Resilience Lite: Strategies for Staying Emotionally Healthy
November 15, 2017
Exercise, eat well, get enough sleep – you probably already know the keys to being physically healthy. At this GrTS, Justin Barker and Amanda Bloom from USU’s Center for Counseling and Psychology Services (CAPS) shared how you can keep your mind healthy when life gets overwhelming.
If you want to succeed in your graduate program, you need to take care of yourself. Every individual needs work to do and engage with something or someone they love. This work-life balance is something that can quickly become out of sync and cause stress or even burn you out during your graduate program.
Stress was not conceptualized until the mid-1950’s! The term was only starting to be used in biology, and not yet psychology. Stress defined is the failure of an organism to respond appropriately to real or perceived threats. For graduate students, there are many real and perceived threats. We simply have to learn how to respond to them appropriately.
Stress as a student can be good or bad. Simply matriculating into school, making progress on your thesis or dissertation, or developing positive relationships with those around you are all good types of stress. These stressors can bring positive changes into your life, but only if they are responded to appropriately. If we begin to respond to these good stressors inappropriately we may begin to experience distress.
When you begin to become overly stressed, you can start to feel irritable, tired, or have a hard time remembering things. Some people also experience tense muscles and have an increased chance of sickness. When you begin experiencing these things, there are some steps you should take to try and remedy the unbalance in your life.
Some quick interventions you can try are breathing techniques, meditation, or visualization. But you must go beyond and try to remedy the unbalance. First, identify what is stressing you out. Second, evaluate if this is needless stress and can be delegated or simply cast to the side. Next, try to cultivate the attitude of “don’t sweat the small stuff.” perfectionism is the enemy to happiness and progression.
All of these things help you develop the skill of resilience. Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity. Resilience does not mean you won’t experience difficulties, likely it will be the opposite. The road to resilience is likely to involve considerable emotional distress. But it is something that anyone can develop and learn.
For more information on how to develop resilience and manage the stress in your life, watch the video above or contact the CAPS office.