In my last blog post, I described the "resilience well" and how we may find ourselves "on empty". I said that the well is refillable.
The bad news is, that once it gets near empty, it takes a long time to refill - it is a slow process at the best of times. The best thing is to never let it get even close to empty in the first place. But making sure it stays mostly filled, and keeping the revenue and expenditure of resilience relatively balanced and stable, is a commitment to make to yourself and keep.
How Does the Resilience Well get Filled?
The essence of what fills your resilience well is: "Joyful Activity". Activities which bring you personal joy, contentment, peace, and happiness. For everyone, the list of what activities do this for you will likely be different. For me, it has been some of the following things:
1. sitting and thinking, with no interruptions or distractions
2. having "nothing to do"
3. paddling in my kayak with or without company
4. riding on a bicycle going nowhere in a hurry
5. reading - especially fiction, adventure stories
6. traveling through the Internet looking at good news stories, humourous memes and videos
7. cross-country skiing, making my own trail, on a quiet day in the woods, even at night
8. camping
9. watching (and sometimes re-watching) action movies and especially series and epics
I think you can see where I take my resilience back. Your list will be different. Start now, "refilling your resilience well". Put a piece of paper up on your fridge - every time you think of something you have once enjoyed, now enjoy, or might enjoy in future, put it on your list. This list is both a prompt and a reminder to take time out of your "responsible" day and take some "me time".
Monday 27 March 2017
Monday 20 March 2017
Resilience Well Depletion - Part 1
"Resilience Well Depletion"
In this, and my next several blogs, I will be explaining my understanding of, and treatment for, "resilience well depletion".
I see this phenomenon in mothers of children with special needs; policemen; teachers; nurses; daycare providers; child protection workers; paramedics; personal support workers and care staff of all kinds in nursing homes; in fact, first responders and service people in human services of all kinds. These are where the risk is highest - but of course, "resilience well depletion" can be found in anybody where "demand on the person" has totally, and seemingly permanently exceeded, "supply of the person".
I have suffered from this myself, in fact, during my 30s - and promised myself then I would never again allow myself to let my "well get low", by ensuring I paced myself and took better care of myself from that point on. (So far) I have kept my promise to myself.
As I have seen more and more people in my practice with "resilience well depletion" I have honed my understanding and my explanation of it to people suffering from it. So now I think it is high time to write it down and make it more accessible to others.
What IS "Resilience Well Depletion"?
Imagine we have a cone-shaped well within us that is normally filled to the brim with a liquid I will call "resilience". Imagine further that the cone is marked in thirds, with the bottom third coloured red, the middle third coloured yellow, and the top third coloured green (see the picture below):
When the well is filled to the brim, there is maximum resilience available. There is also a (more or less) balance between resilience being lost (spent) and resilience being received (earned). Every day, imagine your psyche climbing the ladder to the top, and filling a large container with resilience. Then, your psyche climbs back down the ladder and goes off into life, using the container to pour out resilience on life's many challenges. Some challenges take little dabs of resilience, like scheduling appointments and completing chores. Some challenges take large amounts, like coping with a difficult boss, moving, grieving the loss of someone important to you, or coping with a medical diagnosis. All challenges, great and small, use up resilience. When your container is empty, up the ladder you go (which also spends resilience) to get some more. When you get to the top your psyche looks out on the great expanse of resilience, imagining it to be an essentially limitless supply.
But you notice from the picture, as you look toward the bottom of the cone-shaped well of resilience, the overall volume of available resilience is dramatically less the lower you go. If you continue, over a long period of time, to "spend" more resilience than you "earn back", your resilience supply will begin to drain. And the drain will accelerate. This "acceleration" of loss is not really understandable from your psyche's view. The rapidly decreasing amount of resilience is hidden from your psyche's top-down view and its ability to predict how much is left is skewed in favour of mistakenly thinking there is more than there actually is. Add in "denial" and "self-sacrifice" and your psyche will simply behave as if there is a "limitless supply". So your psyche does what it has always done, scoops up a container and heads back up and down the ladder, essentially blind to the increasingly fast loss of resilience as time goes on.
If you don't replenish the well, the level of resilience falls, faster and faster, until you're in the yellow zone. You need to get a smaller container to get resilience into, and you make more trips up and down the ladder. You begin to get more and more tired, but hey! you've been doing this for a long time and you still harbour the idea that your resilience is essentially infinite in supply. You are starting to get little "signs" that your resilience is waning, but you just keep going.
Once your resilience gets to the "red zone", however, you are now in really big trouble. Your body's survival reflexes begin to trigger on and off, seemingly to your psyche, unpredictably. You begin to wonder what's wrong with you. You find yourself unexpectedly exhausted from what used to be simple tasks and problems. Your autonomic nervous system begins to trigger on, putting you in "fight or flight" mode - where your heart races, adrenalin flows, breathing is fast and shallow, and seemingly you are unable to take a deep, relaxing breath. You suffer digestive system discomfort such as nausea, diarrhea or both. As the blood is directed by your ANS to the larger muscles, flowing away from your extremities, you may feel light-headed or faint, your hands and feet getting cold and clammy, or shaking uncontrollably. You may break into sweats and your hair stand on end, giving goose pimples on your flesh - probably your body's way of cooling yourself down in case, through running like hell or fighting, you overheat. These are all the ANS's built-in behaviours for helping you survive a predator or danger - except, looking around, you don't see any such thing. The danger, which your body may recognize and your mind may not, is that your well is in danger of running dry! Your parasympathetic nervous system may also begin to "misfire", making the same appraisal that you are under threat and need to go into survival mode. You may be "paralyzed with inaction", lose your initiative and "get up and go". You wonder if you are "losing your marbles". But that's not it - no, you are losing your resilience.
If you run yourself right down below a "safe" threshold of resilience, you might simply wake up one morning and you can't get out of bed, not even to help your child with a disability, or put on your uniform to go out and save people from themselves, or "answer the call".
In my next blog, I can tell you that there is good news. The "resilience well" is REFILLABLE. And, there is a way you can work to keep it filled, by making sure there is enough resilience flowing back into the well to make up for any deficit in resilience that has occurred over time. And the really good news is that how to earn resilience is actually FUN!
When the well is filled to the brim, there is maximum resilience available. There is also a (more or less) balance between resilience being lost (spent) and resilience being received (earned). Every day, imagine your psyche climbing the ladder to the top, and filling a large container with resilience. Then, your psyche climbs back down the ladder and goes off into life, using the container to pour out resilience on life's many challenges. Some challenges take little dabs of resilience, like scheduling appointments and completing chores. Some challenges take large amounts, like coping with a difficult boss, moving, grieving the loss of someone important to you, or coping with a medical diagnosis. All challenges, great and small, use up resilience. When your container is empty, up the ladder you go (which also spends resilience) to get some more. When you get to the top your psyche looks out on the great expanse of resilience, imagining it to be an essentially limitless supply.
But you notice from the picture, as you look toward the bottom of the cone-shaped well of resilience, the overall volume of available resilience is dramatically less the lower you go. If you continue, over a long period of time, to "spend" more resilience than you "earn back", your resilience supply will begin to drain. And the drain will accelerate. This "acceleration" of loss is not really understandable from your psyche's view. The rapidly decreasing amount of resilience is hidden from your psyche's top-down view and its ability to predict how much is left is skewed in favour of mistakenly thinking there is more than there actually is. Add in "denial" and "self-sacrifice" and your psyche will simply behave as if there is a "limitless supply". So your psyche does what it has always done, scoops up a container and heads back up and down the ladder, essentially blind to the increasingly fast loss of resilience as time goes on.
If you don't replenish the well, the level of resilience falls, faster and faster, until you're in the yellow zone. You need to get a smaller container to get resilience into, and you make more trips up and down the ladder. You begin to get more and more tired, but hey! you've been doing this for a long time and you still harbour the idea that your resilience is essentially infinite in supply. You are starting to get little "signs" that your resilience is waning, but you just keep going.
Once your resilience gets to the "red zone", however, you are now in really big trouble. Your body's survival reflexes begin to trigger on and off, seemingly to your psyche, unpredictably. You begin to wonder what's wrong with you. You find yourself unexpectedly exhausted from what used to be simple tasks and problems. Your autonomic nervous system begins to trigger on, putting you in "fight or flight" mode - where your heart races, adrenalin flows, breathing is fast and shallow, and seemingly you are unable to take a deep, relaxing breath. You suffer digestive system discomfort such as nausea, diarrhea or both. As the blood is directed by your ANS to the larger muscles, flowing away from your extremities, you may feel light-headed or faint, your hands and feet getting cold and clammy, or shaking uncontrollably. You may break into sweats and your hair stand on end, giving goose pimples on your flesh - probably your body's way of cooling yourself down in case, through running like hell or fighting, you overheat. These are all the ANS's built-in behaviours for helping you survive a predator or danger - except, looking around, you don't see any such thing. The danger, which your body may recognize and your mind may not, is that your well is in danger of running dry! Your parasympathetic nervous system may also begin to "misfire", making the same appraisal that you are under threat and need to go into survival mode. You may be "paralyzed with inaction", lose your initiative and "get up and go". You wonder if you are "losing your marbles". But that's not it - no, you are losing your resilience.
If you run yourself right down below a "safe" threshold of resilience, you might simply wake up one morning and you can't get out of bed, not even to help your child with a disability, or put on your uniform to go out and save people from themselves, or "answer the call".
In my next blog, I can tell you that there is good news. The "resilience well" is REFILLABLE. And, there is a way you can work to keep it filled, by making sure there is enough resilience flowing back into the well to make up for any deficit in resilience that has occurred over time. And the really good news is that how to earn resilience is actually FUN!
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