All women deal with adversity, but the harder part is learning to respond to adversity in a way that leads to recovery and good health.
Mary Steinhardt, a health education professor at the University of Texas at Austin, knows about adversity and resilience as the director of a resilience education program.
“Adversity is something that challenges us, that stresses our capacity in some way, that we might struggle with,” Steinhardt said. “If I have some stable foundation, adversity pushes me off of that stable foundation, and then I have to use my strength and resources to bounce back to where I was.”
Resilience is “the ability to bounce back from adversity and fully recover,” she said.
The inability to become resilient is when people “flounder,” she added.
“That’s when people get stuck in a rut,” Steinhardt said. “That’s when people are kind of putting up with just the daily stressors without doing anything about it.”
She said that’s a problem because then people aren’t growing.
“If they do that long enough, not only are they not growing, but they atrophy,” Steinhardt said.
She said she thinks everyone is born with resilience, but the capacity can increase or decrease.
“In this fast-paced world, I’m hoping that we’re out there trying to take advantage of [resilience],” Steinhardt said.
She offers an online program in resilience that covers ways to become more resilient.
“We need to take responsibility rather than live in denial or blame somebody else or make excuses or shame ourself,” Steinhardt said. “We need to take more and more responsibility, which is kind of owning our power to choose and create for ourself more in our life.”
The second way to improve resilience is to have a certain way of thinking.
“We need to think in ways that bring power to us instead of so much negativity and thinking that takes us to blame and shame and denial,” Steinhardt said.
Also, people need to make “meaningful connections” with others throughout life, she said.
“We all experience adversity, and when we experience adversity, if we can take responsibility for that, think in empowering ways and connect with others, then we have a greater chance of bouncing back…and having more and more moments of thriving in our life,” Steinhardt said.
A Psychology Today article also mentioned that having an agile mind can increase resilience, since it allows people to change their focus and create new solutions, instead of becoming rigid and limited in thinking. For example, having an agile mind can lead to new ideas of how to become happier and to overcome obstacles, and then applying those ideas.
Steinhardt uses the analogy of a muscle to explain adversity and resilience.
“If I want to get stronger physically, if I want my muscle to get stronger, I stress the muscle,” Steinhardt said, adding that this would then be followed by rest and recovery.
She said psychological and emotional wellness and other dimensions of wellness are similar.
“We stress those muscles and then we back off and rest and recover,” Steinhardt said. “The difference is that we might plan to go to the gym to stress our physical muscle, where the other dimensions of wellness we kind of get blindsided.”
However, people have to use those unexpected situations as opportunities to grow, she said.
For most people, stress is a good thing and can help in growth, but in certain circumstances it’s not as helpful.
“We have to acknowledge that sometimes bad things happen to good people,” Steinhardt said.
Steinhardt said she works with military spouses who overcome adversity daily when their husbands are in Afghanistan or Iraq.
“They see adversity as being a single parent, and they handle the day – get the kids to school, do their job, help the kids deal with the anxiety of dad being gone,” she said.
Students may also deal with adversity relating to test and homework stress, she added.
“To a student on an everyday basis who’s handling the stress of school, in their world that might be just as significant [an] adversity to them as…somebody else’s story,” Steinhardt said.
Another example is a diabetic who just hears the news that she will lose her right foot, she said.
“At some point in our lives, we all handle adversity in various degrees of stress or challenge[s],” Steinhardt said.
She said she sees more women taking on parenting and work challenges all at once.
“They have this supermom thing going on or superwoman thing going on because we tend to…care more about nurturing others and caring about others and their feelings,” Steinhardt. “We tend to spend more time doing a lot of service-oriented things and still hold down jobs and go home and cook dinner and raise children and all of that.”
Although “times are changing” and men and women are becoming more equal in their roles, she still sees women having more multiple roles.
“That’s not true in the majority of cases at least that I experience,” Steinhardt said. “I always love hearing a story where maybe you have a stay-at-home dad…but by and large, I still think women are trying to be excellent at their job, being they’re the primary nurturer of children. Often, when they come to work, they’re the primary nurturer at work.”
She also does research on burnout, stress and depression in teachers.
“It would make sense that…teachers who are more stressed tend to feel…more burned out,” Steinhardt said. “Teachers who are more burned out tend to be more depressed.”
She said the pace of life is so fast right now and people don't stop and reflect as much, and the economy can be a stressor. Some people are even having to work two jobs.
"If you lift weights and never put the weight down, you could get injured too," Steinhardt said. "When the pace of life is so fast that people never rest, they're going to break down."
Resources:
http://www.edb.utexas.edu/steinhardt/index.htm
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/imperfect-spirituality/201005/want-be-more-resilient-work-developing-agile-mind