How to Be Resilient During Tough Times Dr Rick Hanson

When we face a threat, like an illness potentially coming at us, the brain has evolved to react really strongly to that sense of threat, especially if it's moving toward us quickly, getting more intense along the way, with lots of moving pieces, and we can have a sense of helplessness, in part, like an epidemic, because the pathogens are invisible. So, it's understandable if we tend to curl around ourselves and hunker down and feel immobilized. That's why it's so important to look for ways that you can feel that you're active in some effective way, if only inside your own mind, because that will help you feel better, and also it will be the foundation of an effective coping response. Of course, out in the world, we should take sensible precautions, follow the advice of experts who know what they're doing. I'm doing that myself. Meanwhile, inside ourselves, there are two kinds of things we can do that are really helpful. The first is to engage in practices that help us feel calmer, clearer, and stronger. For example, just exhaling naturally slows the heart rate and engages what's called the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system, which can help us feel more rested and centered and grounded in ourselves. So, looking for those ways to take three breaths in which you're aware of the feeling of breathing while you're doing it and helping the exhalations be as long as or even longer than the inhalations. That's a really good method. Another really good method is to tune into your own kind of feeling memory of being strong, of being gritty, determined, feisty, even a little fiery, that, you know, you've got some moxie here. That will help you also feel more resilient. And then a third quick suggestion is to tune into the feeling of being cared about by others, friends who care about you, maybe the memory of being in your grandmother's kitchen, maybe something deep inside that feels even beyond yourself. That sense of being supported by others and cared about by others is really important, and particularly given that, as human beings, we must live with others and rely on others. So it's natural to need the sense of others caring about us or certainly including us for our own stress management. A second major way in which you can really help yourself is to tap into what Professor Shelley Taylor at UCLA has developed as the tend and befriend theory of stress management. In other words, in addition to fighting and fleeing in response to a stressor, we can tend and befriend. In other words, keep in mind the fact that they're scared too. Just last night, I was walking down the street and came upon a father and teenage daughter walking their dog, and I could feel the part of me that wanted to shrink away from them and see them as somehow the enemy, and I could feel something of that in them as well. So I was deliberately a little extra friendlier at night, saying hello to them, and a little extra inclined to tune in to their reactions too. And for me, that's a broader teaching, that one of the best ways we can help ourselves and certainly one of the best ways we can help other people at this time that tends to force us into emotional isolation, not just physical social distancing, at this time, it's really important to remember that they're scared too, that we can include other people in our heart even as we ask them to stay home from the office. We can have compassion for the likely impacts on them directly from what we're all going through here, including the ways in which they, if not us, may know people who eventually will deal with something really serious from this situation. So we can feel that compassion for them. We can also look for ways to cooperate together. One of the great teachings of this pandemic is that much as it is the fact that we live together necessarily as humans, it's that which makes us vulnerable to this problem. It also means that the only way we are going to be able to solve this is through cooperating with each other, through relationship with each other. And as we move forward in the days ahead, I think that there's a real teaching here about our fundamental nature as human beings, that we must live in community with each other. And it is through forms of community that we find our own greatest personal security. So I hope this has been useful to you. I really wish you the best and know that through our own personal practice, which helps us find over time an increasingly unshakable core inside of resilient well-being as we face our challenges, know that as we develop ourselves in this way, we're doing it for the sake of others as well.