Resilience – what actually is it and how do we get it?

Jon Neal, CEO, writes a piece for Bury Free Press every month. Here’s one exploring a culturally popular term ‘resilience’.

Let’s build resilience. Anyone disagree? No? Didn’t think so…but what does that actually mean?

It makes sense to do it, of course. We all want fewer people off work with mental ill health, we’re all worried about our kids – particularly teenagers. We’d all like to avoid stress, and most of us know someone in our family or friendship groups who has been mentally unwell.

So, let’s build resilience and everything will be ok, right? Kind of.

At Suffolk Mind we like to unpack abstract language…which is an abstract expression itself: “unpack” is a metaphor. We want to be as clear and concrete (another metaphor) as possible about what we mean.

Resilience, at Suffolk Mind, means meeting our emotional needs as well as possible so we can cope, for a time, if one of them is not met.

We have nine emotional needs – control, community, security, privacy (downtime), attention, status (feeling valued), emotional connection, achievement, and, finally, meaning and purpose.

If all these needs are being reasonably well met, we are at the wellbeing point on the mental health continuum, we’re avoiding stress and mental ill health.

Resilience, to us, means getting those needs met in healthy ways so we can cope when there’s a barrier to meeting one or more of them.

For example, if someone got made redundant tomorrow, that is a barrier to meeting needs for security (because they’ll worry about money), control (they are not making the decision), status (they will feel their work isn’t valued) and maybe a few more.

If they are meeting other needs, they’re more likely to be ok. Let’s say they are in a loving relationship at home (emotional connection and attention), they’ve got a good group of supportive friends (community), and they feel good at what they do, so they are confident about getting another job (achievement). They can also find time for themselves (privacy), and maybe they volunteer, which meets the need for meaning and purpose.

So, six needs are well met, and they can cope with three needs being unmet for the moment. With most needs being met, they feel able to remain calm and can start to problem-solve – in this example, look for a new job.

When I joined Suffolk Mind nearly a decade ago, I didn’t know anything about this approach. What I like about it, is that it’s completely straightforward. I choose that word deliberately, because it’s not simple – there’s a lot to find out about – but everything you discover makes sense. And it helps you make sense of yourself and the people around you.

Perhaps more importantly, this approach to mental health helps you to look after yourself and the people around you as well.

If resilience means meeting your emotional needs proactively and with awareness, then knowing you have these needs in the first place must be the first step to building resilience.

The second step is taking action to ensure you, and the people you care about (at work, and at home), are able to meet their emotional needs as well.

So, yes, let’s build resilience, but let’s also be clear about what that means, and how we can build it.