Building resilience takes time, especially if you’re coming from a low place, so be patient while you build yourself up, and seek support for the journey

Resilience is the ability to withstand stress and return to an original shape or condition. It’s elasticity, the bounce-back-ability of a person, or substance.

When you think of an equipment bag, you might think of climbing gear, or gauze, or firearms. It depends on your field. But when you think of a mental health equipment bag, you might think of self-care, calming techniques, or maybe coping mechanisms.

Do you have resilience in your mental health equipment bag? If you don’t, you’re missing the No. 1 tool for mental health, and you need to pack that in there right away.

The Stress Response

Stress affects our whole lives. It affects our mood, our physical health, our relationships, our careers … everything. You’ve had bad days, and you know how easily it can affect your mood, but did you know it can affect your health?

Chronic stress can affect your health by increasing fatigue and creating anxiety, which can lead to depression, and even increase your risk of cardiovascular problems. While trying to deal with stress, some people could be prone to bad habits, like smoking or drinking, that could increase health risks.

Your response to stress may be to push it aside and ignore it, or it may be to deal with it aggressively. Either poses more risk. If ignored, stress can compound and become worse so it’s harder to deal with. If dealt with aggressively, such as lashing out or making brash decisions, we can ruin relationships or careers.

Your stress response is important and must be addressed with calm focus and, if possible, support. An outside party, be it a friend, co-worker, or professional, can help you see when your stress is dictating your actions and when you’re working through it rationally.

Stress in First Responders

If you want to survive stress, and first-responder life is nothing if not stressful, you need to be resilient.

Remember, resilience is about the ability to return to a previous shape or condition.

Take a rubber band, for example. It bounces back to its original shape after being stretched out. It has elasticity. Now, if we stretch that rubber band and keep it there long enough, it will eventually lose elasticity and not come back to its original shape. Then what? That rubber band will need to be doubled or tied in order to do its job. It would need a way to adjust or cope or else it cannot function and would be useless.

Your mental health is like that rubber band. It gets stretched and twisted, but as long as the stretch (or stress) isn’t too much or held for too long, you can bounce back. The more you’re stretched, the more likely you’ll have a hard time retaining resilience. Then what? You cope, you try to adjust. Maybe you cope in healthy ways, with self-care, therapy or personal time. Maybe you cope in unhealthy ways, with drinking, anger, or other vices.

Thankfully, you’re not a rubber band; you’re human. That means if you lost your elasticity, your resilience, there’s still hope. But first, let’s compare the difference between resilience and coping.

Coping vs Resilience

Both resilience and coping are about survival in a sense, but one is about bouncing back to a previous shape or condition while the other is just making due.

Coping

Imagine you injure your foot. You’re now limping and leaning on things to cope. You could see a doctor and get an X-ray, but you’re busy. So, you decide to deal with it, hobbling along, leaning on things as you struggle day by day.

Over time, it gets harder to manage, hurts more, and you become increasingly aggravated. But you’re not aggravated at the injury; you’re aggravated at people around you. You’re impatient and start to seclude yourself, especially when others suggest you get your foot looked at.

This isn’t a hard example to imagine. It happens all the time, and especially with mental health. Since you can’t see mental health like you can a physical injury, it’s ignored even more. But what happens in that case is even worse, because it will be ignored even more than physical injuries.

Imagine an apple being tossed around, dropped to the ground and mishandled. If its skin isn’t broken, it seems fine, but really inside it’s bruised and spoiled. The fruit isn’t good anymore. While you might think you can cope, if you don’t take care of that internal bruising, you’re only hurting yourself more.

Resilience

Coping is finding ways to manage while injured, but resilience is that ability to bounce back without needing coping mechanisms.

Now imagine you’re an athlete. You train daily but you injure your foot. You immediately get it checked out and start treatment. Because you’re used to training, you’re comfortable following the necessary routine to rehabilitate your injured foot until it’s healed and strong again. Your mindset is to take steps to get yourself back to where you want to be as efficiently as possible. You’re smart about it, so you don’t cut corners because you don’t want to risk re-injury.

Resilience in mental health is the same. You pay attention to symptoms of injury and address them right away. It’s not about blaming the instrument of the injury, but about tending to the injury itself. By focusing on healing and rejuvenating, you bring yourself back to where you want to be, which is mentally fit and ready for action.

So, what does this look like for first responders?

What Resilience Looks Like for First Responders

Resilience has many faces, but here are some examples.

You get a shift change and you’re stuck on third shift. It’s taxing and you barely see your family. You work out options with both your family and supervisor to find ways to adjust the shift, make it shorter term, or find other ways to be involved with your family.

You have a hard breakup with your significant other. So, you take time – day off or evening aside, whatever time allows – to focus on yourself and decide how you want to move on. Maybe you discuss it with a friend, family member, coach, or other trusted individual. You reaffirm what you want for yourself or a relationship and move on from there.

You’re struck with trauma of some sort, on the job or personally. Now, you’re finding everything difficult to manage. Maybe you start isolating and feeling depressed. You recognize this, hear others recognizing this, and decide to take action. Your mindset is that you don’t want to feel this way, so you seek treatment through therapy. Maybe you don’t know how to proceed, so you talk to peer support or a life coach. But your mindset is firmly that you decide to be better for yourself.

How to Build Resilience

There’s ways for people to regain resilience even after years of stress and trauma. It takes time, especially if you’re coming from a low place, so be patient while you build yourself up, and seek support for the journey.

Here are some quick hits on how you can do this.

  1. Determine you goals and build a healthy perspective on achieving them.
  2. Learn from your past by focusing on what works well for you and keep doing that.
  3. Do things that foster a sense of meaning and purpose in your life.
  4. Take care of yourself and listen to your body and your mind when things feel off. The sooner you work on getting back on track, the sooner you’ll grow closer to your goals.
  5. Meditate, or at least find time to be quiet and still so you can clear your mind and reset from any noise going on around you (or in your head).
  6. Cut the self-talk. Be cautious not to let yourself go down a rabbit hole of negative thinking and stay goal-focused with a positive outlook.
  7. Seek support. This doesn’t mean you need professional mental health support, but that’s good, too! This is about surrounding yourself with a support team of friends and family, co-workers, and/or a coach who can keep you on track.

The Resilient Department

You’re not a rubber band, so if you lose that elasticity, you don’t have to stay that way. You can heal and go back to being a resilient, productive, self-sufficient responder that your department and your family depends on. Start working towards a better you today. Whether you use the techniques mentioned above, go through your local peer support network, or get a life coach, working on your resilience brings you closer to your goals, whatever they are.