06 Oct Build your resilience with these 5 proven strategies
I spend much of my time, not surprisingly, talking about happiness.
And I spend much of that time busting myths and misconceptions about happiness.
Obviously, happiness involves enjoying good times.
But just as notably, happiness also involves getting through and/or coping with difficult times.
Resilience, therefore, is a crucial component to living a happy and flourishing life…
via the Ladders by Eric Barker
Every now and then, life punches below the belt. How can you be resilient when times get tough and you feel bad?
There are all kinds of strategies for feeling happier and showing grit. But most of them are very conscious and deliberate. And the truth is, most of what we do every day isn’t all that conscious and deliberate.
Ever since Freud, we’ve known that a lot of our behavior is unconscious. If that’s the case, shouldn’t you leverage your unconscious mind to get through the tough times? Only makes sense, right?
Now I don’t know much about my unconscious mind. (I mean, it’s unconscious, right?) So I called an expert on the subject. Tim Wilson is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and author of Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious and Redirect: Changing the Stories We Live By.
Tim has some, well, mind-blowing insights about how your brain really works. You’re gonna learn a lot about how that grey matter functions, how to fix it when it can’t cope, and you’ll even find out how to get to know yourself better to avoid future messes, how to stay happy when things suck, and even how to become a better human being in the process. (Now how’s that for value?)
But I do need to make a disclaimer first: I’m gonna have to shake your confidence in yourself a bit before we fix it. We need to correct some myths — and some of the truths are a little disturbing. Hang with me. We’ll get you back to the Shire, Frodo.
Alright, forget what you think you know about how your mind works. You’re wrong about a lot of stuff. In fact, you’re wrong about you…
Your conscious mind is an overconfident storyteller
Okay, tough love time: you don’t know yourself as well as you think. Who you think you are, your personality traits, why you do things… your perception of yourself can be way off.
Think your friends would agree with you on what you’re really like? Actually, they would agree more with each other on your personality than you would agree with any one of them.
From Strangers to Ourselves:
First, the correspondence between people’s ratings of their own personality and other people’s ratings of their personality is not very high. It depends somewhat on the trait; for example, people tend to agree with others about how extroverted they are, but on most other personality traits the level of agreement is modest (correlations in the range of .40). Thus, Suzie’s judgment of how agreeable and conscientious she is correlates only modestly with how agreeable and conscientious her friends think she is. Furthermore, other people agree more among themselves about what another person is like than they agree with that person’s own ratings.
Some people would immediately push back on this, “I know what I’m really like! I can see me from the inside! Nobody else has that information!”
Yes, you have a lot more info about yourself than a stranger does but your conscious mind is kinda like the internet: tons of great information and an awful lot of inaccurate information as well.
In some areas you’d have more insight into yourself, but in others you’d be way off. When you average it all out, the information you have about yourself is about as accurate as a stranger’s read on you.
From Strangers to Ourselves:
Averaging across several studies, there seems to be no net advantage to having privileged information about ourselves: the amount of accuracy obtained by people about the causes of their responses is nearly identical with the amount of accuracy obtained by strangers.
I know: pretty shocking, isn’t it? Why is it so shocking? Because your conscious mind is basically an overconfident storyteller.
Your conscious mind doesn’t have any direct access to everything going on in your unconscious mind.
How do you determine what others are like? You watch and guess and make up a story. Well, your conscious mind does the same thing with your unconscious mind. Except your conscious mind is very overconfident about its stories.
From Strangers to Ourselves:
The analogy I favor is introspection as a personal narrative, whereby people construct stories about their lives, much as a biographer would. We weave what we can observe (our conscious thoughts, feelings, and memories, our own behavior, the reactions of other people to us) into a story that, with luck, captures at least a part what we cannot observe (our nonconscious personality traits, goals, and feelings).
Think about it for a second. You lash out at someone. You say they deserved it. Then you have something to eat. And you feel much better. You realize they weren’t being awful, you were just cranky because you were hungry. We feel emotions and our conscious mind scrambles to figure out why. And sometimes it’s wrong.
You think the voice in your head is in charge, that it makes every decision. But that’s true a lot less often than you think. Ever been so wrapped up in your thoughts while driving that you barely remember the ride home? You didn’t crash the car. You made the decisions that allowed you to arrive safely without consciously thinking at all about them. In fact, you’re on unconscious “autopilot” most of the day. But your conscious mind really loves taking credit for everything.
Some people are gonna get freaked out at this realization: “AHHH! I can’t trust myself! I’m not in charge! Why is my brain like this?”
It’s okay. Your unconscious mind is still “you.” But it’s not the “you” that is the voice in your head. To be fair, the voice in your head, your conscious mind, has a really really tough job. Actually, it has two jobs — and they’re often at odds with one another:
- Job 1: Provide as accurate a vision of yourself and the world as possible.
- Job 2: Keep you happy.
You can compare this to giving advice to a friend about their bad behavior. You want to be accurate enough that you can help them course correct but you don’t want to make them feel like a terrible person. It can be a tricky balancing act.
Sometimes you need to hear, “You’re right. Everyone else is wrong.” But other times you need to hear, “You are being a jackass and should get your act together.”
Seeing yourself with rose-colored glasses — within limits — is a good thing. Keeps your self-esteem up and depression away. But too rosy and you start saying things like, “I bet I’m a natural at skydiving! I don’t need lessons!”
Your conscious mind doesn’t have perfect information about your unconscious mind, so it guesses. On top of that it also needs to try and keep you happy. So at times it comes up with very inaccurate stories about you and the world. Stories you often unquestioningly accept as “truth.” And that’s why sometimes you give its tales more credence than your underlying feelings and end up in the kind of job you think you “should” love — but don’t. Or you end up involved with the kind of person you think you “should” love — but don’t.
So what does all this have to do with resilience? (In fact, you may be feeling a lot less resilient now that you realize the voice in your head can’t always be trusted.)
(To learn the 7-step morning ritual that will keep you happy all day, click here.)
When life gets hard and you’re feeling really bad, knowing how inaccurate your conscious mind can be is actually a big help…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE