There’s no doubt about it that remaining strong, as well as thriving after adversity, is no mean feat. It’s a journey rather than a destination, however, and like all cognitive and psychological journeys, you can smooth the way with good preparation and arm yourself with knowledge. There is also an awful lot you can do to help yourself – and knowing and pre-empting pitfalls is a fantastic way to begin! There are certain mindsets and bad habits you can watch out for to give yourself a head start. In this chapter, we explore them.
The problem with perfectionism is that perfection does not exist. For this reason, chasing it is not only a waste of energy but is going to make you feel less robust, not more so. Not only will it make you feel like you are constantly failing (because you can never succeed in attaining something that doesn’t exist), but like you never even got started.
Perfectionism can take many forms: you may, for example, really want to be in a relationship, but say to yourself that only Mr/Mrs Perfect will do. From this standpoint you can’t accept compromise, and as a consequence it’s going to be very difficult to meet anybody. Perhaps you’ve always had in your head the ‘perfect’ life of that amazing partner, two children (one of each), big house, fantastic holidays. But then life throws you a curveball: an injury forces you to rethink your career or your partner develops depression. Perfectionists will struggle: how can I go forward with this less-than-perfect life?
In this way, we can see how seeking perfection keeps us in a state of paralysis, the very opposite of real strength which is about growth and progression. Perfectionists might seem like productive characters, but sometimes in the pursuit of perfection you can fail to fulfil your potential. This is because you’re too scared to give things a go in case you’re not good enough. We know from Part 1 that failing is a crucial part of building resilience, so we can see the problem this presents!
“Gritty people don’t seek perfection, but instead strive for excellence … Perfection is someone else’s perception of an ideal and pursuing it is like chasing a hallucination.”
Angela Duckworth, author of Grit
“What can you control about this situation? You can control how you respond to it.”
Liggy Webb, consultant in behavioural skills and author of Resilience
‘Catastrophist’ comes from the word ‘catastrophe’ and describes people who have a tendency to see everything that happens to them either as a catastrophe or a potential one! You know the type who always thinks in terms of ‘worst-case scenario’? For example, ‘We’re going to miss the flight, and if we do miss the flight then we’ll never get another one!’, or dramatize situations by exclaiming ‘This is a total nightmare!’ Catastrophists are a fan of absolutes, so their self-talk tends to be full of the words ‘never’ and ‘always’: ‘I’m always missing trains’; ‘I’m never going to meet anyone’; ‘I’m always getting let down by people’. Where managing adversity is concerned, the problem with living very much in a black and white world is that life isn’t black and white. Life is full of grey areas; of possibilities and alternatives. Resilient people are able to rise above their worries and see these, and if they can’t see them, they’re able to find them.
The other problem with catastrophizing self-talk is that you begin to believe your own hype. So what to someone else might seem like just a minor hitch – to the catastrophist is, well, a catastrophe! This is because they’re telling themselves ‘this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone’. So they begin to feel it.
Catastrophizing also limits our ability to bounce back because it’s a way of shirking responsibility. If we put ourselves in the eye of a self-made storm, then we can put off having to deal with that storm or taking responsibility for it. We’re having a nightmare! Of course we can’t sit down and be strategic! Often, when we say, ‘It’s so unfair, I’m always missing trains’ what we actually mean is, ‘I’m so annoyed with myself. I need to leave more time.’ The interesting thing about this is that when we eventually take responsibility for a situation, rather than catastrophize over it, we feel better, because we’re in a place of acceptance rather than fighting it – and it’s only when we’ve accepted something that we can work to find a way out of it.
We learnt in Chapter 2 that rumination is basically trying to problem solve. It’s either worrying about the future: ‘how will I cope if things don’t get better?’ Or regretfully focusing on the past: ‘why did I let this happen to me? Why am I such an idiot?’ We are fooled into thinking that worrying and ruminating is productive, because we are thinking about the problem, but it can become circular – we aren’t going anywhere psychologically and so it undermines our resilience and confidence and often leaves us feeling more vulnerable, stuck and helpless.
When it comes to rising above adversity, the only place we can make changes is in the present. Mindfulness practice can help bring our attention and focus to the present moment, thus opening up a calm space for us to form a perspective on our ever-changing thoughts and feelings. So, instead of being pushed around by them, we are able to observe them and notice them calmly. From this vantage point, we have greater choice about whether or not to engage with certain thoughts.
When we are practising mindfulness, we are also reducing activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain that turns on our stress response in the face of perceived threat and danger. When the amygdala is activated, we switch into ‘doing mode’, trying to take action against the stressful situation, which often involves engaging in lots of worry and rumination. In ‘doing mode’ we lose our ability to think rationally and often make knee-jerk decisions. Mindfulness, on the other hand, helps us to turn on our ‘being mode’ – in this mode we are able to think more clearly and function better while we make wiser choices about how to respond to and improve the situation.
These techniques are not designed to get rid of worrying or ruminating – the only agenda is being in the presence of your active mind rather than becoming caught up in it; to notice it at work, moment by moment. Don’t panic if you’re pulled back into worry or rumination – if this happens (which is only natural and what the human mind does), just notice this distraction again, perhaps congratulate yourself for noticing it (as that’s what mindfulness is), and then gently guide your attention back to the present moment, by tuning into your sensory experience to help ground you back into the here and now once again.
It’s very tempting, when something bad happens, to fall into the ‘poor me’ trap. Victim mentality behaviour can take many forms:
It’s perfectly natural to feel sorry for ourselves when going through a tough time. The trick is to avoid staying in that state for too long. It’s a position of powerlessness, and so the longer you stay in the ‘poor me’ space, the longer you put off doing anything about it.
“People with a victim mentality get into a vicious circle: they convince themselves there’s no point in doing anything about their situation because nothing will come of it – it’s ‘learned helplessness.’”
Amy Morin, psychotherapist and author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do
In order to understand what ‘learned helplessness’ is exactly, let’s turn to the study which led to the term being coined. In 1965, as part of his work trying to better understand depression, the psychologist Martin Seligman conducted an experiment: he rang a bell and then gave a dog a light shock.
After a number of repetitions, the dog reacted to the shock even before it happened: as soon as the dog heard the bell, he reacted as though he’d already been shocked. Then Seligman put each dog into a large crate that was divided down the middle with a low fence. The dog could see and jump over the fence if necessary.
The floor on one side of the fence was electrified, but not on the other side. Seligman put the dog on the electrified side and administered a light shock. He expected the dog to jump to the non-shocking side, but instead, the dog lay down. It was as though he’d learned from the first part of the experiment that there was nothing he could do to avoid the shocks, so he gave up in the second part of the experiment; whereas dogs that had not taken part in the first experiment DID jump the fence.
Seligman called this behaviour ‘learned helplessness’– and it’s something that, as humans, we are also prone to. Not doing anything to help yourself in an adverse situation, because past experience has told you there’s no point, is learned helplessness. It’s accepting loss of power and control over the situation and it’s what happens when we succumb to a victim mentality. It doesn’t do us much harm to succumb now and again, but psychologists have found that persistent learned helplessness (and victim mentality) – believing that we have no control over the outcome of situations – is a leading cause of depression.
Interestingly, the way we view negative events that happen to us has a big impact on whether we feel helpless or not. Psychologists call these ways of thinking ‘attributions’ and they have found that certain types of attributions cause learned helplessness. These are:
It follows, then, that if learned helplessness and victim mentality are caused by these ways of thinking, if we can challenge our thinking and change it, then we will not fall prey to either.
Stress is, of course, a huge subject and compromises our inner strength in many different ways. There are also different kinds of stress – short-term, chronic, toxic – there is even ‘good’ stress, if you know how to harness it (see motivational speaker and author Dr Steinberg on how to harness stress and ‘fall up’ in Part 3).
Having to revise for, and take, an exam, for example, might be classified as short-term stress. In isolation, this would probably not cause any harm at all, it’s only when stress accumulates and exceeds our coping ability without adequate recovery that it becomes a problem.
Imagine, for example, that you work for yourself and are a single parent. You are the only breadwinner, which you may cope admirably with, but then your mother gets ill and you can’t afford to take time off to care for her. Situations like this, where there is one challenging situation on top of another, and seemingly no relief or way out, cause chronic stress and, if left unchecked, can lead to long-term mental problems like depression and anxiety – in short, completely destroying our reserves of inner strength.
Traumatic experiences are, by their very nature, stressful. And stress affects our ability to bounce back, so it’s a double whammy! But what is it about stress itself that does that?
It’s all about that fight or flight thing again: when we are stressed, our amygdala labels information coming in as threatening and it goes into over-drive, while our activity in the cerebral cortex – the part of the brain that allows us to make decisions, be sociable and take on new ideas – is severely restricted. As a result, you may act in ways you later regret. Ever flown off the handle at your child because you’re stressed about something else? Or walked out of a restaurant because of an argument? Then you’ll know what we mean by this. It’s not only our mental health, however, that suffers – stress has a negative effect on our physical wellbeing too. (And as everyone knows, it’s hard to feel mentally strong if we’re physically under the weather.)
As we have already explored, when we are stressed, we release cortisol. Cortisol is an energizing hormone which increases blood sugar – great for the short term to react quickly, but in the long term it can be bad for our immune system. This is because a hormone called DHEA, which is released by the adrenal glands and which supports the immune system, cannot be released when cortisol is released. Furthermore, when blood sugar is raised it can lead to inflammation of artery walls – which is why stress is often a contributing factor to heart attacks and strokes.
One really important thing to remember when it comes to tackling stress is that if you give yourself adequate recovery time, you can not only take on more stress, but perform and thrive despite it.
In a way, all the strength robbers in this chapter are examples of getting psychologically ‘stuck’, or of unhelpful reactions you might have when something rattles your cage. That might be being overlooked for a promotion, having a row with your spouse, or learning your child is being bullied. The phrase ‘these things are sent to test us’ is a good one because it’s so true: that is exactly what these setbacks in life do – they test our strength. It’s how we react that counts.
Let’s look at some of the common ways we get psychologically ‘stuck’ and how these can stop you thriving.
“People get caught stuck in the loop of: ‘I’ve set my goal and now I have to achieve it.’ Sometimes it’s helpful to stop and think: ‘why am I striving for this?’”
Liggy Webb, consultant in behavioural skills and author of Resilience
“Hurt doesn’t go away simply because we don’t acknowledge it. In fact, left unchecked, it festers, grows, and leads to behaviours that are completely out of line with who we want to be.”
Brené Brown, research professor, University of Houston and author of Rising Strong
We saw in Part 1 how it is very natural to want to avoid pain. Trauma, change, adversity – they all put us under great stress and so it is perfectly normal to want to push that stress away. However, while this may work in the short term, in the long term avoidance just leads to greater stress levels because we are not processing our pain or trying to solve the situation – we are simply pushing it to one side. But it will rear its ugly head sooner or later.
One of the outcomes of attempting to ignore emotional pain is what author of Rising Strong Brené Brown calls ‘chandeliering’, where: ‘We think we’ve packed the hurt so far down that it can’t possibly resurface, yet all of a sudden a seemingly innocuous comment sends us into a rage or sparks a crying fit.’ This is basically ‘exploding’ with the stress that we’ve tried to suppress.
Another very common way that we push away pain and fail to confront it is by offloading – literally pushing our pain onto other people. We’re all guilty of it at some point: getting home from a terrible day at work and taking it out on our partner or loved ones; getting stressed with the kids because we’re going through a hard time. The problem with this is that it makes us feel terrible about ourselves! And it sets us off on a spiral of self-loathing and regret which, in itself, eats away at our feelings of self-worth and resilience.
We hope you have learned a lot from this chapter. Chances are you recognize some strength robbers more than others but this, in itself, is a positive thing. Self-awareness, after all, is the first step in this journey of real strength, so make a note of those strength robbers you have a tendency to succumb to and, using the rest of this book to guide and support you, aim to work on these first.