Have you been wishing you could hibernate like the bears too? I’m noticing I want to sleep a LOT lately.
Not only are the hours of sunlight decreasing here in the northern hemisphere and the days getting colder, the world has become a very uncertain and scary place. I’m walking my talk of PRACTICING resilience skills.
Eleanor Roosevelt embodied resilience her whole life. And like many of us right now in the midst of this worsening and unrelenting pandemic and historic political turmoil, Eleanor likely had days when it felt impossible to practice resilience. As a little girl having both parents die within two years, she had to have felt powerless. She had a child die. She watched her husband lose his ability to walk. Yet she transformed herself to become a leader, organizer, political activist and a first lady who broke barriers.
We can allow experiences to destroy us or transform us. Often we cannot change the situation…what we can change is how we allow the experiences to make us stronger or better in some way or we can allow the experiences to take us down. We will never be the same again. And when we practice growing our resilience, we can blossom.
We are all practicing resilience right now. Practice is the key word, like any skill it takes time, and conscious effort along with seeing what doesn’t work.
Here are 9 resilience tools you may want to consider practicing to not just survive this election week but also the rest of 2020, 2021 and on to adapt, grow stronger and empower yourselves:
- Lack of social connections is one of the main factors that drove me to start my business, so that caregivers of those with eating disorders wouldn’t have to experience the isolation that I did as a family caregiver.
- The evidence I see daily when parents and other family caregivers have the support of a community who gets it is profound in helping them to grow and have hope.
- Belief in hope can help undo the damage to our brains that the worry toll takes.
It takes a community to believe in us so we can learn to see that we have a choice about our crisis taking us down or growing us. - When we have a person or people who believe in us, listen, encourage us and remind us that we’ve made it through challenges in the past, we can learn to cope with our new normal.
- Routines – Having some things that are the same can help us feel safe and increase our resilience. Even if these are just basic daily habits they can help us have some normalcy. Uncertainty increases anxiety. The more we can incorporate routines into our days, the more calm and safe we can feel.
- FUN – Finding ways to still have fun in the midst of a deadly pandemic is not impossible. It takes more creativity and can include; dancing in the kitchen, reading books, singing, movies, games, playing cards, hiking, biking, skiing, doing the hoola-hoop, learning chess, doing kind acts for neighbors who are healthcare professionals who are getting exhausted, exploring new hobbies.
- Mindfulness – Can include; meditation, managing our thoughts, making a spiritual practice of focusing on what is good, what’s working, what we can control and what we are grateful for. There are endless ways to practice mindfulness.
- Find something that matters to you that you can do something about. When we care about something and find constructive, interesting, challenging ways to help that situation, it can take us out of our own misery and empower us and lift us up.
- Shift perspectives. We can choose to shift how we look at things, our brains are amazing that way. Check out this article on resilience if you’d like to learn more.
We can do this. Together. Fee free to share your ideas for creating resilience. I had to disable comments due to spammers but you can share on my social media sites.
If you need some support with growing your resilience as a caregiver of someone with an eating disorder, reach out. I’m training others to do the work I do so even if my practice is full, there is likely someone else who may be available.
