Build Your Resilience CBT, mindfulness and stress

management to survive and thrive in any situation

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Contents
Acknowledgements

1 Introduction: what is resilience?

The importance of resilience
Assessing your own resilience
Approaches to resilience-building
How to use this book
2 Letting go of experiential avoidance
The importance of undermining experiential avoidance
The unworkable change agenda
Maintaining resilience through creative hopelessness
3 Values clarification
The importance of commitment to valued action
Value clarification and assessment
4 Commitment to valued action
The importance of commitment to valued action
Assessing valued goals and actions
Applying goals and actions
Moving beyond barriers to action
Maintaining resilience through valued living
5 Acceptance and defusion
The importance of acceptance and defusion
Cultivating psychological flexibility
Maintaining resilience through acceptance and defusion
6 Mindfulness and the present moment
The importance of being centred
Connecting with the present moment
Being centred and self-awareness
 Mindfulness meditation
Applying mindfulness to daily life
Maintaining resilience through mindfulness
7 Progressive Relaxation
The importance of muscle tension and relaxation
Assessing your tension
Progressive Relaxation training
Maintaining resilience through Progressive Relaxation
8 Applied Relaxation
The importance of Applied Relaxation
Self-assessment and monitoring your early warning signs
Relaxation coping skills training
Applying relaxation coping skills
Maintaining resilience through relaxed living
9 Worry postponement
The importance of controlling worry
Assessment and worry recognition
Worry-postponement strategies
Worry-time strategies
Maintaining resilience through worry postponement
10 Problem-Solving Training
The importance of problem-solving
Assessing your problem-solving attitude
Problem-solving methodology
Maintaining resilience through problem-solving
11 Assertiveness and social skills
The importance of social skills
Assessing your relationships
Learning social skills
Applying social skills
Maintaining resilience through social skills
12 Stoic philosophy and resilience
The importance of philosophy
 Assessing assumptions about control
Applying stoic practices
Maintaining resilience through philosophy

Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my lovely wife, Mandy, for her endless patience, love and
support, while I was working on this book and to my beautiful baby
daughter, Poppy Louise Robertson, for playing games with me and
regularly providing some healthy diversion from work.

Thanks to our cat, Daisy ‘Meepster’ Robertson, for staying off my laptop
this time and not stomping all over the keys.

Special thanks are due to Paul Young for reading the manuscript and
providing feedback and suggestions for incorporation into the final version
of the book.

References to classical texts follow the conventional system of letter

number, or chapter and passage. Quotations from Marcus Aurelius are
based upon Gregory Hays’ translation, unless otherwise specified (Aurelius,
2003).
 1

Introduction: what is resilience?

In this chapter you will learn:
• What is meant by ‘resilience’ in psychological research on the subject
and a way of defining resilience in relation to pursuit of your personal
values in life
• What ‘risk factors’ and life events typically create increased
vulnerability to stress-related problems
• What ‘protective factors’ and coping strategies typically reduce the risk
of stress-related problems
• How to begin developing a personal resilience strategy or plan
• How to use this book and troubleshoot common problems you may
encounter while trying to build resilience.

You have power over your mind – not outside events. Realize this, and
you will find strength.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
The importance of resilience
How can you improve your ability to ‘thrive and survive’ in any situation?
What disadvantages, stresses or difficulties do you currently face? What
future problems might you need to anticipate and prepare for? What
strengths and assets have helped you to cope well with difficult events in
the past? What can you learn from the way other people deal with life’s
challenges? These are all questions about psychological resilience. Building
resilience is a way of improving your ability to cope with adversity or
stressful situations in general.

We all need some degree of resilience in order to cope with the problems
life throws at us. Indeed, research shows that resilience is normal and
involves ordinary skills and resources. Everyone is capable of being
resilient and becoming more so by developing appropriate coping
strategies. The types of adversity that demand resilience can range from
ordinary ‘daily hassles’ to major setbacks, stressful life events such as
divorce, redundancy, bankruptcy, illness or bereavement, and perhaps even
more severe trauma in some cases. Most people believe that they are at least
moderately resilient. However, few people are as resilient as they could be
in all areas of life, and there are always more aspects of resilience that can
be developed.

This book differs from the vast majority of self-help books, which are
normally assumed to serve a ‘remedial’ function by attempting to mend a
specific problem, such as overcoming depression or managing anxiety. By
contrast, the self-help approach you’re reading about here aims to serve a
more general and preventative function by improving resilience to both
current and future adversities. Building resilience also tends to improve
your wellbeing and quality of life by enhancing positive qualities like
psychological flexibility, social skills and problem-solving ability. This
book will therefore help you to expand beyond your ‘comfort zone’ and
reach out towards new values and goals, by meeting challenges and
opportunities that arise resiliently.

Exhibiting resilience does not mean completely eliminating anxiety and

other forms of distress. Many resilient people experience strong emotions
but cope well with them and overcome stressful problems anyway.
Someone who is bereaved may naturally feel extreme sadness, for example,
while still adapting well over time and avoiding developing more serious
depression as a result. Resilience does not usually mean amputating or
avoiding your emotions but rather, as we shall see, it may often involve
accepting them while actively pursuing healthy goals and personal values.

Research on ‘resilience’ is a fairly specialized area that only really began to

develop in the 1970s, and initially focused on factors that contribute to
resilience during the developmental course of childhood. However, there
has been increasing awareness that similar factors are relevant to the
resilience of adults faced with adversity and research has also been
conducted in this area. Established resilience-building programmes have
now been used to help prepare schoolchildren and college students to cope
with stress, while reducing the risk of depression and anxiety, to enhance
the performance of athletes, parental skills, teachers’ performance, and also
to improve productivity, job satisfaction, and work–life balance among
corporate employees (Reivich & Shatté, 2002, p. 11). Whereas traditional
stress management and therapy approaches generally target problems once
they have arisen, resilience-building approaches train individuals to
anticipate stress and prepare in advance to minimise its impact by
weathering the storm.

Key idea: Psychological resilience

Resilience consists of various processes, ways of thinking and acting
through which individuals adapt and cope well with adversity, without
suffering from long-term harmful consequences due to stress. It has been
defined by researchers in this field as consisting of ‘patterns of positive
adaptation during or following significant adversity’ (Masten, Cutuli,
Herbers & Reed, 2009, p. 118). Resilience employs fairly ordinary
abilities such as problem-solving, assertiveness, and dealing with your
thoughts and feelings, etc. It therefore reduces the impact of stressful life
events while also enhancing general wellbeing and quality of life.
However, there’s some ambiguity about what ‘adapting’ or ‘recovering’
mean insofar as there’s no set-in-stone definition of wellbeing. In this
book, we’ll use the approach known as ‘values clarification’ to help you
define resilience in terms of remaining committed to living in accord
 with your personal values despite encountering challenges or setbacks.
Whereas reduced anxiety and depression are seen as the ultimate goal in
some traditional approaches to resilience-building, here we view these
more as common internal barriers or obstacles to a more fundamental
aim: living in accord with your personal values.

DEFINING RESILIENCE FURTHER

Various groups of researchers have found that there are certain individuals
who tend to cope particularly well with even highly-stressful life events,
such as poverty, divorce or trauma. These challenges have little impact on
the ability of some people to function, such as their performance
academically or at work, and don’t lead to long-term stress-related or
psychological problems such as anxiety or depressive disorders. The term
‘resilient’ is used to refer to such robust individuals. ‘Resilience’ is
therefore the name of the dynamic, ongoing process whereby people cope
well with stressful events. What do we ordinarily mean by ‘resilience’? The
standard dictionary definition is derived from physics and engineering
where it refers to the capacity of a material to automatically resume its
original shape after being bent, stretched, compressed or misshapen in some
way. For example, rubber is highly resilient to physical stress whereas glass
is not. Resilience, in this sense, is linked to things like flexibility, pliability,
suppleness, springiness and elasticity. The word ultimately derives from a
Latin term, resiliens, meaning ‘to spring forward’, or leap back into
position. By analogy, the term ‘resilience’ is used in biology and medicine
to refer to the ability of an organism, such as a human being, to recover
from stress, injury or illness.

For example, bywords for resilience include the following, relating to the
ability to cope with stress and adversity:

Hardiness, toughness, strength, fortitude, adaptability, flexibility,

endurance, robustness, resourcefulness, etc.

Resilience also encompasses the notion of an ability to recover from harm

or setbacks, coping with the consequences of adversity:
 Buoyancy, bouncing back, recovery, getting back on your feet, return to
form, etc.

This aspect of resilience is also expressed as an ability for ‘self-righting’ by

modern authors. It’s sometimes said, for instance, that resilience is more
associated with a ‘survivor’ mentality whereas lack of resilience is more
associated with a ‘victim’ mentality.

In studies on children, surviving setbacks is understood in terms of

achieving typical developmental goals, performance at school, etc.
However, with adults it’s less clear how we measure resilience, i.e., what
constitutes ‘bouncing back’. One answer to this is that we can define
resilience as coping with challenges or setbacks in a way that allows you to
remain committed to living in accord with your own core values. If you
particularly value integrity, for example, resilience might involve retaining
your integrity in the face of problems or recovering it following a
temporary setback.

The opposite of psychological resilience, the inability to cope and ‘risk’ of

harmful consequences, might be expressed as:

Risk, vulnerability, susceptibility, weakness, helplessness, fragility, etc.

Psychological or emotional resilience (the two terms are often used

interchangeably) is the type of resilience focused on in this book. It has
been formally defined by researchers as:

Positive adaptation in the context of significant challenges, variously

referring to the capacity for, processes of, or outcomes of successful
life-course development during or following exposure to potentially
life-altering experiences.
(Masten, Cutuli, Herbers & Reed, 2009, p. 119)

In plain English, the term ‘resilience’ is used by psychologists to refer to

your ability to cope well with stressful events and their consequences.

Remember this: Resilience is normal

 Research on resilience shows it’s quite normal for people to cope well despite adversities and the
skills and attitudes that help people to overcome even major setbacks tend to be pretty ordinary.
You don’t need superpowers to be resilient in the face of stressful situations, just qualities like
confidence and some ability to problem-solve, interact well with other people, and handle
unpleasant emotions, etc.

CASE STUDY

Coping with noise

Throughout this book we’ll look at specific examples of resilient
individuals but let’s start with the example of a group who struggle with a
stress-related problem… For the past few years, I’ve been involved in
delivering and writing-up a series of Government-funded research studies in
which people were taught CBT strategies, similar to some of the ones in this
book, to cope with stress and improve sleep, despite problems with noise in
their environment. Our participants had bother with noisy neighbours,
traffic noise, or noise from plumbing or machinery, etc. This can cause a
huge amount of distress and some people would say they felt as though the
noise was ‘driving them mad’ at times. They often felt their quality of life
had been ruined and many had developed stress-related symptoms such as
headaches, insomnia or digestive problems. However, we soon realized that
many of our participants also lived with partners or spouses who coped
better with the noise, were less upset by it, and perhaps barely noticed it
after a while. Somehow they were being more resilient, although their
ability to ‘get used to it’ was probably just a fairly normal process of
adapting to a noisy environment. The Coping with Noise studies produced
statistical evidence showing that those who had initially struggled could be
taught coping skills that reduced their stress, despite the noise. I worked
closely with many of our participants and the ones who benefited the most,
and acquired resilience to noise-related stress, typically described how
they’d learned to accept the problem, let go of their struggle with it, and
thereby became less preoccupied with it, which ironically led them to notice
the sound less often. We’ll return to this strategy of ‘letting go’ and
‘acceptance’ in much more detail later.
Assessing your own resilience
RISK FACTORS
Risk factors are basically the various problems in life that can cause stress-
related symptoms or more serious mental health disorders and may impair
quality of life. There are four main types of challenge that are typically seen
as calling for resilience (Reivich & Shatté, 2002, p. 15):

1 Overcoming childhood problems. Resilience is required, in some cases,

to overcome developmental problems that may be ‘stacked against
you’, such as coming from an impoverished or broken home,
experiencing neglect or even abuse, and other childhood disadvantages
that might otherwise increase the risk of later psychological problems
as an adult.
2 Living with daily hassles. Resilience is employed in coping with daily
hassles, minor adversities that occur throughout life, such as arguments
in various relationships, difficulties at work, and the challenges of
everyday living.
3 Recovering from major setbacks. At some point in life, most people
will encounter highly stressful or even traumatic life events that
demand greater resilience, such as redundancy, financial problems,
bereavement, relationship break-ups, serious illness, being the victim
of violence or other serious crime or even more extreme situations
such as natural disasters, war, terrorism, etc.
4 Reaching out for greater meaning and purpose. Resilience can also be
seen as part of the process of expanding beyond our ‘comfort zone’
and reaching out toward new goals because it can be stressful and
challenging to proactively seize opportunities in life as well as
reactively coping with threats.

Often risk factors such as these have a cumulative effect. So that an

individual may suffer from a series of challenges in life, each one building
up the level of risk and threatening healthy functioning.

Key idea: Risk factors

Risk factors increase your vulnerability to long-term harm. They include
childhood developmental problems and stressful life events ranging from
 ongoing daily hassles to major setbacks or even traumas. These problems
challenge you to cope with some degree of resilience to avoid harmful
consequences, such as long-term anxiety or depression, etc., and to
remain committed to your personal values in life.

PROTECTIVE FACTORS
Protective factors reduce the risk of suffering more serious stress-related
problems such as anxiety or depression in the future, and minimise the
long-term impact of adverse events on your quality of life. They may be
‘external’, such as social support, or ‘internal’, such as your personal
attitudes and coping skills. We’ll summarize a handful of key protective
factors that contribute to general adult resilience below.

Social support
The most consistently reported protective factors are relationships within
the family or within the wider society that offer healthy emotional support
and encouragement. That’s probably the thing we know with most certainty
about resilience. People who have a supportive family, good relationships
with friends or even a positive connection to religious groups, community
groups, or similar organizations will generally tend to exhibit more
resilience in the face of adversity. Some of the benefits of healthy
relationships include:

Having positive role models to look up to and learn from

Experiencing care and support from others that you love or trust
Being able to disclose problems and share them with others who will
listen appropriately
Receiving appropriate encouragement and reassurance from others.

Moreover, acting altruistically by providing support to others has also been

found to contribute to personal resilience in some studies. Perhaps helping
others to be more resilient can also help you become more resilient yourself
sometimes.

Closely related to the importance of social support is the finding that social
skills often correlate with resilience. One might expect that individuals with
good communication skills would tend to have healthier relationships and
therefore more positive social support. Resilient people also tend to actively
make the best use of the social support available, for example, by seeking
help for certain problems, disclosing their feelings appropriately to friends
or family, etc.

Remember this: Social support is a major source of resilience

Having social support is one of the most consistently reported sources of resilience. That might be
support from within your family, from friends, or from some civic or religious group. However,
being able to appropriately access that support is therefore important and may be linked to
possessing certain social skills such as assertiveness and good communication style. Ask yourself
how you might increase your access to appropriate social support over time. Joining groups,
making friends and improving communication are long-range resilience-building strategies.

Individual characteristics
A number of similar characteristics of personal behaviour have been
reported as contributing to resilience, which we might roughly summarize
as follows:

Healthy self-esteem, self-worth, or self-acceptance, and awareness of

personal strengths and resources
Self-confidence, belief in your ability to perform competently in the
face of adversity
Good problem-solving ability, the ability to make decisions and put
plans into effect
Social skills, such as assertiveness, empathy, communication skills,
etc.
Good ‘emotional self-regulation’, the ability to appropriately handle
your thoughts, feelings and impulses to action.