, people who lack a personal sense of control often live in the past. You will hear them saying, “If only I had done so and so, things would be different.”
If only:
I didn’t marry that good-for-nothing husband of mine.
I finished school.
My parents hadn’t gotten divorced.
The company hadn’t changed hands.
I had made that sale.
I hadn’t forgotten my diaphragm.
I’d chosen a different career.
I had rich parents.
Etc., etc., etc.
The past continues to haunt these people even when it has no relevance. A tremendous amount of emotional energy is invested in things that cannot be changed. I had a patient, Kathy, who had an encyclopedia of “if onlys.” “If only I finished college.” “If only I hadn’t married David.” “If only we didn’t live in Washington, D.C.” “If only I could find a good day care center.” “If only we lived in a different neighborhood.” And on and on. When I pointed out to her how much energy it must have taken to come up with this list, Kathy said, “If only I didn’t worry so much.” I was about to pull out my hair with her. But after several months she learned to rechannel that energy into “What do I want now and how do I get it?” This is a much healthier approach to life.
Never forget that your success starts and ends with you. You want it. You define it. You go after it. You achieve it, or you don’t. Only you are personally responsible for how your life turns out. Many other people will try to take responsibility for you, like your parents, your spouse, your friends, or your co workers, but in the final analysis, they can only influence how your life progresses, they cannot control it. Only you can.
Once you fully realize this most important ingredient of success, your life will never be the same. You will stop blaming others for your failures and disappointments and start working on changing yourself to be the kind of person you want to be. As long as you can blame someone else for why things aren’t the way you want them to be, you can comfortably avoid change. After all, “it’s their fault.” However, when you have no one to blame but yourself, you are more likely to seek change. Not many people feel comfortable saying, “It’s my fault.”
Now, it is true that life is not fair. We are all dealt a different hand of cards in life. Some hands are very good; some hands are very, very bad. The obstacles we have to overcome are not the same for each person. It is, however, what we do with the hands we are dealt in life that determines how we feel about ourselves, not the initial hands themselves.
Eric Fromm, M.D., summed up the concept of personal responsibility in his book Man for Himself when he wrote, “Man must accept responsibility for himself and the fact that only by using his own power, can he give meaning to his life.” You have the power. It is up to you how you use it.
There is an interesting side effect to taking personal responsibility for your life. The more you realize that you’re in control of your own life, the more you realize that you cannot control anyone else’s life. You become more independent, while at the same time you stop believing you can change other people. You realize only they can do that. Efforts directed toward changing your parents, your spouse, or your boss stop, leaving you more time and energy to work on yourself. Success takes a lot of time and energy.
Personal responsibility and self-control are clear hallmarks of a successful person. Without these, you see yourself as a victim of the world and you are unable to take or accomplish any more than the world is willing to give. Personal responsibility dictates that “if it’s to be, it’s up to me.” It’s accepting that you are human and bound to make mistakes. But when you make them, you learn from them, and you look toward creative problem solving rather than looking for someone to blame. Taking personal responsibility for your life takes supreme courage and can be painful at any age. But the payoff is independence and freedom.
Researchers have demonstrated that it is possible for a person to change the way he perceives himself in the world; i.e., victims can take more control. These “thinking” exercises will work to strengthen your sense of personal responsibility if you commit yourself to completing them. The only person you sabotage by not completing these exercises is you. Are you worth it?
For the next week, be aware of your thoughts when something goes wrong—a mistake is made, you have a problem, you have an accident, any situation in which you have a tendency to blame someone else. After you identify an incident such as this, fill in the sheet below. Do this for at least three separate incidents.
EXAMPLE
1. What happened? I got a speeding ticket.
2. What was my first response to the situation? Was it to find someone else to blame? “I wasn’t going that fast. They must have set up a speed trap.”
3. Why is it important to blame someone else? How does that help? “If I can blame the police officer, then it is easy to first try to talk him out of the ticket. If that doesn’t work, it is then okay for me to be nasty to him.”
4. Am I uncomfortable if I can’t find someone to blame? “Yes. That means it’s my fault. And who likes to admit anything is their fault?”
5. Is it okay for me to make a mistake in this instance? “No. My insurance will go up, because this is my third ticket in a year.”
YOUR TURN:
1. What happened?
2. What was my first response to the situation? Was it to find someone else to blame?
3. Why is it important to blame someone else? How does that help?
4. Am I uncomfortable if I can’t find someone to blame?
5. Is it okay for me to make a mistake in this instance?
You can learn to talk back to your automatic “blaming others” habit of thinking. I’ve set up a double-column technique to help you retrain your thoughts. In the first column, write down your automatic thought when a problem comes up, and in the second column, write down a rational response. Here are some examples to help you get started.
|
Blaming Others Personal |
Responsibility Response |
|
I’m late for my appointment. It’s my wife’s fault I overslept. |
I can’t honestly blame my wife because I overslept and am late for the appointment. If being on time is important to me, I will set the alarm to ensure I get up and accept responsibility for my timeliness. |
|
I told the staff to rotate the merchandise and the job isn’t done. They never do anything right. Their failure to follow orders is the reason sales are down. |
When I notice the staff hasn’t completed a job, it’s my responsibility to follow up on it, so they learn to do their jobs completely. The reduction in sales probably has nothing to do with the staff not following orders. Sales fluctuate every day. |
|
My husband always makes me feel unhappy because he acts so nastily toward me. |
My husband cannot make me feel anything without my permission and cooperation. If my husband acts nastily to me, I can choose to talk to him about it; I can make it clear to him that if he doesn’t change his ways, he’ll lose me; I can end the relationship; or I can continue to feel miserable. It’s my responsibility how I choose to feel and how I allow other people to treat me. |
YOUR TURN:
|
Blaming Others |
Personal Responsibility Response |
|
1. |
_________________________ |
|
2. |
_________________________ |
|
3. |
_________________________ |
Each time this week you catch yourself blaming others for something that is happening to you, stop. Immediately stop the blaming. Think about how you contributed to the situation, and immediately work on ways to solve the problem. Refuse to spend any more energy looking for scapegoats. Look to yourself and others for answers, for ways to solve problems. Stop blaming yourself; stop blaming others. It is wasted energy.
Every time you’re tempted to blame someone else but don’t, give yourself a big pat on the back. You’re on your way to taking control of your life.
3. BUILD SELF-ESTEEM
He that respects himself is safe from others; he wears a coat of mail that none can pierce.
—HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
How you feel about yourself is paramount to how you manage the stresses in your life. Having healthy self-esteem is akin to being on good terms with yourself. It is believing that you are worth working in your own best interest. It is believing that you can have a positive impact on others and that you are worth others having a positive impact on you. Self-esteem helps you manage and survive when devastation hits you. It is the internal voice that is on your side and gives you the encouragement to press on, even when things look bleak. Without a positive sense of self, any accomplishments, no matter how big or small, will be negated by an accusing inner voice that keeps repeating you’re no good, erasing any feelings of success. Self-esteem is a cornerstone of resilience.
A fifty-year Harvard study turned up some startling truths about self-esteem. Begun as an effort to understand juvenile delinquency, the study followed the lives of 456 teenage boys from inner-city Boston. Many of the boys were from broken or impoverished homes. When they reached middle age, one fact stood out: regardless of intelligence, family income, ethnic background, or amount of formal education, those who had worked as boys, even at simple household chores, enjoyed happier and more productive lives than those who had not. These results are not difficult to explain. George Valliant, M.D., psychiatrist in charge of the study, said, “Boys who work in the home or community gained competence and came to feel they were worthwhile members of society. And because they felt good about themselves, others felt good about them as well.” People who felt best about themselves as adults were made responsible for themselves as children. Children do, so they believe they can do: they believe in themselves.
Important people contribute to a child’s self-esteem, particularly parents, friends, grandparents, teachers, and coaches. Children often idealize important adults and develop an image of the ideal person they’d like to be. Initially, the ideal persons are often the parents. It is common to hear four-and five-year-old children say they want to be like their mommies and daddies. As they grow, the ideal person often becomes a composite of many admired and respected people. The closer their sense of themselves is to their image of those they admire, the greater their self-esteem. The greater the distance between their sense of themselves and their image of the ideal person, the lower their self-esteem.
The way we talk to ourselves, our inner voice, is the day-to-day indicator of our self-esteem. We all have many voices inside our heads commenting on our daily thoughts and behaviors. These voices are a synthesis of the strong voices we’ve heard throughout our lives. If the parental voices we heard were positive, chances are our inner voices will be the same. If they were harsh and negative, it is likely that we’ll talk to ourselves in a punitive way. When our self-esteem suffers, our inner voices often take on the quality of a “Critics Committee,” which runs a nonstop dialogue on how we could have done things better. These voices can often be recognized as specific voices from the past if we take the time to examine them. If you notice the Critics Committee tormenting you, revisit the exercises in chapter 12, especially “Truth in the Courtroom of Your Mind” (see Chapter 12) to excise these negative thoughts.
4. KEEP YOUR PLEASURE CENTERS HEALTHY
One of the biggest buffers against severe emotional trauma is a healthy brain. When the brain works right, all of the other coping mechanisms can engage to help you weather the emotional storms that hit you. In particular, when the pleasure centers deep in the brain are healthy, and able to experience happiness and joy in the midst of trouble, it will be easier to get up once you are knocked down. Caring for this part of the brain is involved in both lasting happiness and resilience.
The pleasure centers, discussed earlier, are made up of the ventral tegmental area, basal ganglia, and other limbic areas of the brain. They are responsive to several neurotransmitters, particularly dopamine. When dopamine is low, as with Parkinson’s disease, there is a high incidence of depression and low motivation and it is harder for sufferers to experience joy. To keep these areas healthy, it is important to engage in meaningful and pleasurable activities on a regular basis. Do work you love and make time for fun with those you love. These activities prime pleasure’s pump and help these centers stay healthy.
Equally important, be careful not to wear out your pleasure centers through drug abuse or too many repetitive behaviors, such as Internet gambling, pornography, compulsive shopping, or even excessive Internet dating. In his brilliant book Thrilled to Death: How the Endless Pursuit of Pleasure Is Leaving Us Numb, pioneering psychologist Archibald Hart discusses how the modern-day trend of constantly needing excitement and stimulation is depleting us of joy. Instant and text messaging, e-mail, Internet, video games, music downloads, emotionally charged movies, and television all vie for our attention. We are requiring more and more stimulation in order to pay attention at all, in order to feel happiness or joy. Teenagers at a computer often have ten instant messaging conversations going at once. The first time I saw my teenage daughter doing this, I wondered how she could really pay attention to any of the conversations she was having. Television commercials are another example of how technology is driving our attention and constantly pushing on the pleasure levers in our brain. A thirty-second commercial forty years ago had ten three-second scenes. The same commercial in 2007 has thirty one-second scenes, driving us to need more stimulation in order to pay attention and numbing us out.
The constant use of video games, so common among our children, teens, and young adults, is another potentially serious source of the problem. Many people play for hours at a time, to the detriment of their responsibilities, and some even go through withdrawal symptoms when they are not allowed to play or stop. A brain imaging study published in the journal Nature helps to explain why. While a group of people played action video games, researchers took positron emission tomography scans to see which parts of the brain video games activated. They saw increased activity in the basal ganglia, where dopamine works. Other researchers have discovered that cocaine and methamphetamine also work in this part of the brain. Video games bring pleasure and focus by increasing dopamine. The problem is that the more dopamine released during video games, the less that is available later on to do regular life tasks, such as schoolwork, homework, or chores. Many parents have told me that the more a child or teen plays video games, the worse he does in school and the more irritable he tends to be when asked to stop playing. I saw the negative effects of video games in my own house. Video games came into our home when my son was ten years old. Initially, I thought they were very cool. I never had exciting games like these when I was a child. But over the next few years I saw that he was spending more and more time with the games and less time on his work. He would also argue when he was told to stop playing. I decided that the games had to go. We have all been better off since. We have to be careful not to use technology to numb ourselves out, so that we can experience happiness and pleasure, especially when we need it during times of stress.
Work to keep the pleasure centers healthy. Here are some simple guidelines.
• Treat any illnesses, such as depression, that interfere with pleasure center function.
• Curb the use of constant stimulating activities, such as gambling, shopping, pornography, Internet use, scary movies, and high-risk activities.
• Exercise, especially doing something you love, such as dancing or playing tennis.
• Make time to laugh, since humor enhances the pleasure centers without wearing them out.
• Connect meaningful activities and pleasure, such as volunteering for activities you love.
• Develop appreciation and gratitude.
• Look for pleasure in the little things in your life, such as a walk with a friend, a great meal, or a meaningful church service.
5. CLEAR UP PAST TRAUMAS
Unresolved traumas from the past make us more vulnerable to future stresses. Carrying haunting memories sensitizes us to anything that is likely to remind us of the prior experience and robs us of resiliency. For example, Jenna had to file bankruptcy in her midtwenties owing to her diagnosis with thyroid cancer. Her medical bills were more than she could ever imagine paying. Twelve years later, she still was extremely anxious about money. She worked long hours as a nurse and was barely getting ahead. Money was a big issue in her relationships with men. They often thought she was overfocused on financial issues, which scared them away. It wasn’t until she got help for her financial fears that she was able to act more rationally and optimistically about her finances.
In my experience, when there are unresolved traumas, a psychotherapeutic treatment technique called eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) can help extricate them from your brain. The focus of EMDR is resolving or eliminating the emotional distress arising from difficult childhood memories or traumatic events, such as automobile accidents, assaults, natural disasters, or combat trauma. I have also found it helpful for dealing with past failures in sports that drive anxiety and prevent peak performance.
EMDR was developed by psychologist Francine Shapiro beginning in 1987. While walking around a lake, she noticed that a disturbing thought disappeared when her eyes spontaneously started to move back and forth from the lower-left to the upper-right visual fields. She tried it again with another anxiety provoking thought and found that the anxious feeling went away. In the days that followed she tried the technique with friends, acquaintances, and interested students and found the technique helpful in relieving anxiety. She then went further to work with patients and developed a technique that is now used worldwide and is a standard technique used by the Department of Defense for combat veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
The mainstay of EMDR involves clients bringing up emotionally troubling memories while their eyes follow a trained therapist’s hand moving horizontally back and forth. Following a specific protocol, the clinician helps the client identify the images, negative beliefs, emotions, and body sensations associated with a targeted memory or event. Through the therapy, positive statements and beliefs replace the negative ones. The believability of this new thought is rated while the client thinks of the disturbing event. The goal of EMDR treatment is the rapid processing of information about the negative experience and movement toward an adaptive resolution. This means a reduction in the client’s distress, a shift in the client’s negative belief to positive belief, and the possibility of more optimal behavior in relationships and at work. It is important that EMDR be done by a trained therapist. You can contact the national EMDR International Association at www.EMDRIA.org for more information and a list of certified EMDR therapists.
To be resilient, it is essential to clean out the closet in your head of past or current traumas. That way, they no longer control your present or future behavior.
6. FACE YOUR FEARS
Facing your fears is a key component of resilience training. Allowing fear to take hold and put down roots in your brain ensures they will control you later on. People who suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder, for example, avoid many aspects of their lives, such as people, places, events, and opportunities, as these may serve as reminders of the trauma. Subsequently, the conditioned fear is solidified in the brain rather than extinguished. In contrast, people who are resilient are more adept at facing and managing their fears. They use their fears as a guide to understand threats and decide what to do. When you face your fears, you are likely rewiring your brain to have control over it. When you hide from your fears, they begin to control you. In simple terms it means getting back on the bicycle once you have fallen off, getting another job after being fired, or becoming involved in a new relationship after a messy divorce.
7. STRENGTHEN YOUR ABILITY TO DEAL WITH ADVERSITY
Failure is not fatal. It is part of learning and growing. One of my personal heroes is Abraham Lincoln. He had many successes in his life but also faced many tough challenges. He lost his mother at age nine and he did not have a good relationship with his father. His marriage was turbulent and he lost two of his children to death. He suffered from several bouts of depression, even being suicidal at times. He hated how he looked and once said if he ever met anyone as ugly as himself he would shoot the wretch to put him out of his misery. He was elected to the legislature in 1834 but also lost several elections, including twice to the U.S. Senate. He was elected president in 1860, but his early years in the White House were extremely turbulent. There were many Northern defeats at the start of the Civil War and he was constantly criticized. His early losses and defeats perfectly placed him to be able to withstand failure. If he had been successful in all his endeavors, he would have never been able to withstand the pressures of the presidency. He remains perhaps the greatest American leader of all time. His failures, losses, and struggles prepared him for ultimate success.
In a similar way, Michael Jordan, perhaps basketball’s greatest player ever, has said, “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot…and missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why…I succeed.” Failure is not fatal. Not trying is!
Failure is a part of everyone’s life. No one starts out walking in life; it is months before we even learn how to crawl. It is not failure that holds people back but their attitude toward failure and their fear of it. Toddlers don’t give up when they fall; they take their bruises and try again. Anyone who has had small children knows that despite many failed attempts at mobilization, most children go very quickly from crawling to walking to running to climbing up to places they shouldn’t. It is arrogant to think that we are perfect and we will never fail. We are not programmed with the answers; we learn them. We get the right answers by learning processes and observing our errors along the way. Successful supervisors do not get angry when their employees make mistakes. They say, “Don’t be afraid to make mistakes; learn from them. Just don’t make the same one twice. Observe what you do and you’ll always improve.”
How supervisors deal with the mistakes of their employees often determines the quality of the employees. When people go to work expecting to be yelled at or belittled, their fear and anger get in the way of their doing the best they can. When they go to work knowing that they will be taught to learn from their mistakes in a positive atmosphere, they relax and are more likely to produce good work. Be a good teacher for yourself and those around you. Maturity is being able to learn from the mistakes you make.
How we learn from mistakes is a trait we learned in childhood. What happened when you made a mistake as a child? When you spilled something at the dinner table or you did poorly on a test? Were you berated and yelled at for the mistake or were you encouraged to learn something from it? One of the most critical lessons a parent can teach a child is how to learn from mistakes. Too often as parents we are hypercritical of ourselves when we fail, which then transfers to how we treat our children when they fail at something. To help our children feel good about themselves, we must help them be competent. Of course competent people make mistakes; the difference is that they have the ability to learn from them and move on to other things rather than beating themselves up for it.
For example, think about the four-year-old child who spills orange juice at breakfast. Many parents, who are in a hurry to get off to work, get stressed by the delay in schedule and take their frustration out by yelling at the child. The child feels incompetent and the next time he tries to pour juice he’ll feel anxious and tense—making him more likely to spill it again. Parents need to focus their energy on helping their children learn from the mistakes they make. So instead of yelling at the child for the spilled orange juice, I recommend that you teach him how to clean up the mess and then take him over to the sink and have him pour ten glasses of orange juice. In that way, he’s gone from making a mistake to learning two skills: cleaning up a mess and pouring juice. He’s gone from feeling clumsy and stupid to feeling competent. To raise healthy children, and be healthy adults, it is critical to teach them how to learn from the mistakes they make and to give them a framework for problem solving.
The fear of failure may be preventing you from trying. When you do fail, you may do everything you can to not think about it and thus end up repeating the same mistakes. Success involves many failures and lessons along the way. Think about some of the major mistakes you have made in your life. How did you respond to those failures?
• Did you learn from them?
• Did you berate yourself over and over?
• Did you blame someone else for it?
• Did you do everything you could to forget about it?
• Did you repeat the failure?
• Did you get through it and learn along the way?
• Did you stay away from similar situations in the future?
• Did you allow the mistake to stimulate you to look deeper inside yourself to become a better person?
8. USE POSITIVE EMOTIONS, ESPECIALLY LAUGHTER
There is a growing body of scientific literature suggesting that positive emotions, especially laughter, counteracts stress and is involved in resilience. According to Professor Lee Berk of the University of California–Irvine, “If we took what we know about the medical benefits of laughter and bottled it up, it would require FDA approval.” Laughter can lower blood pressure, trigger a flood of endorphins—the brain chemicals that bring on euphoria and decrease pain—and enhance our immune systems. Gamma-interferon, a disease-fighting protein, rises with laughter. So do B cells, which produce disease-destroying antibodies, and T cells, which orchestrate our body’s immune response. Laughter lowers the flow of dangerous stress hormones that suppress the immune system, raise blood pressure, and increase the number of platelets, which cause clots and potentially fatal coronary artery blockages. The average child laughs hundreds of times a day. The average adult laughs only a dozen times a day. If only we could collect those lost laughs and use them to our advantage. One person was able to do this quite effectively.
In Norman Cousins’s classic book, Anatomy of an Illness, he describes how he used laughter to treat a debilitating immune disorder that attacked his body called ankylosing spondylitis. The illness caused him pain, fatigue, and a great deal of anxiety. He believed that he became sick because he was over-tired from travel and work, and his body was in a state of adrenal exhaustion. He went from doctor to doctor, took medicine after medicine, and was not getting better. One specialist estimated his chances of recovery at one in five hundred. In partnership with his physician, he gradually stopped all of his medications, added large doses of intravenous vitamin C, and began a program of laughter. Allen Funt, famed producer of the television series Candid Camera, sent him films of the TV series along with a projector for his laughter therapy. He also watched Marx Brothers and Laurel and Hardy films. He discovered that ten minutes of a genuine belly laugh had a pain relieving effect and would give him restful sleep for two hours. He laughed and laughed. After a period of time, his illness started to improve and eventually went away.
Put laughter in your life every day. Watch comedies (this could be a helpful form of TV), go to comedy clubs, read joke books (my favorite is the Far Side by Gary Larson), and swap jokes with your friends. President Lincoln suffered from serious periods of depression. He used laughter and telling jokes as one form of medicine. Here are three of my favorite humorous Lincoln sayings.
• Common-looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.
• If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
• It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: “And this, too, shall pass away.”
9. RELY ON A MORAL COMPASS
Another characteristic of resilience is relying on a strong moral compass and a solid core belief system. Having a commitment to deeply religious or spiritual beliefs and practices seems to have a protective effect on physical and emotional well-being and helps people cope with stress and illness. A recent survey of the available scientific literature involving 126,000 people in forty-two independent studies indicated that spiritual practice or religious participation was highly correlated with a longer life and survival once an illness was present. Additionally, strong religious beliefs have been correlated with a decreased incidence of depression in numerous studies, ranging from students to grief stricken adults to elderly who were medically ill. In a similar way, teenagers who attended church services had lower suicide rates than those who didn’t. The specific religious affiliation did not seem to matter in the studies.
Obviously, people who have a strong moral compass are not limited to those with religious beliefs. It is likely that morality is intrinsic to human nature. Greek philosopher Epictetus, living in the first century A.D., wrote: “Every one of us has come into this world with innate conceptions as to good and bad, noble and shameful, fitting and inappropriate.” Moral sense is necessary in a high-functioning society. In looking at the brain, it becomes obvious that morality is brain based. When the prefrontal cortex is damaged, some people acquire sociopathic tendencies.
Caring for others is putting one’s moral compass into action. Altruism is a powerful enhancer of resilience. During World War II, people who cared for others after bombing attacks suffered less depression and anxiety than would be expected. Those who suffered with symptoms before the bombs had a significant decrease in symptoms afterward if they were helping others. Many people find meaning in tragedy and use their suffering to help others. When that happens, resilience is enhanced.
10. NURTURE SOCIAL SUPPORT
Relationships are critical to how we deal with stress and trauma. In his wonderful book Love and Survival, cardiologist Dean Ornish detailed the many benefits from having close relationships. Dr. Ornish cited numerous studies indicating that those who feel close, connected, loved, and supported have a lower incidence of depression, anxiety, suicide, heart disease, infections, hypertension, and cancer. Connection enhances brain function and aides resilience.
I was a military psychiatrist for seven years. One of the most striking findings I discovered was that the incidence of suicides and suicide attempts among military service personnel and their dependents peaked in the months of January and July. In a civilian population, suicide is highest in April. What was responsible for the discrepancy between the civilian and military population? January and July are the months of military moves. When people move they become disconnected from their social support network and are at greater risk for depression and suicide. They are less resilient. I frequently treated military wives who became depressed for six months after a move. Their depression seemed to lift after they developed a new social network—friends, church participation, social groups. The women who did not become depressed were much more skilled in getting involved and developing social support right away.
Enhancing emotional bonds can help increase resilience and heal anxiety and depression. In one large study in which patients were treated for major depression, the National Institutes of Health compared three approaches: antidepressant medication, cognitive therapy (the automatic negative thoughts therapy discussed earlier), and interpersonal therapy or teaching people how to get along better with those they loved. Researchers were surprised to find that the treatments were equally effective in treating depression. Not surprising was the fact that combining all three treatments had an even more powerful effect.
How you get along with other people can either help or hurt your brain! Our day-to-day interactions with others enhance the brain or tear down how it works. Being more connected to the people in your life helps you strengthen your brain. Love is as powerful as drugs and usually a lot more fun. The improvements gained through interpersonal therapy appear to go all the way to the brain. In two brain imaging studies, interpersonal therapy showed significant enhancement of brain function.
Use these ten ways to boost your resilience to the tough times we all must weather.