Human Resilience

With all the news of doom and gloom coupled with the grey weather here in UK and the word "recession" being spoken daily. It’s easy to find yourself imagining worst-case scenario's… and with ever increasing accounts of redundancies, the perception of threat can feel very real.

All this naturally activates our stress response, which can lead to thinking becoming irrational and distorted. It’s well known that the content of our thoughts can contribute to emotions. When thoughts are fear based they can create a feeling of loosing control.

When this happens, people often find themselves “catastrophising’, ‘generalising’ or moving into ‘all or nothing’ thinking. We begin to believe the thought as a concrete reality and therefore loose our ability to think creatively or rationally explore other equally possible outcomes. This can create on-going anxiety and negatively affect self esteem.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and other philosophies (e.g. Buddhism) recommend that we identify our thoughts and challenge the absolute truth of them.

We hope you are not finding these times too challenging and offer the following to help you keep your thinking flexible and resilient!

Ten ways to challenge thinking

1. Identify the thought by writing it down
   
2. Ask yourself "what evidence supports this thought? “... "Am I jumping to conclusions”?
   
3. Ask yourself “am I predicting?” e.g. are your thoughts based on fear of what will happen in the future or what happened in the past?
   
4. Ask yourself “is this happening now?" .... "What is my reality today?”
   
5. Ask yourself "what action can I take today to help move myself forward?"
   
6. Consider what your best friend might say to you in this situation … write it down
   
7. Challenge all or nothing thinking, e.g.” I want to go to Australia on holiday but I can’t afford it so I can’t have a holiday at all…” by asking yourself “what is possible?” e.g. "maybe I can have a weekend in France while I save for Australia"
   
8. Ask someone you trust for their perspective
   
9. Remember a difficult situation that you’ve survived in the past and ask yourself “what helped me get through that”?
   
10. Take time out from your head! Do something that takes you out of your negative thought cycle e.g. physical activities, helping someone else, have some fun

‘All that we are is the result of what we have thought.

The mind is everything.

What we think we become"

- The Buddha