#3 - Is Resilience a Choice?

Welcome back to the Resiliency Project! In this episode, we explore the intriguing question: If you can't run out of resilience, does this mean resilience is a choice? I'm your host, Annie, and we're diving deep into this complex topic.

We revisit the idea that resilience isn't just a simple, on-demand trait. It's dynamic, like a rubber band that stretches and contracts. Everyday challenges, from work tasks to household chores, test our resilience in small but significant ways.

Join me as I share personal stories, including my journey through profound loss and adversity, and discuss why some setbacks feel harder to overcome than others. We'll consider whether resilience has limits and what factors might influence our ability to bounce back.

As we continue this journey, think about your own resilience. What ingredients make up your recipe for bouncing back? Stay tuned for our next episode as we delve deeper into this thought-provoking topic.

I'm Annie, and this is The Resiliency Project.

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Welcome back to the Resiliency Project, where we dive deep into questions that
challenge our understanding of resilience.
I'm your host, Annie, and in our last episode, we asked you,
can you run out of resilience?
If you haven't listened to that episode yet, it's a quick one.
Go ahead, bounce over there and give it a listen.

(00:23):
At the end of that episode, we asked you to walk away and really think about
that question. Can you run out of resilience?
What do you think? Yes? No? What did you come up with?
It's not a very straightforward answer, is it? At least I don't think it is.
As we said in the last episode, most people said, no, you absolutely cannot

(00:44):
run out of resilience, including my therapist.
But as I talked about that to my friends, we agreed, my goodness,
it sure can feel like you've run out of it.
So what's that about? Is it maybe less a trait, a skill, a behavior, a characteristic?
I don't know. Is it less something you turn on and off as needed?

(01:05):
Or maybe it's a little more dynamic, like a rubber band.
Maybe it stretches, evolves, rests, and contracts just like we do. Think about this.
We use resilience in all kinds of ways on the daily.
It does not necessarily have to be a dark night of the soul kind of situation, right?

(01:26):
Here's a really simple one. You may go into the office and you think,
I'm going to do these reports, maybe expense reports.
By the end of the day, I don't like doing them, but they have to be done.
I'm going to do them and then I will go home for the day.
But then the day happens and it implodes and around, oh, close to the time you

(01:46):
wanted to go home, you're exhausted, right?
You think, not today, not even today. I do not have the bandwidth for this today.
I will do it in the morning. Okay, so maybe yours is an expense report.
Maybe yours is laundry or cutting the grass.
But the fact that you go in the next day after some rest, and you do the task,

(02:06):
you get it done, and you move on, be it an expense report, the laundry,
an HOA meeting, whatever yours is, I think that's resilience.
And we need to give ourselves a little bit of credit for that.
So when I start thinking about resilience in really simple terms,
not life-changing, life-altering moments, I don't want to minimize those,

(02:27):
but let's really get down and look at this resilience stuff.
I do think resilience has its limits because that's what I was feeling last
fall as I was in my therapist's office going, can you run out of resilience?
And I wasn't getting much enlightenment. Okay, so if resilience has its limits,
it doesn't necessarily go anywhere. wear, it doesn't necessarily leave, shall we say.

(02:51):
Maybe it just stretches when we need it to for challenges, but it also has its limits.
If you're a gym goer, five days a week, right?
And maybe once in a great while, you decide, nope, not today.
I'm going to skip. Do you beat yourself up? Or is that a day that you just acknowledge,
hey, maybe my resilience needs to rebound today?

(03:14):
And isn't at resilience on the next morning, it'd be really easy to hit the snooze button again.
But you don't. You get up and you go in. Those moments, those little decisions
of doing maybe the hard things, maybe not the hard things, maybe the irritating
things, things you have to do. Cut grass, right? Your weekly meeting.
Performance reviews were always the bane of my existence.

(03:36):
Laundry, carpool, HOA meeting, whatever it is. Don't we sometimes,
against our, what we want to do maybe, we decide to show up.
Isn't that a step, at least, in the right direction of resilience?
Resilience let's continue our story from the last
episode so remember last fall i touched on
this i found myself in my therapist office my doctor's office

(03:56):
with a broken heart no job and broken wrist
this was not my first time in front of a therapist i'm a huge fan of a therapist
or somewhat objective in your life that you can trust and sort things out with
that really works for me and i will always suggest it for anything you're going
through so i'm in front of my therapist i didn't know how to keep going. I didn't.

(04:18):
I wanted to, I assure you, I wanted to be strong. I didn't know where to find it. Why?
Well, in 2015, this is a few years ago before that, my husband,
my now late husband, unfortunately had a headache that wouldn't go away.
Fast forward, it turns out it was a brain aneurysm. We opted for the surgery
knowing the risks. I believe in that decision still to this stay.

(04:41):
But unfortunately, he had a very massive stroke that left him very severely disabled afterwards.
And he struggled for three years with as much dignity as we could muster.
And I took care of my proud, sweet husband, that wonderful man,
until one day in 2019, he just couldn't fight it anymore.
And he passed away in my arms. And that is a privilege.

(05:02):
It is a heartbreak, of course, but it's also a privilege.
It was a very hard chapter, very trying. Maybe I exhausted my resilience during those times.
I never knew I had that kind of resilience in me to take care of him.
And then after he passed, getting through that.
And finishing a renovation on our home, a home I renovated for him,

(05:23):
but he was never going to see, he was never going to come home to.
I not only had to rebuild a house, I had to rebuild my life without him.
And those were some of the hardest things I've ever done during a pandemic,
no less, and a couple of layoffs that was fun.
So there's a lot going on there to process. There wasn't a lot going right,
but even through all of that, I didn't doubt myself.

(05:47):
So there I was, how I don't know, five years after all of that,
here I kind of felt powerless,
maybe a little on my knees because I lost a silly job and a relationship didn't
work out that, I'm sorry, it wasn't a 20-year marriage or something.
I mean, you know, these things happen in relationships.
And of course, the broken bone wasn't fun. But look, these things seemed so

(06:11):
small in comparison to what I had been through. And I kept telling myself,
all right, just give yourself a couple more days and then we're going to get up and go.
But I couldn't. I couldn't. And I had nothing to do but lay in heel for a couple
of months, wondering where my resilience went.
Have you ever felt that way that you're facing something objectively in your

(06:32):
brain you know is small? You should be able to do this.
You should be able to do this. And yet you're feeling completely overwhelmed.
So here's the big question that I haven't explored and begun to explore through
this podcast in hopes that maybe it will help others.
What made this unraveling, losing a silly job, a relationship.

(06:55):
A broken wrist, what made this unraveling so different that I couldn't bounce back?
I mean, I'd lost my husband. I'd lost my career. I went through a pandemic.
But this, Why was this little era hitting so hard?
What do you think? What made this so different for me, at least to the point
that I didn't have my bounce back?

(07:17):
Think about your own life. Have you ever excelled at something consistently
only to face an unexpected failure that shook you to your core?
Maybe you were a math wizard all through school, all through high school,
but then you get to college freshman math and you fail.
You struggle and you you cannot understand

(07:37):
why something like that what was it about that
particular setback for you that felt so
different so overwhelming and that's what
I was left reflecting I think sometimes it's not
just the size of the setback but I
think the context and the timing are certainly involved sometimes maybe it's

(07:57):
just the straw that breaks the camel's back but I had to understand why certain
challenges hit me harder hit us harder because maybe that would be the first
step in figuring out how to rebuild my resilience.
So was my resilience something that I could just take out and use like a tool

(08:18):
and put it back when I didn't need it?
Or does resilience have some sort of, you know, maximum number of uses or an expiration date?
These are serious questions that this overthinker was diving into.
Had all of my past trials depleted my reservoir of resilience?
Maybe my resilience was like a cup and the last challenge just made it simply

(08:41):
overflow, flow, not in a good way, maybe in kind of a clogged drain kind of way.
Have you ever felt like you've just reached your limit, even on something that
seemed so minor compared to past struggles?
When the resilience isn't there, where do you go to find it?
Where do you look first? Do you look in your heart? Do you look in your faith?
Do you just try to be physically stronger?

(09:03):
Do you try to see how you're feeling and where those wounds hurt within there? Where do you go?
Because I had to mend something. I knew this resilience was in me and people told me, be strong.
This is hard, but be strong. You're tough.
And I assure you, I wanted to be strong. I assure you, I wanted to jump up and

(09:23):
get a blazing, but I just didn't know where to find that strength.
It felt like I was at the bottom of a well looking up and I just saw nothing
but empty clouds, space.
I'm like, all right, well, Well, let's take a look at what goes into resilience.
Maybe it's more like a recipe. Maybe we're so used to having it that we take

(09:45):
it for granted until it's not there.
Kind of like we're so used to someone else cooking our favorite thing for us.
And then we have to turn around and somehow make it from scratch one day ourselves.
Yeah, that's how I felt. I felt like I had to build my resilience back up.
This brings us to our next profound question.
Is resilience a choice? if resilience involves our simple example of making

(10:10):
daily decisions to keep going, going to work, doing the expense reports,
doing the laundry, paying your property taxes, paying the rent.
All of those things, the grocery, the 30th meal of the month that you've made
and you don't want to do it, but you do it anyway.
From somewhere, from somewhere, does that make resilience a choice?
And that from somewhere, is that some sort of pantry that we have to keep going

(10:35):
back to to build our resilience?
Almost like one of those food network shows where everyone gets the same kitchen,
the same pantry and ingredients, but the two, three, four chefs all come up
with a different recipe that worked for them.
Is resilience more like that? All the same foundational elements available to
us, faith or whatever those things might be. I don't know.

(10:57):
Maybe we take that resilience pantry and we take those ingredients and mold
them into something unique to each of us.
Maybe it's even and every situation calls for a different recipe.
I don't know. So think about it. If you had to go into a pantry with all of
the ingredients that go into resilience, first of all, what are those ingredients?

(11:19):
And what do you think? Is it a choice to go back into the pantry?
Is it a choice? Is it grit, determination, the ability to adapt and persevere?
Is it some sort of physical strength, mental toughness, emotional support,
or maybe a spiritual connection? What is it?
What's in your resilience recipe?
As we move into our next episode, think about what goes into your resilience.

(11:44):
What ingredients make up your recipe for bouncing back and pushing through?
Stay tuned as we dive into this
thought-provoking question and explore the elements that build resilience.
I'm Annie, and this is The Resiliency Project.