As it turns out, Nietzsche’s famous quote That which does not kill us makes us stronger” is not only a philosophical discourse but a theory backed by constantly emerging scientific evidence. Challenge and adversity can build resilience, and it seems that the opposite effect is often true when it comes to our life of convenience and comfort. And this goes for psychological as well as physical resilience.
Resilience is our body’s ability to maintain a stable internal environment or homeostasis regardless of what’s happening, or rather to be able to physically, mentally and emotionally cope with life’s different physical/emotional/mental stressors, and to be able to bounce back quickly. The interesting part is how we build this resilience. It might sound counterintuitive, but it’s not by having no stress at all. The resilience to stress is build up by low to medium levels of – stress.
The good, the bad and the ugly
Stress isn’t something we can’t put in one box. To understand it, we need to differentiate between the short term medium and long term, as well as the strength - less intense, more intense or overwhelming.
Short term and less intense stress, apart from mobilising our body’s resources and increasing our productivity and focus, also increases our stress threshold, which is the ability to deal with stress. When we put ourselves under certain amounts of controlled stress, control being the important word here, we increase the threshold and build resilience, so we can react with more coherence once we are faced with something out of our control. That is the good stress. All the examples in the text below have to do with putting ourselves under short, mild stress like a sprint, or a cold shower, or talking about painful things BUT in a controlled environment.
There is also acute stress which, if it lasts up to a few months at higher intensity can be bad for our body/mind and can turn into chronic stress. Chronic stress is the ugly. If you believe you are under chronic stress, you don’t want to stress your systems even further and might want to leave the 'resilience building’ for a calmer time.
Please note, most of the things I am mentioning here are preventive. They build resilience, not heal an already unbalanced system. If you have heart disease you won’t heal it by running a marathon, and if you already have diabetes, fasting can be fatal for you. Also, if you are chronically stressed don’t stress your system by going for a run, or taking a cold shower. Heal first and then start to think about positive changes you can make to live your full, strong and resilient potential.
PHYSICAL RESILIENCE
Antibodies
There is a hygiene hypothesis which states that children who grew up in environments that were too clean and were not exposed to allergens in the first year(s) of life will have a higher risk of developing allergies and some other illnesses. And this isn’t surprising; our bodies need to be exposed to an allergen or virus to create antibodies.
Cold exposure
People from North Europe went for cold dips in the Oceans, seas and rivers for ages, knowing this will make them not only more resilient to cold, but healthier in general. Perhaps due to the popularity of Wim Hof aka Iceman, there are more studies than ever which prove that cold exposure builds the resistance to cold. It also strengthens the immune system, can boost physical recovery, and as some studies are showing, can a natural anti-depressant.
I have a very low tolerance to cold. I grew up in central heating, and my mum would dress us up like little Eskimos as soon as the first snowflake would fall. Naturally, I had a bit of a cultural shock when I moved to London and saw kids in sandals and without socks on cool spring or fall days. I thought their parents were crazy, but it turns out they are not the crazy ones. Tired of shaking every time a cool wind blows I wanted to do something about it, so inspired by Wim Hof aka the Iceman, some research I read as well as common sense;), I decided to start taking cold showers about a month ago. It’s still early days but I can already feel the positive change and am looking forward to my daily cold showers now. I only skip them on days when I feel strained or over stressed.
Fast
Fasting is another way of building the resilience of not only the digestive system but of the endocrine system as well. We eat way too often and often way too much. Most kids these days are obese and diabetes is becoming a real global pandemic. WHO’s website states that “The global prevalence of diabetes among adults over 18 years of age rose from 4.7% in 1980 to 8.5% in 2014.” I am sure the numbers keep rising. Most of the people affected have type 2 diabetes which is “largely the result of excess body weight and physical inactivity.” (WHO). Insulin resistance can be managed by fasting as insulin levels drop.
Insulin resistance has also been connected as a consequence of Thyroid dysfunction, something I have had the misfortune to witness happening to me. So to reverse that as much as I can, about six months ago I started practising 16:8 (or sometimes 15:9) fasting for about six months now and I feel great. If I have dinner at 8 PM, I don’t eat again until noon when I have either a snack followed by lunch at around 2 PM, or if I’m very hungry which doesn’t happen often, I’ll have a brunch. Nothing is for everybody, so please make sure you do your research before you start with something like this.
Chew!
After I read about it in James Nestor’s Breath (the book which I recommended in the March newsletter) I bought a book called Jaws – The Story of a Hidden Epidemic. I just started reading it and it’s super interesting. In a nutshell, the authors, Sandra Kahn and Paul R. Ehrlich, a pioneering orthodontist and a world-renowned evolutionist talk about the pandemic of small jaws and crooked teeth which are not only non-esthetical but pose a health problem as well, especially when it comes to breathing. Our ancestors didn’t have this problem and this is because they – chewed! Our soft diets and (over) cooked food is creating a global epidemic. Once I read the book, I’ll come back to this, but for now, what I find super interesting is how we created this cooked, soft foods to make it easier for us to chew them, yet that only created a problem.
In short, even though you won’t change your jaw or teeth, you might help them stay strong by chewing more. Forget about blending your food into smoothies, we’re not babies. Chew that celery stick!;)
Build strength and cardio fitness
It’s quite obvious that we can’t build a strong, resilient body by sitting on our butts watching Netflix, we need to do some strength training. We can’t build cardio fitness by a bit of yoga here and there, we need to do some cardio; jogging, hiking, climbing etc. It wasn’t easy to do this during these crazy lockdown times, so if you are getting back to your routine, or have decided to build one, make sure it’s slow and progressive.
Our sedentary, comfortable lives, on our soft sofas locked in our houses, and convenient, often bad diets, seem to have done us more harm than good. If we want to build strength and resilience on all levels, there’s some stress, effort and discomfort involved, there is no way around it.
I am not saying we should go back to living in the caves, but perhaps to be a bit more aware of how our lives of comfort and convenience are actually causing our demise.
PSYCHOLOGICAL RESILIENCE
Accept the challenge
Challenge and adversity build resilience. The more challenges we are faced with and we manage to overcome one way or another, the more empowered we become, and the more resilient when the next challenge comes knocking on our door.
The strongest, most capable and independent people I know didn’t have an easy childhood and/or life and had faced many challenges they had to overcome. We don’t become independent by depending on someone all the time. We don’t become emotionally strong without having our heart broken a few times. “Smooth seas never made a skilled sailor”. Even some traumatic events which were processed and didn’t turn into PTSD can empower. Of course, the opposite can be true if the wound is too deep and ignored.
Judging by my life, I know this to be true. Most of my blessings today are gifts born out of challenge and pain. I was recently interviewed by a few Croatian lifestyle and wellness magazines and apart from obvious yoga-related questions, both journalists wanted to know how I found the courage to close my studio and move to Portugal in my early 40’s. The truth is, I found that courage 20+ years ago when boarded the flight to London without much of a plan and with very little money. That is when I had built the resilience to moving and changing my life around when I felt it was time, so I can enjoy my independence and freedom today. But, it is never too late for anything, resilience to change can start to be built today by doing small and uncomfortable changes.
Face the fear
We all have some fear and phobias, some more common and connected to our ancestors (like snakes and spiders), some due to traumatic events, and some we can’t pinpoint. But, more often than not, they can be quite uncomfortable and freezing. One of the CBT’s (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) treatments for fears and phobias is slowly and progressively introducing exposure to the stressor which causes fear. Slowly and progressively being the key words here.
I have had a quite strong fear of heights, especially man made ones like buildings, those glass lifts, bridges, even to the point where some bridges I couldn’t walk across. This fear started to mess with my life and lifestyle, so I decided to do something about it. I didn’t know about CBD therapy, but I knew that avoiding the problem will not make it disappear, it might make it stronger. So, I started with small steps and finished with walking over the Golden Gate bridge twice on a windy day. It wasn’t comfortable, but the reason I walked back that day is because I felt so empowered after walking across, it gave me the strength to do it again. “Do one thing every day that scares you”… and you will build more resilience to fear.
Embrace your wounds
Many of us grew up in a society of imposed norms where shame, guilt and secrets that go with them, were a normal part of life. Shamed and conditioned into not not sharing, not showing, and often not feeling, we keep our (and our family’s) secrets, wounds and pains and carry the burden of them, afraid to be exposed, afraid of the vulnerability and risk we believe they carry. So we put up our defences and show a strong and often compensated face to the world. But, nothing truly remains hidden. These unprocessed and bottled up emotions still come out, in different and often uncontrolled ways as anger and aggression in traffic, jealously in relationships, insecurities in work environment etc.
Our hearts want to be healed, and our minds want to be unburdened so we can be truly free. Embracing our shadow as well as our light, our weaknesses as well as our strength, our wounded parts as well as those intact, is perhaps the most important thing we can do for ourselves. Exposing ourselves fully in a controlled environment like with a therapist or someone we trust, is healing, unburdening, freeing, and an important part of health and wellness. I call it the emotional hygiene. Once we embrace our wounds, unburden ourselves and let those skeletons out of the closet, we stop living in the past fearful and ashamed, and start living the present full of hope for tomorrow. Instead of using our energy to constantly rebuilding our defences, we use it for opening ourselves up to life.
There is a beautiful Japanese tradition called Kintsugi, meaning Golden Joinery in Japanese, and it is the art of repairing cracked or broken pottery with Gold or Silver. As a philosophy, if an object has been damaged then it has more of a history and should, therefore, be celebrated and highlighted, rather than hidden or discarded. In fact, the repaired areas become the strongest part of the pottery.
