Last updated April 11, 2024
Here’s our guide to building emotional resilience, enabling you to navigate life’s challenges and emerge even more resilient.
Life is full of unexpected twists and turns and traumatic events. And how well you adapt to these stressful situations often depends on how resilient you are. However, if you feel like your emotional resilience is currently lacking, there are things you can do to improve it.
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Just because you have struggled to navigate what life has thrown at you in the past, does not mean you can’t better manage the unpredictable and stressful things you might face in the future.
What Is Emotional Resilience?
The American Psychological Association defines emotional resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress.”
Dealing with such things is understandably challenging, but they don’t have to shape your entire life in a negative way. The more resilient you are, the more you can learn to bounce back and actually experience personal growth from the adversities you face.
This is not to say that emotional resilience is about winning every battle. Even people who already have a high emotional resilience can still experience distress and find themselves on the “losing end” of a problem.
Resilience isn’t about winning; it’s about perseverance. If something knocks you down, your resilience is what enables you to keep pushing forward despite what losses you might have faced.
Six Steps to Help You Build Better Emotional Resilience
There are many proven ways to build emotional resilience, with the three primary areas of focus being physical, psychological and social. Below are six ways you can target these three areas of focus through specific and actionable tips.
1. Balance Hobbies with Everyday Life
Having hobbies is a great way to find an outlet for your feelings and the stress of everyday life, and having a positive coping outlet can boost mental health and enable you to develop better emotional resilience.
That said, too many hobbies can also be a source of stress as it can create an imbalance in your daily schedule. You want to make sure you aren’t focusing on too many hobbies as a way of avoiding dealing with your life.
To find a better hobby-life balance try:
- Learning to say no to activities that are less important and cause too much of a distraction;
- Scheduling out time blocks for your hobbies so you aren’t spending too much time on them;
- Focusing on one hobby at a time;
- Setting realistic goals for your hobbies;
- Having a dedicated and organized space for your hobbies to keep them separate from the rest of your life.
2. Travel More Often
Traveling is an excellent way to build emotional resilience as it targets all three of the primary focuses. When you travel and explore new places it can improve your physical health and vitality because of the extra walking and physical activities people do while traveling.
It can boost your mental health because it can help build awareness, adaptability and confidence. Plus it targets the social factor because when you travel, you will meet new people and will have to learn to communicate in situations that force you out of your comfort zone.
Traveling can also be a way for many people to de-stress, and learning how to better manage stress is an important aspect of building emotional resilience. When you travel, try using all five senses to enhance your experience and help you release more stress.
Soak up the beauty around you, discover new sounds, embrace new textures, savor new flavors and immerse yourself in the aromas.
3. Improve Your Emotional Intelligence
A counterpart to emotional resilience is emotional intelligence. These two things go hand-in-hand. When you improve your emotional intelligence, it can help boost your ability to be more resilient.
Where resilience is our ability to adapt to emotionally stressful situations, emotional intelligence is our ability to perceive and express our emotions. In order to be able to appropriately respond and adapt to a difficult problem, you must first be able to perceive and understand the problem, which is where your emotional intelligence comes into play.
To work on improving your emotional intelligence, you need to practice being more self-aware, such as being able to recognize what you are feeling and acknowledging your own biases. It’s also about understanding how your behaviors impact others.
Being able to regulate your emotions and not letting them get the better of you is also important, as well as building your empathy for others.
4. Practice Mindfulness and Gratitude
There are a number of well-being rituals that can also help you build your emotional resilience. Mindful thinking, for example, can help ground you and restore hope when you are facing difficult situations.
You can practice mindfulness by giving your full attention to the present moment and then later ruminating on the positive aspects of your experiences instead of getting caught up on the negative.
This is also a form of gratitude practice. Instead of drowning in all of the things that are bringing you down, try to give more attention to the good things, as this will help you adapt and be more resilient when in the face of adversity.
5. Prioritize Building Stronger Relationships
Building better interpersonal relationships is also key to being more resilient. In building stronger relationships, we tend to widen our perspective. This can change the way we see the world and ourselves, which can give us the strength to endure and overcome our problems.
So the next time you spend time with someone, try to focus on genuinely connecting with them and being more receptive to their perspective.
6. Take Care of Your Body
Physical health is important because when you strengthen your body, you also strengthen your mind and a strong mind is essential for emotional resilience. Every aspect of your body and mind is connected, so if your body isn’t getting what it needs, then neither is your mind, which can make it harder for you to deal with stressful situations.
Do your best to make time every day to strengthen your body, even if it’s just a 20-minute walk or some yoga and stretching.
How to Build Emotional Resilience
Last, but not least, if you are struggling, remember that it’s okay to ask for help. There is nothing wrong with seeking professional guidance if you need help building your emotional resilience.
There are a number of different therapies available today that can help improve your resilience, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), psychodynamic therapy, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) and even eco-therapy.
Everyone is different and there is no one right way to build emotional resilience. The things that trigger us are personal and thus the way we each deal with those things can also be unique and personal.
Strengthening your emotional resilience is all about finding what works best for you and your individual needs.
About the author:
Sam Bowman enjoys writing about people, wellness and adventure, and how they merge. He enjoys taking trips by himself, with his friends or even with his dog. In his spare time, he likes running, reading and combining the two in a run to his local bookstore.
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