I recently wrote an article called Your Resiliency Toolbox. In that article, I discussed the various, myriad ways you can maintain your resiliency, your emotional strength and power, and some of the differences of what helps you not thrive versus thrive beautifully.
We all respond to things differently, and there are a lot of variations or reasons why we’re not always 100 percent. And that’s where your resiliency toolbox comes in. It helps you pick and choose the tools you’ll need at any given challenge in life, and life is challenge. Life is change. And we don’t always respond to change with the grace and strength that we want.
After publishing that article, I realized I only covered a small portion of the value of resiliency. Resiliency in simplistic terms is the ability to thrive and to survive situations. And we don’t just have mental challenges, we also have emotional, physical and spiritual challenges. And being able to thrive and survive those requires resiliency. I believe that the tools I gave for your mental resiliency — in your resiliency toolbox — will help with your emotional, physical and spiritual resiliency as well. But I really want to focus on the physical resiliency, because right now, during COVID, we all need a lot more strength and stick-to-itiveness to overcome this.
Now, COVID does also give us emotional and spiritual challenges. So, developing resiliency for that is also important. Community is huge. And a positive attitude, one of where you believe that things will turn out well — you kind of work for it sometimes, but you have to have faith. You also have to have the belief that life is a rainbow of opportunities and options. It’s not black and white. And that right there helps with not just the mental, but also emotional, physical and spiritual challenges.
But I think physical challenges are real important to talk about right now, as I just said, and I believe that when you focus on getting good quality sleep, that’s a good start. Moving regularly throughout the day is another good and important start. And I’ve got this theory that, if you can’t move because you’ve had surgery, you’re sick, something doesn’t let you move as fully and completely as you want to and need to, try inner movement, inner physicality. In the 70s, inner tennis was a big deal and people have taken that on to other inner games. But I like the idea of inner movement, so that you can see yourself walking, or stretching, bending, lifting — all of those activities that we need to have a really healthy body.
And then having a good, healthy diet is also important to have resilience. The sleep and the movement help with that. But it’s what you eat and drink that also matters. Drop the faux colors and flavors, the fake sugars. You need to eat whole foods. You need to drink water. Other beverages are fine, but you’ve got to do water. I mean, a huge proportion or portion of your body is water. So, keep that ratio of water going and fresh in your body. I’m not going to tell you what diet to eat. We all have our own theories. But make sure yours is a sound theory based in science. And your body often tells you how it’s responding to your nutrition.
Get your numbers tested. Go get your blood work done so that you know what your triglycerides are, what your cholesterol is, though I don’t think cholesterol is quite the telling marker that we want. But your homocysteine…there are a lot of numbers that we often don’t think of that are important. So build your resiliency not just mentally, but also emotionally, physically and spiritually, and see how your life blossoms and see how your enjoyment in life is more fulfilling, more joyous.
I think that is a lot of what life is about, is the joy. And feeling good. Doesn’t hurt a bit in feeling the joy.
The article on the topic: Your Resiliency Toolbox