Building Resilience to Chronic Stress
I think we can agree: adult human life can be stressful! Especially nowadays. For some, stress is temporary and relatively infrequent. Having a looming deadline, being on the outs with a friend, your car having problems, running out of sick days at work, moving, or any other common life challenge. With these, it can be easier to feel relief after they’ve passed. For others, stress is more chronic being a day-in-day-out reality. Being a primary caregiver, having health issues, financial insecurity, demanding workplace, or many other long-term difficulties. When talking about stress that lasts for an extended period of time, we shift from moments of higher anxiety while the stressor is present (might take a few days to a week to get your car figured out) to unrelenting stress that is quite draining (truly not knowing when circumstances might be different or knowing it will be a long time).
Building resilience to stress
What I mean when I say “building resilience” is growing one’s ability to adapt. You may hear this concept talked about as “bouncing back” when things get difficult. But I think that’s a bit reductive, not to mention kind of arbitrary. Is the goal being as though that stress never happened? Feeling great? Or, being so stably rooted in yourself that you can accept the stress and know you’ve got yourself through the challenges? Clearly, I’m a vote for the latter.
Knowing how to deal with chronic stress and anxiety is key for your overall mental health and physical health. The goal isn’t to make the stressors go away, that would be impossible most of the time, but to move through them without wear and tear on your mind and body. To learn more about that wear and tear, check out our blog that goes in-depth about the impacts of chronic stress both mentally and physically here!
What are resilience strategies and skills?
Big picture, resilience strategies and skills are practices that help you to cope with challenges. Cool…but what are resilience skills really? And how do resilience strategies actually help?
Stress resilience techniques are healthy ways of managing higher intensity emotions like anxiety, anger, or fear. It’s important to specify the health of coping skills because true stress management and resilience is finding lasting relief, not just immediate relief. Unhealthy coping methods are behaviors geared towards a 'quick fix' to distance ourselves from the difficult emotions we're having. They're going to provide short-term relief, yes, but don't move us towards real adjustment or healing.
It might feel helpful to go out every night doing something social and typically fun for you. On the flip side, you could feel drained or so overwhelmed and choose to stay in for weeks or months. Both of these are behaviors of avoidance that distance you from feelings or situations that bring up those tougher thoughts and feelings, but neither fosters processing nor are sustainable.
Common unhelpful behaviors people tend to do are over-working, staying busy, substance use, avoiding certain people or places, self-isolation, and emotional detachment or dissociation. If you find yourself consistently engaging with any of these or other avoiding or numbing behaviors on a consistent basis, I encourage you to explore what these responses give to your long-term, if there are alternatives that might be more beneficial, and maybe seek support from a professional in finding your way forward.
Healthy coping behaviors help you reconcile what you're experiencing that has thrown things off kilter. These behaviors empower self-care, facilitate flexible mindsets, enable perseverance, and ultimately promote action over avoidance. These resilience skills center taking care of yourself to prevent burnout, calm the body and mind, and equip you to handle moments of pressure. This can include things like exercise, intentional breathing, journaling, talking to friends, making time for rest, and engaging in hobbies or fun activities.
Stress resilience helps to build mental flexibility and strength reframing challenges to help the adjustment process. These behaviors help us minimize spiraled thinking, increase our comfort and tolerance of difficult experiences, and more quickly bring us to hopeful solution-focused thinking than procrastination or denial.
Overall, increased resilience to stress allows us to reduce the impacts of potential adversity in life to maintain mental and physical well-being. Coping with stress and anxiety is focused on recovering and adapting leading to more stability despite the ebbs and flows of life.
Stress resilience: coping strategies for anxiety and stress
Here’s some tips you can experiment with in daily life to deal with chronic stress and anxiety.
Acceptance → Stress will happen. You are bound to feel anxious, no matter how brief, at some point. Let that exist.
Ignoring or pushing against stressors will only exacerbate the hardships. If we brush something under a rug and turn our back to it, there’s still stuff under that rug even if it’s no longer in eyesight. Like this, the stressor will still be present and affecting you whether you recognize it and deal with it or not. Acknowledging what’s going on and accepting that it’s the reality of the moment will set you up on good footing to adjust to the circumstances and move through them with as minimal impact as possible.
Focus on what you can control → Though you can’t control everything, you can probably control some aspect of most situations. Shift your focus from planning and control for alllll the things to the few things you may actually be able to influence.
I encourage my clients to break this down really specifically. If the stress feels like it’s just piling up or coming from a lot of directions, focus on the next 5-10 minutes. Run through your mental rolodex of stress points and see if there is anything you can do about it in the next 5-10 minutes. If you can’t, let that one go for the time being. If there isn’t anything you can do for any of your stressors in that time frame, it sounds like it’s time for some self-care! Read our post about caring for yourself no matter how busy you are here.
Make meaning → Listen, some situations are extremely shitty. Toxic positivity of silver linings and looking on the bright side no matter what is not where we’re going with this one. Can those mindsets be helpful and beneficial sometimes? Totally! But sometimes pressuring yourself to do that when it just feels freaking unnatural is likely going to make things harder, not easier.
That being said, trying to find meaning in moments does build resilience to stress. This may be seeing an opportunity for growth, testing a change you’ve been wanting to make or recently committed to, or being able to reflect inward towards your values and being able to act in ways that prioritize things of value. It can also be consciously trying to recognize positives in life totally unrelated to the stress like things you may be grateful for still having or small daily pleasures. No matter what, you’ll have identified a sense of meaning in your circumstances which is powerful for overall mental health.
Take care of your physical self → I know this one sounds silly and trite. But it’s common advice for a reason. Although stress may first be realized in the brain, it is experienced by the body.
Our stress response starts with the release of chemicals and hormones and then moves throughout the body impacting pretty much every organ system. We’ve gone into detail about this in a few blogs that you can check out here and here! When your body is more physically equipped, the impacts of the stress response are minimized (which also means the stress feels less intense when it happens!). So eat well for your body, get enough sleep, move your body when possible, and try to do the things we’ve been preached to about since elementary school in a moderation that is sustainable for you.
Connect with others → Sometimes space to do immediate processing of stress is the jam. But isolating yourself, especially for extended time, can actually be counterproductive!
Social connection is a powerful buffer against stress. Now I don’t necessarily mean go and do all the socializing you can. Simply spending time in the presence of your supportive people - be it friends, family, support group, therapist, etc. - can be beneficial. Time with your closest support system might be a really great place to vent and improve your mood from getting some quality time in and distance from the stressors in play.
Find your core stress management techniques → There’s hundreds of options out there to help manage stress. I work with clients on finding a handful (or two) that really resonate with them and feel good.
Activities rooted in mindfulness, breathing, bodily movement, and self-care are all helpful in activating the body’s relaxation response to counteract stress responses. We’ve got some pretty good ideas with explanations in this blog post and this one!
Learn and honor your limits → Discover what your limits are, set boundaries around them, and honor those boundaries.
Living with limits around your responsibilities and activities helps to avoid overload and overwhelm. This may look like boundaries with yourself like, “I may not enjoy X, but I know I would feel better if I did it” or “I will be able to relax more easily/be more present at dinner with my partner/have more energy for my other obligations if I did Y”. This may also look like increasing your comfort with saying no to others and setting interpersonal boundaries to support your mental and emotional bandwidth.
Be patient and compassionate with yourself → Stress is stressful and change takes time.
Let yourself be human and have human reactions to your world. Being frustrated with yourself for your reactions, thoughts, and feelings will actually add unnecessary stress to what you’re already feeling. Censoring yourself to fit a certain vision of being or progress leads to a vicious cycle counterproductive to stress resilience and coping with anxiety.
Building resilience to stress takes commitment and practice, but it allows you to live your best life even under less than ideal circumstances. Stress is an unavoidable part of life, so there’s certainly value in building up the skills to withstand it as much as possible. With time and consistency adopting these strategies, you will shift into a place of more calm, hope, and confidence dealing with chronic stress and anxiety.
If you are wanting to continue and expand on this type of work in therapy for anxiety and stress, I’d love to join you! Reach out to me here for us to get started.
As always, take good care of yourself
-Elise