Building Resilience

Living with mental illness can feel overwhelming, debilitating, and that there’s no way out. This isn’t true however – building resiliency can help you from these thoughts and feelings from taking over and making things worse.

We’ve briefly talked about resiliency before. Having resilience means having something, or several things, to help you manage difficult situations, creating almost a shield or barrier from the effects of mental illness. This doesn’t mean that resiliency is a cure from mental illnesses, but it gives you more power and strength to fight back against them and to help you cope better. These include things like building the skills for more positive thinking, having a support system, finding hobbies, and treating yourself with kindness.

If you aren’t sure how your resiliency is, or if you want to find ways to strengthen it, Resiliency in Action has a quiz that helps you figure out where you’re at. The quiz isn’t traditional, per se: you don’t get a score on it and it’s more of a checklist, but it’s still a way to see what protective factors are in your life to help you now and to see what you can do to add more of them to your everyday routine. 

There are several ways you can use this quiz. You can just take it once to see where you’re at now, or you can take it now, make a list of resiliency goals, and do a follow-up quiz a few months from now to see if you’ve met them. Of course, you don’t have to have all of the items on the list checked off to be happy and resilient, but it’s a way to navigate what you think is best for you when battling negative thoughts when things get rough.

What are your coping mechanisms when it comes to living with mental illness? What recommendations do you have to build resiliency?