Experts say you just need a mindset shift to turn a difficult situation around.
Wrong.
Mental Resilience is our ability to process overwhelming feelings in our body.
💡 Here are four steps to Embodied Resilience.
When we are under pressure, our bodies are filled with anxiety, fear, and dread. Our autonomic nervous system detects a threat and pumps our body with cortisol. The horse has bolted before our prefrontal cortex has even realised.
Then the mind gets afraid of what’s happening in our body and starts catastrophising with stories that make our situation worse.
That’s what it means to ‘lose your head’ under pressure.
We try to get rid of the feeling with our mind with a top down strategy of positive mindset reframings, but we are fighting an emotion with thought.
It doesn't work. What we resist persists.
The real skill is the ability to recognise and process what is going on in our body.
The Four steps:
💡 We Register: ‘Okay I’m noticing my heart is pounding and my stomach is clenching. My mind is making up a scary story of what’s happening here’
⏸ We Pause: ‘Okay, I’m noticing that I’m trying to get rid of the difficult feeling with runaway thinking. That’s okay. Breathe.
🚦 We Soften: ‘I’m going to open myself as much as possible to this difficult sensation. I’m not going to resist it with faux mental reframing’
🌊 We Open: ‘Now to locate where this sensation is happening in my body. I’m going to double click on it.' Note: That means you will be momentarily filled to the brim with fear and anxiety. But the wave is just cresting, it will subside.
Then the storyless emotion passes much quicker. You can now assume your resilient mindset where you reclaim your agency in your difficult situation.