Being resilient: how do you do it?

Being resilient is something that comes in handy in your life. After all, your life has ups and downs, and you can recover from those downs faster if you are resilient. In this blog, I take a closer look at being resilient.

Resilience meaning

Technically, resilience is about the ability of an object to return to its original position.

For example, a car spring can spring in and out. When the spring breaks down or wears out, there is not enough spring force to return to its original state. You then often see cars that have sagged through the springs.

Mentally speaking, resilience is about the ability to overcome setbacks and turn threats into opportunities. For example, you can “get back on track” after dealing with a setback[1].

You won't get stuck in a slump, for example.

Resilient together

Your resilience depends, among other things, on your relationships and even the way you form attachments to other people[2].

For example, if you suffer an economic setback, your resilience depends in part on how you subsequently handle your social relationships. Indeed, the stress of job loss can make those relationships more difficult, such as dealing with your family and friends.

After all, an economic setback can make you angry, withdrawn, and hopeless, or you can approach it optimistically and be proactive in finding solutions to new economic challenges you face. In the latter case, you’re more resilient than in the former. If you have a family that supports you and thinks things through with you, that also helps your resilience. If, on the other hand, you have a family that gets angry with you on top of everything else, the slump only gets worse.

In the process - if you have one - you can pass on healthy family dynamics to your children, making them more economically resilient as well (source 2).

So the term together you are stronger can also be substituted for together you are more resilient, as long as you interact in a healthy way.

In addition, talking with peers and learning from each other can also make you more resilient if you have mental problems, for example[3].

Resilience Recovery

Recovery can also take many forms. For example, you can recover from something both mentally and physically.

In mental recovery, resilience involves the following:

• Hope
• A picture of how you want to be (self-determination)
• Responsibility
• Increase sense of power (empowerment) (source 3)

Resilience is also important for recovery when it comes to your physical health. Conditions such as Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), poor sleep, and fibromyalgia, for example, are treated with hypnotherapy, and one of the key aspects of this treatment is improving resilience.

PDS is a problem that can cause a lot of pain and psychological stress. Resilience is very important to not let this problem take too much hold on you. Hypnotherapy that targets the abdomen improves resilience, reduces stress and even reduces pain in PDS[4].

For women with fybromyalgia and poor sleep, cognitive behavioral therapy with hypnosis also works better to improve resilience than cognitive behavioral therapy alone. Women were able to return to normal sleep faster with hypnosis and were less bothered by their fybromyalgia symptoms[5].

Increase resilience

There are a number of personal attributes that help you have more resilience in your life namely:

• Positive self-image
• Improve self-control
• Being able to control thoughts
• Motivation to be effective
• Care
• Optimism (source 2)

This also provides immediate opportunities to boost your resilience. For example, you can work on your self-image and your thoughts through mindfulness and hypnotherapy.

With mindfulness, you can become more aware of your thoughts, for example, your thoughts about yourself. And you can then let go of those.

Is it difficult to think more positively about yourself? If so, hypnotherapy can help with that.

An economic setback and other setbacks can make you more anxious. Then, to make you more resilient, hypnotherapy can focus on changing and improving your thoughts[6], such as those thoughts about yourself.

For example, if you think negatively about yourself, this often stems from beliefs about how the world works and how you function within it. You may often think, for instance, that you aren’t good enough to function well in the world. However, what constitutes “good” depends on how you view the world.

Changing life rules and beliefs

With regression , for example, you can find out what "precepts" you once thought about the world that now cause you to think negatively about yourself, for example.

You might think you have to work forty hours to do “well,” but if you’re recovering from burnout, that belief doesn’t help.

If you can figure out when you thought of something like this, you can reinterpret that moment, that memory. Most memories about situations that made you think a certain way about certain topics come from childhood. After all, that is the moment in your life when you determine how the world works and what you have to do to get the best of it.

Only as a child, of course, you don't know what you know now as an adult, and usually you're not very aware of those kinds of moments. You are often only aware of the "feeling" that you are not doing something right.

By revisiting that memory for a moment, without that feeling, you can create a new feeling with it. A hypnotherapist helps you do this. For example, you can empathize with other people who played a role in that memory. This can already change your entire memory, making you feel better overall.

This can help you feel less negative about the future, for example, and that alone gives you the resilience to take steps again.

Are you suffering from childhood trauma? Then hypnotherapy[7], with regression and a conversation with the inner child, is also often used to process this and improve your resilience.

Breaking unconscious patterns

Another thing that can get in the way of your resilience is having a certain ritual when you’re not feeling well. For example, the ritual of staying in bed, drinking, using drugs, or doing something else that doesn’t help you move forward.

With hypnosis, you can completely shake up this ritual in your subconscious, so it no longer makes sense for you to deal with problems that way.

For example, you can first visualize your ritual and see it all through.

Then, if the ritual is "broken," you can visualize a new ritual on how to deal with problems.

For example, you can visualize first calming down and then taking steps to solve your problems. You can visualize searching for something on Google or picking up the phone and asking people for help.

This also helps boost your motivation to be effective in your environment, which is a much more thoughtful approach than just letting things slide—otherwise, the problem will only get worse.

So this also improves your sense of responsibility and feelings of hope, this is also good for your resilience to mental problems.

Improve optimism and self-esteem

By improving your "precepts" and reinforcing a more solution-oriented mindset, you are probably already making sure you believe more that everything is going to work out. This alone strengthens your optimism.

It is also important to improve your self-image. For example, you can strengthen your ego by repeating certain suggestions such as:

"I can do anything."

"I'm good enough."

"Doing something is better than doing nothing."

"Every step is a step in the right direction."

These are just examples. Depending on the problem you need more resilience for, a hypnotherapist, or you yourself if you are knowledgeable about hypnosis, can come up with other suggestions that specifically address that problem.

Language is also very important in hypnotherapy to strengthen resilience[8]. Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) often plays a large role in hypnotherapy as well.

Would you like to learn more about how hypnosis works and what you can do with it? Then join us for the free online masterclass.

Or enroll in one of our training courses. The trainings are conducted online from a professional studio and with enough assistance for one-on-one attention. No anonymous online training, but real contact to guide you through your learning journey.

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