For those of you who have been tuning in to our LinkedIn page, we’ve launched a daily series of resilience tips then will plunge right into a deep-dive of a resilience tip that involves using your character strengths. Since there are 24 strengths, this will be an entire series in itself so we hope you can follow us there as well.
We posted about stoicism as a resilience tip. Ironically, right before posting it, I found myself in the middle of a forced stoicism exercise last week when my phone broke down.
I know, right?
My books, my audiobooks, the Duolingo streak (I had so painstakingly worked up to more than 940 days),my music and videos, new pictures and videos I hadn’t uploaded to the cloud yet, my e-wallets, even my mobile hotspot that my laptop used were all in my phone… I imagined the cellphone repairman using a stethoscope and doing CPR to resuscitate it as I waited helplessly and dramatically beyond a glass window.
I felt paralyzed.
Was this an overreaction? I looked back to decades earlier when we didn’t have a smartphone and we happily went about our day on “airplane mode.” Now, when you can’t use your phone, it feels like you’re missing a body part.
Photo by Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash
If you’re on our mailing list you’ve probably already read about my car accident as a teenager when I broke my dominant arm in two places. In the weeks that followed, I soldiered through exams writing answers with my left hand because my now bionic right arm wasn’t fully healed. In the months that followed, I could move it normally but couldn’t carry the loads I was usually able to carry there. In the years that followed, I worked on getting back to swimming, which I had been doing since I was a kid, and was eventually able to compete again.
I wasn’t able to use my dominant arm normally for years. And now, I somehow felt even more helpless without a working smartphone.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my arm more than I love my phone, but it was highly disconcerting. I had, like most of us have, been used to having this device connect me to everyone and everything else (not just my entertainment but my obligations and bills were taken care of on my phone), and now, the convenience was taken away from me.
I eventually survived the time without it and was even pleased when my “Digital Well-being” metric showed that I used my phone less that week (haha).
While this is more of an inconvenience than a major problem, being “paralyzed” in any way is something that’s daunting for us, and would lead you to think about your daily routine and life differently. You may be surprised at how resilient you are, you just weren’t given a chance to be.
Author Oliver Burkeman (you might notice he’s a favorite of this website), proposes a “negative path to happiness” in his book “The Antidote: Happiness For People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.”
While we won’t discuss the contents of the book in its entirety, there is one nugget there that we would like to focus on for this blog. We don’t just equate happiness with getting what we want, BUT we also assumethat when our greatest fears happen, life would be awful and unlivable for us.
For clients who are afraid of being thought of as insane, psychologist Albert Ellis prescribes the “subway station exercise.” In this practice he asks his clients to yell the name of the upcoming train station, breaking the silence in a train full of people right before the speaker announces the station you’re arriving at. Essentially it’s facing your fear head-on by deliberately creating conditions to live that way for a day or more.
Happiness is defined as contentment and well-being. By definition, there is no mention of a circumstance or a situation we need to wait for in order to achieve this.
If you can face your fear head-on, whether it’s stage fright or a new job or just an inconvenience such as a day without your phone or internet, it loses its grip of intimidation on you by allowing you to realize, Wait, this isn’t so bad. I can do this!
Because the truth is, we can’t get everything we want in life. There is not a single human being that has not been frustrated or disappointed ever in their lives. Yet, this doesn’t mean that humans are relegated to an existence wherein happiness is impossible. But real joy is when we are still able to feel content and engaged in spite of not getting our ideal situation.
In our ebook: “Low-Key Happiness: 4 Habits to Boost Overall Well-being” we share practical, scientific steps to improving well-being and happiness to obtain real results. These simple, effective habits have a physiological/chemical effect on our brains, which process our moods and well-being. If you haven’t gotten a copy of it yet, I hope you can grab one today!
We look forward to hearing from your wellness journey!
Mitch
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