Building resilience in midlife: 5 hard things
If there was ever a time to start, it's now
Today — Election Day +1 — may be a tough one for a lot of people, so here’s five ways to build all-important resilience as you navigate the days, months and (four long) years ahead.
Resilience is an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change and was first used, according to Merriam-Webster, in 1807 — the same year that other conspicuously relevant terms came to life, including “tubby, self-infatuated, lemon-yellow, damaged goods.”
But let’s not digress.
Accepting and handling adversity with honesty, grace, courage and a learner’s mindset is a fundamental feature of aging with strength — emotionally, spiritually and with community. Here’s 5 (not exactly easy) ways to build your personal resilience.
Acknowledge your pain, as a means of getting it out of you. One of the best ways to do that is to write, even a few sentences, what you’re feeling. If that’s not your thing, then give voice to your pain, to a friend, to yourself, along in your car, wherever or to whomever you can speak freely. The more honest you are about what’s going on inside you, the faster you recover. Burying it, by contrast, creates a festering infection. Last week, I let myself cry (not about politics; about something else), because I just had to, and was again reminded that this simple, uniquely human act is, perhaps ironically, one of our most effective resilience strategies. Crying just clears out the trough.
Practice optimism daily, which is remarkably self-reinforcing, like compound interest for the soul. That starts with your belief that you are eminently capable of “self-efficacy” — influencing your perception of things toward the positive.
Reframe! Whether it’s your health, happy and secure children, financial stability or deep friendships, locate your sources of major gratitude. “Things could be a helluva lot worse” is a cliché, but right now it’s a true cliché. Embrace it and…
…Realize how damned good you have it. If you’re reading this, you’re almost certainly among the wealthiest, if not also healthiest, 1% of humans. Click the link and see.
Empathize, for just five minutes, with your opponents. I saved the hardest resilience exercise for last. In the current environment, I’m specifically talking about politics. Not everyone on the other side of your politics are Hinchcliffian jackholes or defund-the-police leftists. This morning, I wondered if, had the election gone the other way, Trump voters would have felt as gut-punched and bewildered as I felt today. A very small act of empathy, indeed, but healthier than reflexive enmity.
As a thought exercise, conjure your opponents’ belief systems. Their financial and educational backgrounds. Their reasons for supporting a candidate many of them actively dislike. Those reasons are eye-opening.
Digging into your opponents’ actual (often not their stated) belief systems may reveal a more complicated motivation structure beyond the banal racism, faux-masculinity and gratuitous putdowns that were disgraceful features of the Republican presidential campaign. There is, for instance, a lot of emotional, economic and other individualized pain behind the election results.
This is a hard exercise to try, and it can feel like the emotional equivalent of forcing yourself to clean a public bathroom. But it will help put a more humane perspective on what just happened and why.
I specifically left off the most obvious and easy way to build one form of resilience — a good, hard workout — on the assumption that you don’t need me to state the obvious.
What are your best coping and resilience mechanisms? I urge you to leave a comment, criticism or insight below.