After having a lot of different conversations recently about psychological resilience and other clinical psychology topics, I wanted to revisit resilience by offering some more tips about how to build it.
With resilience being the ability or measure of how well a person can deal with psychological distress and the situations that create it. Some people are more resilient and can bounce back faster than others.
This mental health episode has been sponsored by Social Psychology: A Guide to Social and Cultural Psychology. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can get the paperback, large print and hardback versions from Amazon, your local bookstore or local library if you request it.
3 New Tips to Help Build Psychological Resilience:
Compassion
Just as a quick definition compassion is our sympathetic concern for others when they’re in distress and it’s when we want to eliminate it.
This is an interesting new take on resilience because in clinical psychology we know the importance of compassion in mental health. But in terms of resilience, compassion is also very important because research shows people higher in self-compassion tend to report less distress when faced with distressing situation.
Therefore, this supports what I’ve said before on the podcast about self-compassion and how important it is to our mental health. As well as if you don’t know too much about self-compassion then I’m fairly sure I’ve spoken about it before on the podcast.
Overall, compassion is a great resilience because when we have the ability to show compassion towards others and ourselves. This can help us to be more resilient when faced with situations that cause us psychological distress.
Growth Mindset
Personally, I think this is one of my favourite types of mindsets. Not only as a psychology student because I always want to keep learning and improving, but as an author too.
As a result, the point of the growth mindset is to help a person unlearn their fixed mindset. Because the growth mindset helps a person to foster their passion and curiosity for learning as well as it helps us to embrace risk and choose how to act when situations change.
This is all needed for effective resilience as without embracing risk and learning, we won’t be able to enjoy life as much as we could. And both these things help us to explore the world, have fun and take new opportunities.
However, without a growth mindset, a person might not learn how to choose and respond effectively when they encounter new situations. Leading to possible further psychological distress.
So I encourage you to keep learning, keep exploring and keep wondering so you can develop your growth mindset. Allowing you to become more resilient over time.
Grit
Whilst this is never taught in clinical psychology and rarely in wider society but grit is a great skill or ability to have when it comes to resilience. Due to grit encompasses the persistence times when a person has showed lots of perseverance, determination as well as dedication.
With grit being a much stronger predictor of a person’s success compared to natural talent and school grades.
The best way to think about grit is it gives a person the power to preserve and carry on in the face of a rough situation that causes them psychological distress. For example, a university student wants to study clinical psychology but failed a recent essay. Some students would be devastated by that but people with grit would dust themselves off and carry on. Probably engaging their growth mindset so they could learn and not fail on the next one.
Conclusion:
Overall, I do enjoy talking about resilience from time to time because it is important for mental health and everyday life. Therefore, I really hope you got something out of today’s episode.
If you wanted to learn more, please check out:
Social Psychology: A Guide to Social and Cultural Psychology. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can get the paperback, large print and hardback versions from Amazon, your local bookstore or local library if you request it.
Have a great day!
Clinical Psychology References:
Merriam Webster Dictionary
Luo, Xi & Qiao, Lei & Che, Xianwei. (2018). Self-compassion Modulates Heart Rate Variability and Negative Affect to Experimentally Induced Stress. Mindfulness.
Laura King, (2001). The Health Benefits of Writing about Life Goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27(7):798-807
Angela Duckworth
Carol Dwek
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