By Brianna Bell, Alliance Intern from Smith College ’24
Resilience is a word that we often hear when life seems to ask the most of us. Navigating the ways to deal with the overwhelm can feel unattainable from a simple word. However, Barking Up The Wrong Tree provides five methods from the book Tomorrowmind that can help those with the lowest levels of resilience deal with the demands of life. A study demonstrated a 125% increase in three months by just doing these five things: Emotional regulation, optimism, cognitive agility, self compassion, and self efficacy. Everyone struggles but how we respond to stress can help us.
Emotional regulation challenges you to slow down and check in with your emotions. Optimism envisions your best possible self and imagines you are in a successful place where you can reach for that version of yourself. In times of uncertainty, Cognitive agility insists that focusing on actual situations is preferable to the scariest ones that might cloud your judgment.
Self compassion urges you to apply compassion to yourself in the same way you would do to others. Self efficacy recommends achieving goals frequently enough to alter how you view yourself, which develops confidence and agency. Overall, following these steps can help relieve the stresses from life that we endure everyday.