EP 9: We've Lost Resilience

3 tips on building resilience to help end the stop-start health cycle.

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Transcript

Speaker A: Hi everyone.

Speaker B: I'm Ben Johnson, mental health and exercise coach, private gym owner from Newcastle Online, coach of the revival program, and outnumbered dad of two strong independent daughters just like my wife, and I can't get.

Speaker A: A word in with them at home.

Speaker B: Here's my chance. Welcome to my podcast. This show is a combination of my own personal growth, life experiences and experience of coaching people for over a decade to help improve their health, happiness and life fulfillment. There's a lot of people struggling to find sustainable physical and mental health solutions, so I want to provide you with some key insights and key tools to help. If you find this information useful or even just enjoyable, it would be absolutely amazing if you could hit the share button or leave a comment. You can also follow me on any of my social media platforms that can be found in the description text.

Speaker A: So when it comes to improving your health and fitness, you need resilience. And people often think that resilience is something that people are born with it, or they're just naturally resilient, or they have this innate ability. Some have it and some people don't have resilience. And that's where a lot of people are massively wrong, in my honest opinion. I believe, and I coach people to believe, that resilience is a learned skill, it's a behavior, it's a way of life, and it's one that needs constant work and it needs constant reinforcement. Resilience can come and resilience can also go for everyone. And the good news is, if you don't currently have it or you don't currently possess resilience, that you can get it. Or if you've got low levels of resilience, you can build it. But on the flip side of that, bad news is that if you have current high levels of resilience or you feel like you're a resilient person, you can get complacent. You can lose it. It's not linear. And as I touched on in a previous episode, a lot of things in life for many people have become fairly easy, especially when it's linked with technology advancements. And this, in my opinion, has added to the loss or the lack of resilience, if you like, that many people possess in other areas of their lives because it's been brought through from the advancements in technology, it's been transferred into different areas in health and fitness, resilience being one of them. I believe that constantly working on and building resilience is one of the absolute key things to support both your physical and mental health long term. I want to point out before I go on, that just like most things in life, levels of resilience aren't going to be linear. There's going to be ups and there's going to be downs. But with some mindset tools, some mindset approaches, some systems, we can definitely help ourselves to improve these levels throughout our lives. Here's an absolute given for everyone life can be hard. Challenges are inevitable. There will be tough times, whether that is financially, you might lose a job or you might close a business, whether that's professionally, you might have extra stresses, you might have new role, new responsibilities. You might have bad relationships within your career, might be personally, you might have relationship breakdowns, divorces, you might have bereavements in family or close friends. You might just be bringing new people into the world and raising young children, or you might be moving house. All personal challenges, these might be spiritual, you might have a bit of a lack of purpose because you've got huge changes within your life. These might be health struggles, sicknesses, injuries, diseases, all of these areas. All things can feel like really tough times and challenging. And these tough times can often snowball quite quickly. Pessimism will kick in, everything can start to feel like oh, I'm a failure. Emotions can be very low, sadness can kick in, then the negative self talk kicks in, which can lower your self worth and can lower your self confidence. And unfortunately, the realization is that for some this can lead to mental illnesses potentially driven by some of the things that I've just shared above, but also people who go through these challenging times, who already have previous mental illnesses, it's going to be ten times tougher for them, even to the point of that. Things that we would class as normal daily events, normal behaviors, normal activities can feel very tough for those people as well. A little side note for anybody who's listening with mental illnesses currently I'm going to be sharing some advice to help improve resilience, which will 100% help you, but I would always recommend to get further help, external help from the likes of a counselor or a therapist as well. Right, here's a sentence that I'm going to say a couple of times because I feel it is so, so important. Hard is a subjective perception based on resilience levels. So one person's what feels hard can be completely different to what somebody else's. What feels hard is it's a subjective perception. So this is what you feel is hard based on your experiences, based on your beliefs, based on a coping mechanisms. This is all linked to your resilience levels. So hard is a subjective perception based on resilience levels. Resilience can be described as a protective factor against psychological distress and how we manage to withstand and bounce back from difficult life events. It's important to understand that being resilient doesn't mean that you're exempt or immune from the likes of stress. You're not immune from pain, you're not exempt from suffering. Being resilient and building resilience means that you have the ability to work through the stresses, the pains or the suffering. And that's why for a lot of people who have long bouts of poor mental health or unfortunately have mental illnesses, that therapy is essential to help them improve their ability to work through stresses. Pains of suffering. What I want to do today is share a small selection of the courtroom advice that we give our private members that helps them build resilience to prioritize their health and fitness routines through the inevitable life challenges that we're all going to face. And then this isn't stuff that's just going to help build resilience for health and fitness routines. It's also stuff that can help you build resilience in all areas of your life as well. Having resilience with your health and fitness routines like your exercise, your movement, your workouts, your nutrition habits, it's extremely important to create in order to create sustainable lifestyle changes. Without it, without having that resilience, you're probably going to fall into your or your stop start pattern over and over and over again. And if you can find consistent sustainable lifestyle changes with workout and exercise especially, these are actually fantastic coping mechanisms whilst you're going through and you're in the depths of these challenges and hard times. So it's a win win to try and work on this. These are all things, as I mentioned before, that need constant work and they need constantly revisiting. It's not going to be linear. So feel free whilst you listen to these to grab a pen or type some notes whilst we're doing this. First one adopt a growth mindset. This is first and foremost, this is number one priority. These tough times are challenges, they happen to everyone. It's easy when we're in the thick of these challenges to feel like we're the only ones suffering. The universe is against us and because we're hype are aware of them and we're living through these hard, tough times, we're in the moment. So it does feel that way. But this can make you feel like others have it better than you or they've got it easier than you. And that you can't do what they're doing or you can't learn what they're doing or how they live. That's what's called a fixed mindset. And adopting a growth mindset can help you learn from each experience, start being open to new ideas, new perspectives, new solutions, which can help build future resilience. When it comes to your self care and your health and fitness routines, I'm going to give you an example. Say you've got an injury, a knee injury for example. A fixed mindset is I can't do any exercise at all, I'm going to give up, I'm a failure and I'll avoid this in the future as well. Whereas a growth mindset is, okay, I can't do what I was doing for now, but let's find out what I can do, let's find some safe alternatives, then I can improve in other areas and when I'm ready, I can get back to my original plan when I've recovered. Also, growth mindset in this example is what can I learn to avoid this when I get back to it in the future as well. A growth mindset is a massively helpful resilience build and tool. Be open to new ideas, be open to new ways of thinking, because you can change it. Don't think that you can't. Number two, control the controllables. Accept that things aren't perfect, they never will. Accept that every week won't be the same. Accept that changes are going to happen to your routines whether you like it or not. Focus on the things that are within your control and learn to let go of the things that you can't directly control. Too often, too many of us focus on the latter, which just wastes time, it wastes effort and it really impacts your emotional regulation negatively. An example for this, say your children are poorly sick, so you can't get to the gym three times a week like you were doing. You maybe start to resent your kids a little bit or at least get very frustrated about it. And you start to feel guilty. Maybe you start to feel anxious, you feel like a failure. So every one of your weekly health habits, not just your workout, goes out the window all on off an approach. Or you accept that you can't do your normal routines, you can't work out at the same time or the same place that you want it to. So you find a solution within your control. You focus on the controllables. It might be that you do a shorter home workout routine once or twice in the week rather than three. Maybe you accept that your sleep is going to be or might be impaired. So your normal bedtime routine, in your normal sleep routine, you adapt them so that you get a little bit more sleep here or there. Maybe is what you do before bed. Might be that you watch a little bit less tele things that you can still control to get a little bit more sleep. Maybe you accept that your time is limited, so you kind of cook all the meals that you wanted to or you were previous weeks when your children weren't poorly. So instead of getting poor nutrient dense fast foods, snacks or takeaways, you may opt for some really quick options that are more nutrient dense, but still aren't what you originally planned. If you're controlling and focusing on the controllables, this is going to help you build resilience as it's going to make you feel proactive and it's going to make you feel accomplished with continuing moving forwards towards your health and fitness. Long term goals. Number three, adopt a flexible push pull method. So tying in with a point we've just gone through there, controlling the controllables, you can actually set yourself minimum weekly self care standards around your workouts, around your nutrition, around your sleep, around your general daily activity, also known as pull times. These pull times are key during challenging, tougher and harder times. In contrast to this, your push times are when things are a bit more, let's say, play and sailing. These would be where you give yourself and you partake in your maximum weekly self care standards around exercise, nutrition, sleep, general daily activity. I'll give you an example. You've unfortunately, and sadly mebbies, had a family bereavement. So you give up on all self care because there's too much to organize, there's too many people to support, there's too many emotions to process. Or you recognize this is a pull time of your life for a few weeks, maybe it's for a few months, and you accept less of the weekly positive health habits that you were doing, but know that you're not sucking everything off when you're in a pull mindset. This is going to help you cope with organizing things, it's going to help you cope with support and others, and it's going to help you cope with your own emotions as well. A great quote that I heard in regards to this one is this too shall pass. This too shall pass. Meaning that the tough times, the hard times, the challenging times in life, the pull times, they will pass. Just as the easier, the smoother times in life, the push times will pass as well. So always remember, this too shall pass. These three systems, mindset, approaches, tips if you like, that I've just shared. These are all helping you avoid the all or nothing approach when challenging and harder times arise. Also known as building resilience with your health and fitness routines. The last point that I want to make to round all this up and bring it all together full circle is this workouts and exercise themselves will also help you build resilience. So if you can overcome this stop start yoyo cycle with exercise and workout patterns that are associated with hard life events that we've discussed financially, professionally, personally, spiritually. If you can overcome these, you're going to have more consistency with your workouts and therefore you're going to have more consistency with working on building your resilience from these workouts as well. In your workouts. You're going to overcome challenges, you're going to push through struggles, you're going to be able to adapt to stress better. You're going to start thinking outside the box with a bit of a growth mindset. All of these amazing things from your workouts, all improving and building your skill of resilience, which can then all be transferred into other areas of your life as well. So hopefully you can understand resilience and the importance of having resilience and working on resilience in all areas of your life, especially in health and fitness as well. And hopefully some or all three of these tools that I've shared are going to give you some direction on what to work on. And also lastly, remember that the power of exercise and workouts themselves is super powerful in building the skill of resilience which is transferable into other areas of your life. Personally, for me, I've had more of what I perceive as hard times challenges in the past five years than I had in the previous 30. Family bereavements house moves, bringing young children into the world, the pandemic and the business and financial challenges that that brought with it more injuries, more illnesses than I've ever had in the last five years. Thanks, kids. Thanks for getting older. But all of these harder times, these challenges, I see them as a means of growth. It's built my resilience for the next challenges that I'm going to have in the next five years and beyond that, I am going to face inevitably. So even those are things that I wish didn't happen. There was a lot of sadness. There was a lot of worry, there was a lot of stress. I'm still grateful for them in this respect that has helped me build resilience with all of this. You can either choose to be the victim or you can choose to be empowered by hard times. It's our choice, as always. Thanks for listening. Please, please, please continue to share and subscribe. I want this podcast channel to positively impact as many people as possible. And that can only be done with the help of you. If you want any more information about working privately with me, all of the details are in the description of text. Take care.