Bounce Back - Resilience

A set of skills, not a disposition or personality.
1. training for resilience can change the brain to, well, make it more resilient
2. "with a little practice, anyone can develop resilience, says Southwick, 67, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine."
It can be cultivated by forcing people out of their comfort zones.
1. Dr. Dennis did so by dragging along his children on "semi-dangerous" adventure trips such as a kayaking trip with his son Alex: It rained the entire time, the life jackets didn't fit and they had to share a broken-ruddered boat for 12-mile runs every day.
Enables people to not only get through hard times but to thrive through them.
1. "Just as rubber rebounds after being squeezed or squished, so do resilient people."
2. people bounce back from difficult experiences--- both those they seek out and those that blindside them--- while others don't fare quite so well.
  1. there are lots of ways to intervene so that stress or trauma doesn't derail you
Resilience can help us with stress.
1. "humans get stressed far more than they realise"
  1. "The vast majority of us will be faced with one or more major traumatic stressors during a lifetime," says Southwick.
  2. countless smaller stresses also take a toll
2. nearly all our modern ills, including heart disease and possibly even brain disorders like Alzheimer's disease, have stress as a common risk factor
  1. "Resilience training can help people to deal effectively with chronic disease and improve their quality of life," says Charney. "It helps people cope."
The latest science shows that if you train your brain, how you act under pressure can, in large part, be up to you.
1. "anyone could train him - or herself to be more resilient"
2. Ways/factors to cultivate resilience: tight-knit community, stable role model, strong belief in their ability to solve problems
3. people thrive in the aftermath of adversity
Quotes:
1. For resilience, there's not one prescription that works. Find what works for you. --- Dr. Dennis Charney
2. Very few highly resilient people are strong in and by themselves. You need support. --- Dr. Steven Southwick
To measure how resilient you are, consider how you react to things that don't go your way/stress.
1. What causes stress: social pain(rejection and loneliness), fear, everyday stressors like worrying about the future or fretting about the past
  1. Resilient people can appropriately regulate the fear circuits in their brain under a stressful environment. They do not reinforce the fear circuit and instead build and strengthen different connections, developing a new response to stress.
How to become more resilient: face your fears, develop an ethical code to guide daily decisions, have a strong network of social support, exercise as it develops new neurons which help with dealing with stress
1. "When people are exposed to a stressor in a lab, their heart rate and blood pressure don't go up quite as much if a friend is in the room as they do if they're alone."
Resilience focuses on mindfulness:
1. "Marines who trained in mindfulness returned to baseline levels of heart rate and breathing rate faster than those who hadn't been trained."
  1. "They also showed a lower activation in the region of the brain associated with emotional reactions. By the end of training, their brains actually looked more resilient."
Meditation helps with resilience:
1. becoming tougher has everything to do with tuning into the mind
2. consistent practice changes how the brain looks as well as how it operates
3. the more experienced the meditator, the more quickly the brain recovers from stress

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Bounce Back - Resilience

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