By: Amanda Ziminski
“Resilience is
essentially a set of skills as opposed to a disposition or personality type,
that makes it possible for people to not only get through hard times but thrive
during and after them,” - Dr. Dennis Charney.
Psychiatrists Dennis Charney and Steven Southwick have been studying resilience for two decades, trying to understand why some people bounce back from difficult times and why others don’t. However, in order to understand resilience, we must first understand stress and how it affects us. Humans are far more stressed than any of us realize. Most of us will experience a major traumatic situation in our lifetime, but the smaller stressors of everyday life will also take a significant toll on us. As humans, we are genetically programed to “sweat the small stuff.” We think about what we would say in conversations that will never even occur, we worry about what others think about us, and we have irrational fears of the most ridiculous things. All of this worrying activates a highway of neural pathways in the brain. Through new technologies of functional magnetic resonance imagining (fMRI), scientists are able to look past their observations of patients and look into the parts of the brain that dictate emotion. By observing patterns of blood flow they can measure brain activity and see what stress looks like in different people. The connection in the brain that is significant in response to stress and resilience is the path from prefrontal cortex, which is where cognitive thinking is done, and the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for emotion and fear.
Through research
by Dr. Charney and Dr. Southwick, new evidence suggests that with practice
anyone can learn to be resilient. “If you train your brain, how you act under
pressure is up to you,” Dr. Charney stated in his interview with TIME. “Like an
animal whose pulse returns to normal after successfully outrunning a predator,
resilient brains seem to shut off the stress response and return to normal.” If
we train our brain to become resilient a stronger connection between the
prefrontal cortex and the amygdala will form. Dr. Charney explained that
stronger connection means the prefrontal cortex can quicker tell the amygdala to
quiet down. Consistent practices can actually change how the brain looks and
operates.
According to
Charney, “there is not one prescription that works. Find what best works for
you.”
Some suggestions for becoming resilient includes:
1.
Identifying a set of beliefs that nothing can
shake.
2.
Try finding a meaning in whatever stressful or
traumatic event has happened to you.
3.
Try to maintain a positive outlook
4.
Take cues from someone who is especially
resilient.
5.
Don’t run from things that scare you: face them.
6.
Be quick to reach for support when things go
haywire.
7.
Learn new things as often as you can.
8.
Find an exercise regimen you’ll stick to.
9.
Don’t beat yourself up or dwell on the past.
10.
Recognize what makes you uniquely strong- and
own it.
I feel that
being resilient is an important asset to have. One thing that I have noticed
through job shadowing and EMT clinicals is that there is an overwhelming amount
of people clinically diagnosed with anxiety. According to the National
Institute of Mental Health (NIHM), 18.1% of the U.S. population has anxiety. I
have also noticed through researching various diseases including heart disease,
obesity, asthma, and diabetes are all linked to stress as a risk factor for
developing or worsening the disease. I
think we all could benefit from not only some destressing, but learning how to
stand back up twice as tall after we’ve been knocked down.
References:
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