Resilience and Emotions

Resilience is trainable and practice increases your ability to tolerate both your own and others’ emotions. It becomes easier to prevent ‘panic’ and over-reactions that influence you and others negatively. This means that it becomes less easy for other people’s negative emotions to penetrate into your brain’s the alarm centre (read about The Thinking Brain and the Alarm Centre).

The more resilient you become, the more it is YOU who controls your own thoughts and feelings – subsequently other people´s emotions will not control your inner life to a great extend. For exsample:

Anger
Fear
Sadness and powerlessness
Embarrassment and shyness
Unnecessary dissatisfaction
Self-pity

Here is a training plan proposal:

  1. Make sure you know how your attention and alarm centre works (read: The Attention – Spotlight of the Brain and The Thinking Brain and the Alarm Centre), and when the alarm centre kicks off challenging emotions.
  2. Practice body relaxation, using the exercises that work best for you, until you are able to do it automatically (read: The body helps the Mind).
  3. Make a practice plan consisting of situations from your everyday life which you know for sure will trigger alarm feelings to a degree that you can still keep control and balance inside by using the techniques you have practiced (in Section 2). Your alarm centre learns that you are the one in charge and the alarm centre will gradually calm down. In this way you become more and more resilient and become able to gradually move yourself into situations that are more and more difficult (read: Construct a Plan of Practice and Resilience and Praise).