Resilience and Your Health

Resilience and Your Health is a program designed to assist you in learning and practicing the skills and attitudes of resilience so that you can better manage your health and navigate the healthcare system.  The program provides the opportunity to practice these skills and attitudes as you attempt to manage these challenges and the healthcare system.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction and Purpose.
  2. Ten skills and attitudes that can increase resilience.
  3. So how prepared are you to deal with a medical challenge/crisis? Take your own inventory.
  4. Post-traumatic growth? The Post-traumatic Growth Inventory. Have the bad things that happened in your life made you a stronger person?
  5. Some things to do before a medical crisis/challenge.
    1. Learn to be an effective communicator and maybe even a storyteller.
    2. Learn to practice gratitude.
    3. Become a better problem solver.
    4. Learn to calm down: The art of self-regulation.
    5. Develop and follow a plan for building your resilience.
  6. Some things to unlearn.
    1. Change your thinking: Don’t be a catastrophic thinker.
    2. Stop being a pessimist: Examine the way you explain events in your life.
    3. Learn to avoid thinking traps.
  7. Dealing with a disaster in your community.
  8. Resilience and young people.
  9. Apply what you have learned: 20 questions.
  10. Use of the program.

I. Introduction and Purpose

Life has no shortage of personal challenges and disasters, some small, such as a minor car accident, or some major, such as a serious illness or disability. The program that follows contains information about the skills and the attitudes of resilience. Resilience is the ability to manage adversity in your life, to bounce back. It is not a trait that is inherited. But research has shown repeatedly is a set of skills and attitudes that create mental toughness and it can be learned and applied in dealing with both life’s minor and major challenges. Just as we know that reinforcing a bridge may make it stronger and less likely to be washed away by a flood, we know that reinforcing an individual’s coping skills, their resilience, can make it less likely that they will be overwhelmed, washed away, in the same flood.

In the healthcare field, we have known for many, many years that the attitude that a patient takes in confronting an illness or a disability will play a major role in the patient’s recovery. We also know that the skills and the attitudes that we apply in dealing with life’s challenges on a daily basis can have a major impact on our health, either positive or negative.

We know that individuals handle adversity in many different ways and that the different approaches and strategies that they make use of have been learned and shaped by the culture, society and family system in which they grew up and of which they are a part.

The program was written and designed by Ron Breazeale, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist, and Richard Lumb, Ph.D., an educator and researcher. The program is based on their work and is also based on the research and practice over the past 30 years of other psychologists, physicians and professionals, such as Dr. Martin Seligman. We would encourage you to spend time with the program. Here are 10 of the common skills and attitudes that resilient individuals often share.

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