Personal Resilience

Dr. Brecher: Hello. I’m here to talk about resilience and how we can learn about the different models of resilience and what research tells us about what are the best strategies and attitudes and skills that will enable us to bounce back after adversity. So let’s start with this quote by Richard Davidson, who is a neuroscientist, he focuses on speed. So he says, “Resilience can be defined as the rapidity with which we bounce back after adversity.”

And so I agree that’s definitely one of the components of resilience, is how long do we feel stuck after things go wrong. But it’s not only how long but also how much it costs us and what we can do to bring ourselves out of a really difficult situation, using the resources at hand, both internal and external.

So, today I want to talk about three different models of resilience, the first is based on the work of Michael Ungar, who is a social work professor at the University of Dalhousie and he talks about the kind of multisystemic model resilience. Bonnie St. John and Allen Haines focus on what they call micro resilience strategies, which are the small moment-to-moment changes that we can make to reset. And then I want to introduce a five-factor model of resilience that I developed, based on my work as a clinical psychologist in a university setting.

So let’s get started with Michael Ungar.

[A slide, entitled “Michael Ungard: Multidimensional Resilience, comes up. 12 rounded icons around an individual’s silhouette illustrate the different types of sources of resilience.]

He identifies 12 different types of sources of resilience that any individual can experience. Some of these are entirely internal and some are based on our communities and the external sources around us. So if we start with positive thinking, structures that are out in the community, a sense of accountability, love from other people, supportive relationships, powerful identities, a sense of control, belonging to a community or a culture, the rights and responsibilities that we have, our basic needs being met, a sense of physical well-being and financial well-being. And all of these contribute in different ways to any individual being able to bounce back after adversity. So he poses these 12 questions which I’m going to share with you, and I’m going to encourage you to simply fill in the blanks of each statement, just as a kind of personal exploration around what resources do you have at this point in time that are available to you, and what are the resources that might be really helpful to cultivate in the future?

So let’s start with structure, accountability and intimate relationships. So read the sentences and fill in the blanks if you can.

[A new slide lists three sentences that need to be completed in relation to structure, accountability, and intimate relationships: There are people in my life that expect me to…; When I don’t meet expectations I know that (blank) will happen; I can reach out to my (blank) to get help when I need it.]

Next, are other relationships in our lives and the roles they play. Being really in touch with our own identity and having a sense of power and control.

[A new slide lists three sentences that need to be completed in relation to other relationships, identity, and power and control: When bad things happen in my life there a people like (blank) who support me the best they can; I feel respected for what is special about me when I am with/at/doing…; In my (blank) I get to participate in making decisions that affect my…]

Then it’s about belonging, belonging to a community, a family, a culture where you really feel that you are celebrated and important. And the rights and responsibilities that you may have.

[A new slide lists four sentences that need to be completed in relation to belonging and culture, rights and responsibility. At my (blank) people miss me when I’m not there; There are places such as (blank) where I can celebrate my culture and beliefs; When I am with others at my (blank) I feel treated fairly; When I am with (blank) I am responsible for myself/others.]

And your basic needs are met, and then you feel safe, and that, both physically and financially. There’s a sense of robust well-being.

[A new slide lists four sentences that need to be completed in relation to basic needs, physical well-being and financial well-being: I am well cared for by…; I feel safe when I am with/at…; Physically, I am able to (blank) when I want to; Financially, I am able to (blank) when I want to.]

And then finally, positive thinking. So what can you say to yourself when things are going wrong? Do you blame yourself?

[A new slide lists two sentences that need to be completed in relation to positive thinking: When bad things happen in my life, I say to myself (blank) and I feel better; I know I’m not to blame when (blank) happens.]

So Michael Ungar has written quite a few books, he has lots of resources out there. I wanted to introduce his work because I think it’s really important to acknowledge that resilience is not entirely an internal experience, but there are lots of external factors that contribute or do not contribute to our sense of well-being and capacity to bounce back.

Next, I’d like to introduce you to the work of Bonnie St. John and Allen Haines. And I’m particularly impressed with Bonnie St. John as an individual, as someone who has overcome incredible adversity in her own life and has triumphed. So among other things, she is an Olympic athlete who skied as part of competing for the Olympics and yet, when she was a child, she had one of her legs amputated and she still was able to be an Olympic skier. She was a Rhodes scholar. She’s an economist working for the Obama Administration and she now consults with businesses. She and Allen Haines identified five key areas where we can engage in small but really important activities that will help us remain well. So they talk about it from the perspective of refocusing your brain, resetting your primitive alarms, reframing your attitude, refreshing your body and renewing your spirit. So I’m going to dive into each of these right now.

So, refocusing your brain is really based on research that was conducted by James Loehr, who was a sports psychologist. He was really interested in the top tennis champions and he posed the question: how did they win championships and how are they always on top of their game, why are they so competitive? And so, by studying what they did and interviewing them and watching hundreds of hours of videotapes, this psychologist basically came up with two key strategies that these top tennis players used, that we can use in our own lives.

The first is energy recovery and baseline reset between points. What does that mean? So they were very conscious of expending energy only in service of their goals and resting whenever they could. For example, if a tennis player was a right-handed tennis player, in between points, they would shift the racket to the left hand and rest, even if it’s for like 20 seconds. That’s an example of not going full force all the time, but taking these micro-breaks.

They also engaged in what they call baseline reset. So if you just won a point in a test game or lost a point, you might have an emotional reaction to it–you might be very happy about it or really disappointed or angry with yourself. What he found about these top tennis players is that they always went right back to their neutral emotional space in between points, so they didn’t dwell on anything good or bad and it allowed them to get to bullet point number two, which is a positive focus.

So they spent no time being thrilled about a point or upset about a point or imagining… they were only focused on what they were doing during the game. And so, can we take those two strategies and apply them to any endeavour in our life, be it a hobby, work, or school?

So energy recovery, baseline reset and positive focus.

Think about resetting your primitive alarms.

[A new slide, entitled “Fight, flight, freeze—What’s really happening when we go into survival mode”, appears. It includes a drawing of a brain. The prefrontal cortex is highlighted in red and the caption reads “Learning/thinking brain—the logical smart part of your brain goes offline. The limbic system is highlighted in green and the caption reads “Lower brain functions take over.”]

Human beings are designed to respond to threat in a very primitive basic way. So our limbic system, once we send him a message that there is a physical threat, it takes over and moves us into one of three physiological states: either fight, flight or freeze. Freeze is kind of like you’re a deer caught in headlights and you can’t move, you just want to freeze and hope no one sees you, so to speak. Now, these are really, really important survival strategies; our logical brain is not necessarily functioning at the time. It’s kind of offline, but what is going on is a kind of instinctual reaction to threat. Great strategy under physical threat, but what if we receive a psychological threat? So we’re in a meeting and someone ignores us or our ideas are being disrespected, we can feel that same sense of threat and move into fight, flight or freeze, and our prefrontal cortex goes offline but it doesn’t really work for us. In that context, what we feel is very anxious, but not necessarily able to do anything for ourselves. In fact, the physiological shifts that happen in a fight, flight or freeze response are like an all-system shift. We get a dry mouth, our breathing becomes quick and shallow, our heart starts to beat much faster and harder. We might experience breaking into a sweat or getting a cold chill, our digestive system kind of shuts down, our muscles become tense. Many people will experience this as a panic attack, when in fact it’s your body’s response to moving into fight, flight or freeze, which is highly appropriate for physical danger but not otherwise.

[An illustration of a human body appears with arrows pointing to different areas of the body. Saliva: Flow decreases; skin: blood vessels constrict chills and sweating; heart: beats faster and harder; stomach: output of digestive enzymes decreases; muscles: become more tense, trembling can occur; eyes: pupils dilate; lungs: quick, deep breathing occurs; bowel: food movement slows down; blood vessels: blood pressure increases as major vessels dilate.]

So what do we do with this? One of the things to think about is the optimal amount of stress that we have in our lives and to keep it within that sweet spot. So this is the Yerkes-Dodson Human performance curve; it is used in lots of different contexts. But there’s a very simple relationship between stress and performance. If we don’t have enough stress, our performance tends to be lower.

[A figure appears entitled “The Yerkes-Dodson Human performance curve and stress curve.” An increasing then decreasing bell-shaped curve represents the relationship between performance and stress.]

When we have enough stress, we’re energized, focused and we have the experience of either being in a flow where work is effortless; we’re really on top of our game and that’s really where we want to be. If the stress continues or intensifies, we end up in a place where our performance deteriorates; we feel fatigued, we feel unwell, we might have a sense of breakdown or burnout. So what we want to do is remain in this optimal level of stress and part of what we’re talking about today throughout the session is how to get there so that either we stay out of distress or move into distress, we know how to get back into that optimal performance.

So I want to talk about how do we reframe our attitude and one of the ways to think about reframing an attitude is how do we remain really present in our lives, awake and alert? So the first has to do with our physical posture. So if you’re sitting kind of slumped or without a good posture, you’re sending a message to your brain that this is really not anything you need to pay attention to. But if you sit down with both feet on the ground, sitting up straight, this posture provides feedback to the part of the brain that’s responsible for wakefulness and consciousness; it is called reticular formation. And when this part of the brain receives signals from the body, sitting up straight, “I’m focused”, it’s easier to become alert and focused. So one way to become more alert is to choose your physical posture. A second way is to visualize a very bright light when you’re feeling kind of sleepy or disengaged. So you don’t have to be in light all of the time. You can close your eyes and imagine a really bright sunny day or that you’re on a stage and there’s a spotlight on you. And so what happens is that when we see, even in our imagination, a very bright light, it sends a surge of norepinephrine throughout the brain, which is a neurotransmitter that increases alertness. So, again it’s a way of you know, putting the cart before the horse, or putting the horse before the cart. So we can increase our sense of feeling awake by imagining this bright light and then finally, breathing. We breathe without thinking about it all the time, but what if we did think about it, if we thought about taking deep breaths that were perhaps slower. And being intentional about the inhale and exhale what we can do, then, is increase the amount of oxygen that goes to our brain and that can increase alertness and presentness. Then it’s about refreshing the body. So any nutritionist will tell you that there are certain foods that can really increase your sense of positive energy and just generally are healthy for you. And they’ll say drink eight glasses of water a day, but what if you drink this water strategically, just before a complex task? Turns out that hydrating before a complex task can increase and boost your sense of concentration and focus. So these are all small hacks that you can engage in that can help you stay focused, resetting your baseline energy, etc.

And then finally nurturing your spirit. Most of us are familiar with first aid kits, we’ll have them in our homes or in our cars, just in case something happens. We have the band-aid or the burn ointment, or whatever it is that we need. What if we had a joy kit that served a very similar purpose? So a joy kit is like a first aid kit and it is about collecting photos, souvenirs, music, mementos, even sources of smells that you particularly like, that each thing that you collect for this joy kit should be bringing a smile to your face and your heart. The sense of what can I do when I’m feeling down? Can I look at photos of the people I care about the most? Can I remind myself through music of an experience that I have?

[A new slide, entitled “Joy Kits”, appears and reads: Micro-resilience tip: A medical first aid kit is handy for cuts and bruises. Similarly, create a First Aid Kit for your attitude to shift from feelings of pessimism, rejection and frustration to positivity, gratitude and creativity. Fill it with items that inspire joy, such as photos, souvenirs, mementos, and music.]

Anything that you can count on in that world. Now, what’s interesting about a joy kit, it shouldn’t be just lying around in your room, on your desk. Put it in a drawer and pull it out when you need it. And that’s another way you can refresh your spirit.

Now I’d like to talk a bit about my work working as a clinical psychologist in a university counselling center. Over a 25 year period, I worked with many students who were struggling and when I thought about what they had in common with each other, even though each one had a unique story, they had five key things that I observed that they shared in common. They often tended to find it very difficult to be in the present moment. I thought of them often as time-travellers like so many of us, we travel into the future and worry about what might happen, we travel back to the past and ruminate and go over and over what went wrong but we aren’t necessarily thinking about the present. Secondly, they tended to be unaware of the good things that were happening in their lives. So oftentimes, the focus was on what was going wrong but not what was going well. Certainly, they tended to have a pessimistic explanatory style. What does that mean? It means that you know, often in depression or anxiety disorder, you will see a lot of pessimistic thinking. But even outside of that context, they tended to have a way of explaining things to themselves about when things were right or wrong that tended to reflect a very pessimistic frame of life. They were often self-critical and self-judgmental and even though they often didn’t want to, I would observe that they would tend to give up when feeling overwhelmed. It was just too much. So I wanted to think about how I build a profile resilience, what are the skills that individuals could benefit from learning that would address these five areas? So I thought about mindfulness and mindfulness meditation as a way to be more present in the moment. I thought about the research in the field of positive psychology that talks about the positive impact of noticing the good things that are happening in your life through gratitude and really engaging and in appreciativeness of this. I thought about optimism as an explanatory style and how to teach individuals how to think with more hope and more optimism. Based on the work of Kristin Neff, I thought about self-compassion and how self-compassion can really address that self-criticism because we tend to, when we are down and out, to be highly self-critical, but what if we engage in forgiveness and compassion for ourselves in those moments.

And then finally, thinking about how we persevere when we do something we love, and can we learn from the strategies and attitudes that we bring in that context and apply to a situation where we are not feeling like we’re persevering, and in fact, we feel overwhelmed.

So I essentially created this five-factor model of resilience, which is what we’re going to be talking about from now on. With mindfulness, I think of it as in the centre. It touches on all other forms, gratitude, optimism, self-compassion and perseverance. So let’s start with mindfulness.

Mindfulness is about being present in this very moment and allows us to take stock and gather resources, which is why it is, I think foundational to resilience because we need those resources and if we’re not attending to them in the moment, we may miss out on it.

So I thought this picture really says it all.

[A drawing, entitled “Mind full (in two words), or mindful?” appears and represents two people in a garden.]

There are two people in the garden, one of them is in the garden and thinking about what’s in the garden. And the other one is in the garden and thinking about a multitude of other things, but they’re not really being present. And so there are different ways of thinking about it. Their mind is full instead of being mindful. So let’s unpack mindfulness better and understand it better.

So Jon Kabat-Zinn, who is a scientist and someone who has developed a program called mindfulness-based stress reduction, which really launched the mindfulness movement in North America, basically, and he says, “Mindfulness is the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment.”

So without judgment, it’s simply paying attention and being present. So how do we do a mindful pause in our life? In the most simple way, we want to sit or stand quietly with our eyes opened or closed and we can start by placing the focus of your attention on your breath.

So, how does a breath enter the body through the nose, throat, chest and belly? And then, how does it exit the body, as you exhale from the belly to the chest, to your throat and nostrils. And this allows us to become more aware of our thoughts, physical sensations and emotions.

So that’s the essence of mindful pausing. And what I’d like to do is to take us through a brief mindfulness meditation called the three-minute calming breath, and I’m going to invite you to sit with me, with both feet on the ground, and with good posture and if you’re in a chair with arms, you can rest your elbows on the arms.

This is called the three-minute calming breath and it’s an exercise as a way of stepping out of automatic pilot and inviting an awareness of the present moment. Position yourself in such a way that you’re sitting comfortably, bringing length to your spine and a sense of softness into your posture. Rest your hands on your lap, and tuck in your chin slightly towards your chest. Either closing your eyes or looking down towards the ground. Bring in your awareness inwardly, begin to focus on your breath, pay attention to the inhale as your breath travels in your nose down your throat and into your lungs. And then to the exhale as your breath travels out from your lungs up through your throat and out of your nose, your mouth. In this way, you can bind your awareness to your breath. There’s no need to change your breath in any way.

There’s no need to make it deeper or fuller. Just notice the natural rhythm and pace of your breath. It may be helpful to say to yourself, “I’m breathing in, I’m breathing out. I’m breathing in. I’m breathing out.” Now, bring your awareness to the physical sensations in your body. Perhaps noticing the floor underneath your feet. The chair underneath your legs or other sensations in your body, including places of pressure, contact or temperature.

Now, bring your awareness to your thoughts and notice what thoughts are popping up in your mind. There’s no need to get pulled in by any of these thoughts, as best you can, just notice them as they occur then let them go. Bring your awareness to your feelings, perhaps noticing where they are in your body. Noticing any qualities linked to those feelings and not getting wrapped up in what they might mean. Expand your awareness to your whole body, so that in your mind’s eye you have a sense of your head, torso, arms and legs, resting here, in this chair. Simply get a sense of your whole self being here in this present moment. You might imagine that your whole body is breathing itself with each inhale and each exhale. When you’re ready, open your eyes if they’ve been closed, shift position and bring your awareness back into the room to close the practice.

Mindfulness, based on the research, has been associated with higher levels of life satisfaction, more positive emotion, less negative emotion, an increased sense of autonomy and competence, lower levels of anxiety and depression, higher levels of self-esteem, vitality and authenticity and increased focus and productivity. And this is based on a mindfulness practice where the individual engages most days of the week, if not every day, in mindfulness practice. The amount of time seems to vary, some people will meditate for an hour a day, other people for 10 minutes a day, it seems that what’s most important is how often, not necessarily how long. So mindfulness is the first component of resilience in this five-factor model; the second is gratitude. And gratitude is really about noticing the good things that are happening all around us, savouring the kindness and generosity of others and tuning into opportunities that you can explore because you’ve noticed them in the first place.

There’ve been many researchers who’ve looked into gratitude, but Martin Seligman, who was considered the founder of positive psychology is the one who first introduced gratitude as an element of thriving and flourishing. Now, brother David Steindl-Rast is a Benedictine monk, and he has spent most of his life thinking about and writing about gratitude. He says, “It’s not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.” He has a lot to say about living in the present moment and being grateful for the things around us and, in fact, in a TED talk with Louie Schwartzberg, who is a time-lapse photographer, Louie Schwartzberg brings in brother David Steindl-Rast to do a narrative for part of the TED talk and both the words and the visuals are stunning. I’ve left the link on this slide. But I think it’s so important to think about the role of gratitude in well-being. So, in order to really talk about how we can become more resilient by becoming more in touch with our gratitude and gratefulness, it’s important to talk about the innate negativity bias that exists in our brain. As part of survival, similar to the primitive alarms we have a capacity to notice threats and engage in some kind of problem-solving that will help us be safe again, notice problems that have to be fixed, notice negative things that happen in our lives and dwell on that. It’s part of our survival and it’s something that we do very, very well. The problem is that we notice the bad things so much more easily than the good. So if 10 things happen to you in a day and nine of them are really wonderful and one was negative you’re much more likely to pay attention to the one negative than the 9 positives and that’s because our brain is kind of wired that way.

So Rick Hanson, who is a very interesting psychologist, talks about this negativity bias, from the perspective of Velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good. So the bad sticks to us and the good just kind of slips away easily, so we have to be much more intentional about taking these positive experiences and, to quote him, “weaving them into the fabric of our brains.” So how do we do that? Donald Hebb, who’s a neuropsychologist actually from McGill University, he came up with this very famous sentence, quote, “cells that fire together wire together” (1949). This really was a long time ago. But it was really the beginning of our understanding of the neuroplasticity of the brain that we can create patterns in our brains, what we focus our attention on, and so cells that fire together things that you know we pay attention to over and over again, we get better and better. In doing that, that kind of wire together. So in order to fight the negativity bias, we have to be much more intentional about paying attention to the good things that are happening in our lives.

So one way to do that is through an exercise called the three good things to exercise, and it’s very simple, you can do this exercise in the middle of the day, throughout the day, at dinner with your family, in a journal just before you go to bed, whenever you think makes sense. What is the exercise? Is to keep a gratitude journal, and this could be written down in your phone or just in your own memory, it doesn’t matter, about three good things that happened each day. Now it’s not just the good thing that happened that you write down, you want to know the role you played in making that thing happen—an active participant in that good thing, in that you had a wonderful time with a group of friends or were you a passive recipient, someone gave you an opportunity, a seat in the subway, or held the door for you, or they gave you an opportunity for a wonderful job, whatever it may be. And then, secondly, what it means to you or your future that these good things happen? So you’re not just identifying the good thing but you’re actually kind of unpacking it more deeply.

My recommendation is that you do this daily for a week and then notice the impact it may have. There are many people who choose to do this on a daily basis. It’s just one of the things that they do every day to keep themselves well.

Another exercise you can engage in is what’s called the gratitude letter. And it could be an email if you’re not going to be seeing the person individually. So first, I would like you to think about someone in your life, could be recent, could be in the past, or in the distant past, who has made a huge difference in your life. They were really important, they gave you an opportunity to give you a break, or they helped you in some really significant way. Once you have a person in mind, the idea in this letter is to express gratitude to this person, what it is that they did that made such a huge difference in your life? But going beyond that is be really specific about why you feel grateful, based on your shared experiences, but also what it says about the other person when they were so generous.

So it’s not just how they impacted you, but who are they in this equation? Once you’ve polished and edited the letter, arrange a visit to read it to them and then email the letter so they can keep a copy. So if you live with this person, sit down with them, they’re part of your bubble and all of those things, otherwise do it on the phone or Zoom or in any other way. The third component to resilience is optimism and the operating definition is that it’s our explanation to ourselves about why good things, and why bad things happen to us. Now, the truth is we could define pessimism in an identical way but pessimism isn’t necessarily a component of resilience so I’m focusing on optimism. It is what we say to ourselves, not necessarily what we say to other people, about why things are going well, or have gone wrong. Shawn Achor is a psychology Prof at Harvard and he wrote the book “The Happiness Advantage”, he says, “Happiness and optimism fuel performance and achievement” (2019). So that’s interesting. It’s not so much that performance and achievement make us happy and hopeful or optimistic, it’s that happiness and optimism fuel our capacity to really do well and achieve our goals. So I want to start off by talking about hope, and I want to introduce you to Shane Lopez, who is a psychologist who spent his entire career studying hope and I’m going to play a small snippet of his video where he talks about what hope is.

[Dr. Brecher plays video. This question appears: What is hope?]

Shane Lopez: Hope is the belief that the future will be better than the present, coupled with the belief that you have the power to make it so. You need those two beliefs kind of joined together to be hopeful. A belief that the future will be better than the present is optimism, which is a healthy attribute. But you have to combine that with a sense of agency and an ability to come up with pathways thoughts to actually have hope. So you need optimism plus agency, plus a whole bunch of plans.

[This question appears: Why is hope good for us?]

Shane Lopez: Hope is good for us for a whole lot of reasons. Number one, it’s hard to be happy, without being hopeful. So hope is kind of a domino that knocks over the happiness domino in life. Also, we are much more productive when we’re hopeful, so hopeful students can actually achieve a letter grade higher than a less hopeful student of equal intellect. And a hopeful worker is more productive than a less hopeful worker, so you get done as a hopeful worker as much by four o’clock as it takes your colleague, who’s less hopeful, to get it done by five o’clock. So you’re actually 14% more productive at work and you’re 12% more productive at school, so hope for the future really pays off today.

[This question appears: How can I use hope to achieve my personal goals?]

Shane Lopez: Hopeful people pursue two or three goals that matter to them most.

[Dr. Brecher stops the video.]

Dr. Brecher: So hope is really about optimism, agency and the plans you make to implement what you’re working on. So I think that’s a really great kind of functional definition of the role of hope, as part of optimism and resilience. And I came across this quote; it was actually someone who just said this publicly: “Worry is like praying for what you don’t want.” That’s an interesting idea. Oftentimes worry is like we build this whole elaborate picture about what we’re worrying about whereas hope is about imagining what you want in detail and believing that it can come true. So instead of building this whole picture of what you don’t want, can you work on developing the plans to make what you’re imagining actually come true? That’s the provocation, that’s the invitation. And the difference between hoping and wishing is that hope is proactively moving to implement your dreams, whereas wishing is kind of passively hoping that they come true. So there’s a real sense of agency that’s part of the hope that I think is really important to address. So why is hope good for us? Well, it tends to lead to an increased sense of happiness and well-being, and as Dr. Lopez said, hopeful students are about 12% more productive at school and 14% more productive at work. And what this means is that most likely the hope that these individuals have tends to simply be something that helps fuel their productivity, whereas the pessimism and kind of lack of belief in yourself often become obstacles that slow you down.

And so, this is a research study where they were looking at what different things impact academic performance and they say, “Together these results indicate that hope, academic self-efficacy, and engagement may all be associated with early academic outcomes to some degree, but that hope is the psychological variable that has the most robust relationship with academic performance and retention” (Gallagher, Marques, & Lopez; 2017), so I find that very interesting. So how can we hope? Lopez says to find out what you’re most excited about in life and do more of that. So when we engage in things that we’re excited about, that are meaningful for us, that we derive a lot of satisfaction from, it tends to engender hope in us. And also, if you surround yourself with people who are hopeful in the first place, they can teach you the steps of hope, in part by role modelling it but also talking about how they maintain their own hope.

Now, I also want to talk about optimism in a really functional kind of way. And so what I thought I would do is, this is a slide that kind of summarizes a book called “Learned Optimism” by Martin Seligman, written quite some time ago, in the center, the purple circle here are the four conditions.

[Dr. Brecher shows a matrix diagram with the four conditions.]

Optimist in good times, pessimist in good times, optimist in bad times, pessimist in bad times. And then, on the four wings, the corners of the slide, there are very explanatory styles. So an optimist in good times will explain something to themselves, this good time as personal, something I did to make it happen, pervasive, spilling over into other parts of their lives, and permanent. Seeing a good event, the pessimist might say to themselves, “It was just good luck”— situation-specific and temporary. So they get very little fuel or energy from that explanation and it doesn’t help them deal with the next thing that happens. An optimist in bad times will say to themselves, “Oh, it was just bad luck!”—situation-specific and temporary, whereas the pessimist will say to themselves in the same kind of situation, “Oh! It was all my fault.”—personal, pervasive and permanent.

So you can see how these explanations then lead to an emotional reaction and also either an increased likelihood that you are going to bounce back or an increased likelihood that you’re going to feel stuck. So as a way of addressing that, I’ve developed these six questions that can help you shift from a pessimistic to an optimistic frame of reference, by posing these questions and answering. So let’s say something good happens and you tend to be the kind of person who has a pessimistic explanation for good times, what if you asked yourself these three questions: what role did I play in making this happen? How can I make it permanent? What can I do to have this spill over into other aspects of my life? Now, posing these questions and attempting to answer them actually takes you to the kind of thinking that an optimist engages in with little effort. With a little bit of effort on your part, you can start to think of that. Try it out, see if it makes a difference. Same thing if you have a pessimistic explanation for something that’s gone wrong. So in bad times, perhaps you can share the responsibility. In what ways is this also the responsibility of other people or circumstances beyond my control? Secondly, you can ask yourself how can I keep this temporary and what must I do to contain the damage of the long-term effects of this? So these are the kinds of questions that if you start to answer them, you might in fact flip out of a pessimistic frame of reference and into an optimistic one. The fourth component of resilience in the same model is self-compassion.

Kristin Neff, who is a psychologist at the University of Austin, Texas, has researched self-compassion throughout her career and she really defines it as being your own best friend, kind, supportive, patient and loving in the moments we need it the most. So instead of abandoning ourselves, if something goes wrong, you blame yourself, you say, “Oh, I did it again! Why??” and all of that recrimination. Instead of that, what if you showed up yourself the way that your best friend would show up. And that they would be kind and supportive and generous with you. So here’s a self-compassion exercise to perhaps begin to cultivate self-compassion. Think back to a time when someone forgave you. How did they express their forgiveness to you, and how did you react? What were the benefits of being forgiven and what did you learn from the experience? How did your relationship change as a result of you being forgiven? So I encourage you to take some time to fill this out. And then, once you’ve done it, after that reflection, consider forgiving yourself for an error in judgment or thoughtlessness. Using this other person as a role model for forgiveness, but rather than having a company outside that you actually do this for yourself in the same way that they have forgiven, you can forgive yourself? Because self-compassion is about being your own best friend in the moments when you need it the most.

[This sentence: This is a gift that you give yourself is added on a slide entitled “Self-Compassion Exercise”.]

Some research done by Neff and her colleague Knox was to try to understand what percentage of the population tends to be compassionate towards themselves versus others than to themselves. What they found was actually surprising. 78% are more compassionate towards others than to themselves, so much better at giving to other people what we could also benefit from. About 6% are more compassionate towards themselves and 16 report that they’re equally compassionate. So the vast majority of us have some work to do if we want to cultivate that self-compassion towards us. Research also suggests that self-compassion is associated positively, linked to greater life satisfaction, higher emotional intelligence. It’s associated with achieving the learning goals, having a sense of more wisdom, curiosity, happiness, optimism, positive affect, social connections and less self-criticism, less depression, less anxiety, less fear of failure, less thought suppression, less performance goals [and disorder eating behaviours].

And it is negatively associated with maladaptive perfectionism, so people who are perfectionists, to the extent that they actually are in their own way. I think some students over the years I’ve worked with would rather not hand in an assignment than get a B on it. If it wasn’t an A+ assignment, it wasn’t worth handing in, and so they actually sabotaged themselves. So maladaptive perfectionism really is an obstacle that can stand in your way. So the more self-compassionate you are the less likely you will be a perfectionist and the more perfectionist you are the less likely you will be self-compassionate. That’s what that research shows.

Paul Gilbert, who is a psychologist in the UK, developed something called compassionate-focused therapy. He developed this slide which I think is so interesting.

[A new slide appears, entitled “Three circles of emotional regulation”. The introduction reads: According to Paul Gilbert’s model, people often switch between three different systems to manage their emotions. Each system is associated with different brain regions and different brain chemistry. Then, there are 3 circles of colour. The blue circle represents the drive system, the green circle represents the soothing system and a red circle represents the threat system. Although we might not realize it, many of us spend the majority of our time in threat and drive, which can lead to imbalanced emotions and distress. It can be important to notice if your soothing system is underdeveloped. In order to help you get a sense of where you might be out of balance your practitioner may ask you to imagine how big each of your circles is.]

We have talked earlier about the threat system, that primitive alarm that kicks in. It’s a cortisol-driven experience, where we feel fear, anger, anxiety, shame, all kinds of negative things in the face of the threat. And we tend to interact with our drive system a great deal. So drive to threat.

The drive system is really driven by the hormone dopamine, which rewards us when we achieve our goals. We’re very achievement-oriented, we’re motivated, driven, excited etc. And many of us move back and forth between the feeling of being threatened to accomplishment. But what we often ignore is the soothing system, which is driven by the hormone oxytocin, and it really is often referred to as the rest and digest system, where we slow down, where we’re self-soothing, we feel safe, we take care of ourselves, we engage in kindness and we feel connected.

So what if we started to work on building this soothing system as part of our lives so that we’re not always on this high stress between drive and threat. So I have some suggestions around that. So it’s based really on the mammalian caregiving system, which is really… we belong to that as a species, where when we are cared for on a physical basis, there’s a release of oxytocin and that increases trust, calm and connectedness. It also leads to self-compassion, so how can we do that?

So these are some really basic simple things that we can do for ourselves, it’s wonderful if we have someone in our lives, who gives us a hug on a regular basis, and soothes when we’re upset etc., but what if we don’t or if they’re not available in that moment? So one way to engage is to take both hands and put them on our hearts.

And then just breathe into our hands in our heart and slow down our breathing and notice that our heart rate decreases a little, and it can calm us quite significantly. It’s not 10 seconds or 30 seconds that would be maybe about two, three minutes. I’m going to take us through these fairly quickly, but you can spend more time on them on your own.

And that there is one hand on the heart and one on your tummy, same idea. And it could be that one of these four resonates more than others, and that’s up to you. Another one is to cup one cheek or both cheeks and just hold your face, I find this one to be the most impactful for me. Or you can just hug your arms, give yourself a hug. And these are actions when we touch ourselves in these very particular ways that are very soothing, releases oxytocin, give us a sense of calm, and connectedness, and can be very helpful in terms of cultivating that self-compassion, which then is part of resilience.

And then, finally, the fifth factor of the five-factor model resilience is about perseverance, which involves a kind of passionate curiosity and a commitment to our long-term goals, despite the obstacles we face. So we stick to things because they’re important because we’ve committed to them. And what happens if we intentionally inquire into how do we persevere when we do something we have to do and can we take those same skills and apply them to something that isn’t going as easily but is really important to us.

So Albert Einstein said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with my problems longer.” That’s an interesting notion that it’s really kind of a growth mindset. Effort is what leads us to our success, effort and investment in time, and focus and everything we have can yield the kind of results that are often looking for. So, Christine Padesky is a very prominent psychologist with whom I trained and this is from her model, which I think is so helpful and so useful that I’m incorporating it into the resilience model; it’s called the personal model of resilience and really is a strength-based intervention, where we tap into our strengths in a very intentional way and use them in other contexts.

So you can pull out a piece of paper and do this as I go. I’m going to be giving an example. Or you can do this on your own time afterwards, whatever works best for you. So the first step is to think about an activity that you really enjoy doing, that you do either every day or regularly enough and have lots of experience with that. You find it enjoyable and fulfilling. You’ve solved problems and overcome obstacles that relate to this activity. You have some insight into how to work with those obstacles that arise, and you keep going even when you’re tired or frustrated. So this year, I want you to think about an activity that really fits the bill. Now, it could be anything. It could be riding your bike as you commute to and from your home to your place of work, it could be playing a musical instrument, playing a game of chess, it could be any sport, it could be crossword puzzles, it could be gardening, whatever it is that you do, that you enjoy, that you solve problems and overcome obstacles.

Once you have that in mind, I want you to identify at least three obstacles that you faced and what you do persist in the face of those obstacles. So you’re really answering the question of what keeps me going. So I will be thinking about behaviours, attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, metaphors, feelings or all the above. So what keeps you going even when you encounter these obstacles? So here’s an example of a chart that I filled out, and you can fill it out in any way you like. So I’m a swimmer and I’ve been swimming between three to seven days a week for I don’t know 30, 40 years now, and I love it but nonetheless, I will encounter obstacles. So my first obstacle is an injury, so I had a pinched nerve in my neck. I couldn’t raise my arm over my head, so that made it very hard to swim and when this happens, I felt very frustrated.

So what keeps me going. So I identified behaviours, thoughts, assumptions and metaphors. So some of the behaviours that kept me going were I had to wait until the pain reduced. Then I had to swim differently and modify the activity. So I had a flutter board, I would rest my right arm on the flutter board and swim with the rest of my body. Then I took lessons to improve my stroke, to compensate for the weakness that is now there. My thoughts were if it’s important enough, it’s worth the effort. And my assumption was I need time to heal. And my attitude was I needed to find an alternative; I couldn’t not go to the pool. A second obstacle was when I would run out of time. So I swam during work and I had a very full workday so I often felt like “when do I get to the pool?” And when I couldn’t get to the pool, I would feel uncomfortable. So what did I do, I had to shift things around. So I decided to swim during my lunch hour, go before work and my attitude was, if it’s important enough, I’ll make the effort and the assumption was I can do this.

And my attitude was, “I’m happy to sacrifice my lunch hour in order to reach my goal.” Obstacle number 3. No access. Sometimes the pool was closed. And when that happened I would feel really deprived, so I needed to have a backup like alternate pools that I can have access to, or I would do something else, like yoga, pilates, go for a walk, but I would still move my body. And my thought was it’s up to me to make this work and my assumption was like: always find a way and when a door closes, I’m going to open another. So the reason why we have three obstacles is you want to have a lot of things that you can pull from because not everything is going to be translated into a new context easily, so you want to make sure that you have lots of options to choose from.

So step number three is to extract the strategies that you can use in another context. So we’re going to decouple swimming and these strategies in action. And so really you’re going to look at what are the behaviours, attitudes, assumptions, beliefs, metaphors and feelings that could be used in a new context that perhaps you aren’t that resilient in because you haven’t been doing it for that long or you haven’t figured it out yet. So I’ve picked these seven strategies, you can pick 10 if you like, but I chose seven for this exercise, and these were resilience approaches that I’m going to try in a new context: I need to give myself time to heal. I have the attitude—”I can do this”, I’m happy to sacrifice X—so X is anything in order to reach my goal—because lunch isn’t going to necessarily apply in a new context. I need to be able to shift things around, be open, adaptable, flexible. Have a backup plan to do things differently and basically, decide if it’s worth it, if it’s important enough, it’s worth the risk.

Okay, so now we apply these to a current challenge. It has nothing to do with swimming. Perhaps it has something to do with an interpersonal conflict. So you fill out the same form; you identify the three obstacles and how you feel and then you try to figure out mixing and matching which of the strategies that worked, in my case it was swimming, that might actually work in this conflict. If the person is not listening to me and I feel frustrated, maybe I need to approach the problem differently and modify my strategy. So instead of modifying how I swim, I’m going to modify my strategy connecting with the other person. My thoughts are that I have to be open and adaptable and the assumption is that sometimes I just need to wait. And if the person is judgmental and critical and I feel uncomfortable, maybe I need to give myself time to recover from the hurt. And maybe I need to sacrifice the idea that I’m right in order to reconnect with the person. Instead of sacrificing my lunch hour to get to the pool, it’s the same essential strategy but modified to this new context. I have to operate from the assumption that it is important enough for me to make this work, and if the person just won’t change their perspective, and I feel hopeless, maybe I need a backup plan. Maybe I need help, maybe I need to back away from this. And so just pulling out some of these gives you a sense of… You focus on something that you’re really committed to, figure out what really works there, transplant the same strategies into a different context and see if they work there. So you’re tapping into your strengths and you’re using them in a very intentional way.

And now I’m going to wrap up by telling you about some of the resources that are available to you, having to do with this audience.

So the first is, I’ve written a series of workbooks, primarily, one that I would recommend in this view is the “Cultivate your happiness workbook”, which is… looks at the academic year of the university context to fall and winter. And for each week of term, I’ve selected an exercise that you can do and an opportunity to do it and reflection questions, based on the rhythm of the academic year and the kinds of challenges that you might face throughout that.

So that link is at the top.

[A drawing, entitled “Resilience at Ryerson drawing with Dr, Diane Brecher, appears. It illustrates the Five-Factor Model of Resilience components: mindfulness, gratitude, optimism, self-Compassion and grit.]

And then this drawing here is based on animators rendering of a keynote talk that I gave at a conference and pretty much everything I’ve talked about the five-factor model, you should be able to identify in this picture because she drew all of these.

[A new slide, entitled “Meditation Resources”, appears and lists these different resources: Insight Meditation Timer, Headspace, Thriving in Action online, Lama Rod Owens, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach, Angel Kydo Williams, Jon Kabat Zinn, Yoga with Adriene, Guided Body Scan, Cultivating Gratitude, Mindfulness with a Hip Hop Twist, Drop Anchor.]

I put together a list of meditation resources from lots of different sources.

Some of these are audio, some of these on YouTube.

Some focus on different cultural perspectives and meditation and so, for example, Lama Rod Owens and Angel Kydo Williams, they focus more on the black community.

There’s Mindfulness with a Hip Hop Twist, for example, it is a very different kind of mindfulness. Yoga with Adriene focuses much more on the yoga piece of mindfulness. Jon Kabat Zinn, Jack Kornfield, Tara Brach are kind of very prominent meditation teachers. So and again things like Insight Meditation Timer and Headspace. These are all free resources that you can tap into, and I think are definitely worth looking into. I also wanted to mention that the Thriving in Action online that I co-created with Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer. It’s a blend of thriving strategies, which I’ve talked about here in the part of resilience piece and learning strategies.

This is a free resource. The website is https://tia.ryerson.ca/ and it is an open-source for anyone who wishes to explore; we posed the question: How can I learn to love being a student? And then, at the Ryerson library, I’ve been working with several different librarians to curate a mental health collection, which includes the ThriveRU resources, which is really focused on resilience and positive psychology and what does it mean to flourish and you can see the first two books here aren’t directly related to resilience. One is on habit formation and the other is on character strengths but there are many different books that can be very helpful to explore.

And with that, I will wrap up this session and wish you all the best, thank you.