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Learn About Managing Stress Through Resilience:
- What is Resilience – and How Can It Help Me?
- Building Your Inner Resilience
- Immediate Stress-Coping Strategies
- Helping Kids Build Resilience
- Help with Basic Needs
A change in job status. Challenges with parenting. A family dispute. The death of a loved one. We all face different degrees of stress throughout our lifetime. While stress is perfectly normal, how we cope with our life stressors can have a dramatic impact on both our physical and mental health.
If you need assistance to help you with stress, please refer to this chart to determine what level of service may be most helpful for your stress level.
Think back to a time you experienced a specific type of stress – such as unexpected traffic on your way to an important meeting or appointment. How did you react? This same stressful event can trigger a multitude of different reactions from people. For example:
Person A might… curse inwardly and reach for a cigarette.
Person B might… react angrily and begin to honk and drive aggressively.
Person C might… begin nail biting or fidgeting while awfulizing the entire day ahead.
However you personally tend to respond to a stressful situation like this, you probably engage in a reaction that negatively affects your physical and/or mental health. Just like unexpected traffic on the way to a scheduled engagement, much of the stress in our lives is unavoidable. But there is something we can all do – and that’s to work on improving the way we react to these stressors. Little by little, we can create a different kind of reality for ourselves where stressful situations don’t feel as challenging.
So how do you change your long-term relationship to stress? With a concept called resilience.
1. What is Resilience – and How Can It Help Me?
Resilience is the ability to “bounce back” from stressful situations, rather than letting the stress continue to affect you in unforeseen, unhealthy ways that can ultimately lead to even more stress. Having personal resilience doesn’t mean you’ll never experience stressors – but that you’re better able to cope with them. Think of resilience as a kind of inner strength that helps you to be less reactive to any kind of stress, be it small or significant.
2. Building Your Inner Resilience
Building your inner resilience is similar to strengthening a muscle. While it’s not an overnight process, little by little, day by day, you can build your inner stress warrior. In time, nearly anything that comes your way feels less difficult because you’ve built up your stress defense.
Ready to get started? Our free Stress Relief Guide can guide you through this journey from start to finish.
Included in the toolkit:
- Vocabulary to help identify your real feelings
- A worksheet to help build your personal stress-reduction plan
- Ideas for healthy coping strategies that you can practice anywhere
- Long-term resilience builders, including food
More Resilience-Building Resources
The key to building your long-term resilience is to focus on your overall wellness, including good nutrition, daily movement, and quality sleep. Check out our favorite ideas and expert tips for improving your well-being:
3. Immediate Stress-Coping Strategies
Resilience is a great long-term strategy for stress. But what about in the meantime, while you’re building your inner resilience “muscle?” Managing immediate stress is also an essential resilience-building strategy. The key is to move through your stress versus trying to navigate around it. Check out our top stress-coping tools to learn more:
4. Helping Kids Build Resilience
You can foster wellness and promote resilience for the kids in your life too! Helping kids develop healthy nutrition, movement, sleep habits, and stress management skills earlier in life will give them a great foundation for resilience into adulthood.
Young children might not be developmentally ready to work through the adult resilience toolkit yet, but helping them identify and understand their emotions and feelings is a good place to start. Try these fun downloadable activities with your kids:
And for even more expert tips, check out our Raising Resilient Kids series:
Parenting During COVID-19
Parents and caretakers have faced many additional challenges during this unprecedented pandemic. The following resources can help guide you through challenging decisions and conversations with your family about COVID-19:
Additional Resources
Try these ideas to help your kids stay active and engaged while at home:
5. Help with Food, Bills, and Other Basic Needs
Building personal resilience is especially challenging if you’re struggling with basic needs. Have you experienced worry or stress about housing, food, bills, shelter, utility assistance, childcare, medical care transportation, disaster recovery, counseling, and more? Free resources are available to support you.
Which resource might be best for you and your family?
More About:
Community Connections: Through a combination of phone calls, office and home visits, a team member will help you navigate the often complex system to help you get the resources needed. Their one-on-one support is confidential.
Michigan 2-1-1: In partnership with Heart of West Michigan United Way, Michigan 2-1-1 connects you to the things you need. By dialing 2-1-1, you can get help with accessing services that can help. It only takes one call. You can also text your zip code to 898211 to be connected.
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