Happy Monday!
This week’s article is a follow-up to last week’s Resilience. You might want to read it twice. I needed to.
Could we be making ourselves unhappy by trying too hard to be happy? I have never thought about that. Take a look around you. There are so many people looking for something. Many looking for happiness in all the wrong places. Until you accept yourself for the child of God that you are, created uniquely and perfectly by Him! When we accept ourselves and have the confidence of our creator, we worry less about what others think of us and more of whether we are pleasing to Jesus.
I Googled resilience: the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. How can you recover quickly, if you are unsatisfied with yourself in the first place. It is during those times of difficulty that you are most vulnerable to illness. I am talking about, not only physical, but mental and emotional too. It is during those times of difficulty that we either turn to Jesus for sustenance, or we turn away.
For me, when things get tough, the best thing I can do is try to help someone else. Sometimes, just a hug can mean a lot to others. I have bought food and given to the homeless. Sometimes, just a smile or God loves you. A kind, encouraging word can be priceless. I have found when you make the world a little brighter for others, it becomes much brighter for you.
The capacity to recover quickly from difficulties… when you think more of others and less of self, you may just find that capacity increases tremendously and the side effect is you DO feel happier! How resilient are you?
Pray Unceasingly!!
In His light,
Lois
Why Resilience Is the Key to Lasting Happiness & How to Cultivate it
Zelana Montminy – Source: MindBodyGreen
Although we all try to do what we think it takes to be happy, so many of us are still unhappier than ever before. The code to unlocking bliss and success isn’t the quest for it, after all. Groundbreaking research shows that happiness is in fact much easier to attain if we stop focusing on it so much. Although this might sound counterintuitive, happiness shouldn’t be the end goal if you really want to be happy.
Research has actually exposed several negative side effects of happiness, particularly that too much of the wrong type of happiness, experienced at an improper time, pursued in the wrong way, can be damaging. The antidote: undertake resilience instead.
Our frantic search for happiness is leading us astray primarily because we’re fixated on the wrong things. We desperately try to capture good feelings for ourselves, which alienates us from others. As contagious as happiness can be if we express it, the process we’ve been taught of how to attain it can be a very lonesome pursuit that further decreases happiness.
We also overestimate how thrilled certain achievements are going to make us. When we don’t feel the emotions we expected, we keep striving for more and more, which also doesn’t produce those feelings, continuing a vicious cycle.
In this way, a focus on happiness mostly serves to highlight our shortcomings. Lasting happiness requires building upon your strengths, persevering, and being gracious with yourself and others—it’s really not about personal achievements or experiencing fleeting, positive thoughts and feelings.
The words happiness and resilience get thrown around often. Because of this, we’ve tuned out. They have lost their powerful meaning. Overuse doesn’t make these concepts any less important though. In fact, they’re more important than ever before in our fast-paced world. I’ve noticed that people expect others to solve their problems and often blame society for their issues.
In this age of instant gratification and quick results, people often get uncomfortable when they have to work hard and solve problems. They reject negative feelings—but that’s not going to make them any happier. However, it’s healthy—almost necessary—to sometimes be unhappy in order to find lifelong well-being.
While negative feelings clearly don’t feel good, they are important tools for growth and learning. I see also that there are plenty of studies referenced without being linked. And while our environment affects our lives, it is entirely up to us to have the strength to overcome whatever’s thrown at us. That vital trait—our ability to overcome and learn from our challenges, aka resilience—is often neglected. We need to become more resilient to ultimately be happy.
We’re still learning more about the complex characteristic of resilience every day. Recent research has begun to identify its environmental, neurological, and possibly even genetic sources. Although there’s much that we still don’t know about it, we do know that it’s not entirely genetic. While some people have an easier time turning trauma into triumphs, resilience is a skill we can all develop. It is not a fixed state of being.
We can build it and continue to work on it just like we can train our brain to be more positive and optimistic. In fact, positive emotions play a large role in resilience. Research has shown that they help us rebound better from trauma and find opportunities for growth from stressful experiences.
Being resilient does not mean that you won’t encounter problems or have difficulties overcoming a challenge in your life. The difference is that resilient people don’t let their adversity define them. At its core, resilience is about being capable and strong enough to persevere in adverse or stressful conditions—and to take away positive meaning from that experience.
Living with resilience is more than just “bouncing back”; it is about shifting our perceptions, changing our responses, and experiencing real growth. The only thing we have control over is that we have the ability to definitively and consciously change how we respond to what life throws at us at any given moment. We all endure challenges, big and small, which are meaningful opportunities for learning and building strength.
Highly resilient people seem to not only bounce back from hard times, but also grow and become stronger as a result—they experience posttraumatic growth. They found a way for their struggle to redefine their life and fill it with new meaning. This type of growth is the cornerstone of resilience.
Belief is incredibly powerful. When we believe in something, for right or wrong, it becomes our truth. Positive, goal-oriented beliefs—that you can achieve success, that you can be happy, that you can do what you set out to do, that you can bounce back from adversity—set the foundation for your life.
Remaining positive with whatever comes your way plays a large role in well-being. However, remaining positive is not a direct path to happiness. The problem today is that people are inundated with being told to “think positive,” so they’ve become afraid of the negative. They mistake happiness for only feeling happy thoughts and feelings, and they confuse resilience for never truly experiencing pain.
That’s not what any of this is about. We can’t escape the daily grind. But we can use stress to our advantage; it can actually be motivating and adaptive if we react to it effectively. Our most trying moments are valuable teachers—as resilient people, we must expect to learn from them.
While this foreknowledge won’t take away the pain of those moments or experiences, knowing in advance that we will come out of it stronger reduces some of the sting. We all have the power to be the strongest, most resilient version of ourselves.