Stop and Smell the Flowers

How To Build Your Resilience

How many times have you heard the advice – stop and smell the roses? We all know about it, but do we do it?

Life seems to pass by, for most of us, at an unprecedented rate with our commitments, careers, family obligations, and the general need to be busy. This day and age has been dubbed, “The Age of Greed and Speed”.

It is not unhealthy to live a varied, exciting, fulfilling life. What becomes unhealthy is our attitude about our commitments, and what can become an addiction to an overwrought and strung-out nervous system as we attempt to continually address the demands on our time and energy. 

Stress, Emotions, and Resilience

This nefarious negative emotional upheaval is often called stress, distress, or upset, and studies have shown an association with a variety of pathological conditions, including hypertension, silent myocardial ischemia, sudden cardiac death, coronary disease, cardiac arrhythmia, sleep disorders, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, neurogenerative diseases, fatigue, and many other disorders.

Stress is emotional dis-ease, the experience of which ranges from low-grade feelings of emotional unrest to intense inner turbulence. Stressful emotions arise in response to external challenges or events, and from ongoing internal dialogues and attitudes. Recurring feelings of worry, anxiety, anger, judgment, resentment, impatience, overwhelm, and self-doubt often consume a large part of our energy and dull our day-to-day experiences.

However, we need our emotions. They infuse life with a rich texture and transform our conscious experience into a meaningful life experience. It is our emotions that help us to understand what we care about and what motivates us. Because of emotion, we connect, protect and support those we love, we develop the courage to do what needs to be done, we appreciate our successes, and we have compassion and kindness for those who need our help. 

Emotions are also what allow us to experience the pain and grief of loss. In other words, without emotions, life lacks meaning and purpose.

Much more than thoughts alone, emotions activate the physiological changes comprising the stress response. Resilience and emotions are closely related because emotions are the primary drivers of our physiology, and affect the key processes involved in energy regulation. Therefore, it behooves us to learn more about emotional management within ourselves.

At The HeartMath Institute, we define resilience as “having the capacity to prepare for, recover from and adapt in the face of stress, adversity and challenge”. Therefore, it follows that a condition to sustain good health, optimal function, and resilience is the ability to direct one’s emotions.

Resilience is a state, not a trait, and can vary over time as demands, circumstances, and maturity change.

Self Regulation Skills

Research supports that positive emotions and effective emotion self-regulation improve and prolong health and can reduce premature mortality.

Most people would agree that it is the ability to adjust and self-regulate one’s responses and behavior that is most important in building and maintaining supportive, loving relationships, and effectively meeting life’s demands with composure, consistency, and integrity. The ability to adjust and self-regulate is also central to resilience, good health, effective decision-making, and living life with greater kindness and compassion.

We are beginning to understand health not as the absence of disease, but rather as the process by which individuals maintain their sense of coherence and the ability to function in the face of changes within themselves and within their environments.

The ability to step back and generate awareness about one’s current state and circumstances is a start to building coherence in one’s life. 

The story of Nan, in a book by Elizabeth Berg, exposes a woman in the throes of self-examination and re-evaluation of her life, as she asks the question,” Is this busyness, this running, this rat race, what’s become of my life? Is endless responsibility all there is? When did I vacate my spacious heart and learn to live in the two-dimensional world of lists?” 

It is a scary place to lose oneself to a life that doesn’t feel like one’s own, and to misplace precious parts of the self. Humans are the only species that can become the “walking dead” – completely disconnected from the heart. 

Life is a mix of experience, and when imbalance sets in, it is within our power to set it right again. We have the inner power and skills to do so – if we choose.

Getting out in nature is one way to begin the healing journey. It is a land of magical balance where primal forces bring us back into a mindful appreciation of life. Make it a point to stop, get off the wheel of life, and smell the flowers. All it takes is a moment of quiet and clarity to bring us back to ourselves and to keep our minds safely anchored in our hearts.

If you can hardly remember what it feels like to stop and absorb the sun on your face, the beauty of the night sky, a nourishing touch, or a moment of stillness that touches your soul, you have lost yourself in your crazy, busy life. When you lose track of your center, everything becomes harder and less graceful.