(cross-posted at Pittsburgh Post Gazette)
Michael Jordan has famously said “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Look at the people you know, and you’ll find that there’s a wide spectrum of how people respond to adversity. There are the MJ’s, who get cut from their high school basketball teams and months or years later have actually grown as a result of their failure. There are others who get knocked down and seemingly go into an endless tailspin. And then there’s the rest of us, most of whom fall somewhere in between.
Michael Jordan has famously said “I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Look at the people you know, and you’ll find that there’s a wide spectrum of how people respond to adversity. There are the MJ’s, who get cut from their high school basketball teams and months or years later have actually grown as a result of their failure. There are others who get knocked down and seemingly go into an endless tailspin. And then there’s the rest of us, most of whom fall somewhere in between.
What is it?
Resilience is
one’s capacity to respond to adversity – to take bad circumstances and move
beyond them, or perhaps even make something productive out of them. Resilience
is not the ability to walk through
life unscathed – we’re all human here, and $#^& happens. Instead, it’s how
you react to those life stressors, big and small. Do you bounce back? How
quickly and effectively?
Who’s Using It?
A few years back, researchers at the University of
Pennsylvania operationalized a resiliency training program (the Penn Resiliency
Program), a cognitive-behavioral training program administered in a group
setting. The first wave of studies from some of these participants indicates
that resiliency training can significantly reduce depressive symptoms (effects
that are maintained through at least 1-year post-intervention). Moreover, the
US Army believes in resiliency so much that they’ve sunk nearly $150 million dollars into psychological
fitness training for their soldiers and master resiliency training for their drill
sergeants (Comprehensive Soldier Fitness). In
the sports world, Team USA Volleyball has published guidelines on training resilient athletes,
and as elite-level performers seek to gain every possible advantage, Olympic
hopefuls are increasingly hiring positive psychology specialists to train their
minds.
Wiring Your Brain for Resilience
Alrighty, get ready for some crash-neurobiology. When you work
on the mental skills that build resilience, you activate a specific set of
regions in your brain. At first, maybe these neurons aren’t used to talking to
each other, so the connections between them are weaker – they’re speaking
through two paper cups tied together with a piece of string instead of an
iPhone 6. So how do we train a neural circuit to make it more efficient? In
short, the more frequently those neurons are firing, the stronger the neural
pathway between them will become – neurons that fire together, wire together.
The key here is repetition. Every
time you’re practicing those resilience-building thoughts and behaviors, you’re
forcing that circuit to fire, until eventually it becomes automatic – and so do
those thoughts and actions.
What brain regions are involved in this circuit? As always, it's more complicated than just sticking resilient (and not-so-resilient) people in the scanner and seeing what lights up. But, a few studies have been done that point us toward candidate brain regions important for resilient brains - in a small study of fire-fighters (n=36), resilience was positively correlated with activity in the right amygdala, insula, and left orbitofrontal cortex when subjects listened to a stressful script (versus a relaxing script). These regions are commonly implicated in emotion regulation and interoception, suggesting that more resilient folks may be able to better recruit appropriate circuitry for emotion regulation. In a second study (n=11) where resilient special forces soldiers completed a monetary reward-anticipation task, soldiers showed less of a difference in nucleus accumbens and subgenual prefrontal cortex activity
(see right) when you look at high- vs no-reward conditions (compared to civilians) - so there may also be differences in how people higher in resilience process and respond to rewards (and presumably, failures).
(see right) when you look at high- vs no-reward conditions (compared to civilians) - so there may also be differences in how people higher in resilience process and respond to rewards (and presumably, failures).
A key part of creating resiliency is training your response to anxiety, fear, and self-doubt. Acknowledge it and then simultaneously
bring up a positive feeling, gratitude, calm, happiness. Go to your happy
place. By doing this repeatedly, you wire a positive emotion into a circuit that
was previously bringing up distress and helplessness. This process of rehearsal
and reconsolidation is a key part of how your brain encodes memories, and it
occurs in a network of regions distributed across your prefrontal cortex and
hippocampus. This technique works well for athletes who maybe having problems
performing following a bad race, slump, or injury. When negative memories –
your bike crash, the marathon you tanked – come to mind, hold onto that memory
for a few minutes while you also bring in a positive experience – that race
where you excelled, and all the great feelings that came with it. Essentially,
you’re rewiring bad to good.
Build Optimism and
Focus on Strengths. Remind yourself of what you’re great at. If you need an
objective reminder of this, go fill out the Signature Strengths Questionnaire.
Remembering the good things that are a fundamental part of you helps you separate the feelings from a failure from your
overall identity.
De-Catastrophizing. Minimize
catastrophic thinking by first identifying that “worst-case scenario” you’re
afraid of. Then, think about the actual probability of that worst possible
outcome playing out. Consider a broader range of possible outcomes, including
the best-case scenario. The simple process of thinking about a great outcome
can engender positive emotions and thoughts, and behaviors tend to stem from those thoughts! Finally, consider the most likely scenario as a possibility.
The ability to harness techniques such as these it what can
separate resilient athletes who bounce back from setbacks from the less
resilient, who have a harder time shaking off the bad. Building resilience
allows you to regroup and go out to train and compete again.
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