Resilience

This episode of Just Call Jenna explores the science of resilience and why it’s far more powerful than relying on motivation or simply “staying positive.” Jenna breaks down how the brain and nervous system respond to stress, explaining that resilience isn’t about avoiding difficult situations—it’s about learning to recover from them. Through the lens of neuroscience, she shows how emotional regulation, neuroplasticity, and small acts of courage strengthen the brain over time, allowing us to navigate uncertainty with greater confidence and self-trust. 

Listeners will learn practical, research-backed strategies to build resilience, including calming the nervous system through breathwork, reframing fear with clarity, creating evidence through small actions, and prioritizing recovery over constant performance. Jenna also discusses negativity bias, nervous system dysregulation, and why burnout is not a badge of honor. This empowering conversation reminds us that resilience isn’t about becoming emotionless—it’s about becoming more adaptable, choosing to return to ourselves again and again, and discovering that growth is built one small, intentional step at a time.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Welcome back. Today I'm talking about resilience, something we all want to have. It's sort of how do you recover? How do you bounce back? How do you get up again? All of that. But we're going to talk about some real-world tips of things you can do in your real life, how the brain works, and why do you need to repeat this? Because resilient people are not just born that way. It they recover by training themselves to do it. So we're going to talk about that. You're going to talk about resilience, not just motivation, not just positive affirmations, not fake it till you make it. But the real neuroscience of resilience. Stress is unavoidable. You just can't avoid stress. Life's gonna keep lifing. Life's gonna keep happening. Life's gonna keep coming like waves. It'll keep coming. It's here to teach you lessons. But your recovery, that's intentional. Recovery, resilience, sort of the same thing. I know we don't think of it that way, but it is. Resiliency comes from recovery. Resilient people aren't fearless. They simply recover faster. They get back up again. They don't quit. Research actually shows that resilient brains have a stronger emotional regulation, but your nervous system recovery is faster. That makes you more adaptable to uncertainties, healthier stress response patterns. So again, research shows that if your brain is resilient, if you train your brain to be resilient, you're gonna have stronger emotional regulation. You'll be able to control your reactions, you'll have better nervous system recovery, you won't be in survival mode all the time. So stress is unavoidable, but your recovery is intentional. Resilient people aren't fearless, they simply recover faster. Again, my whole point of these things is really stress less and live more. You're going to enjoy your life more when you train yourself to be resilient. When you're recovering, one of my favorite quotes is Mike Tyson everybody's got a good plan until they get punched in the face. But resilient people can actually recover faster from that. So it doesn't mean that you won't get punched in the face. Life is just sometimes gonna punch you in the face. It happens, whether you think you deserve it or not. Like that's not even the point. But resilience is about recovering from that. Again, you have a plan, you get punched in the face. What now? If you're resilient, you're just gonna recover faster. So your brain has practiced returning to safety if you're resilient. That's the key. The brain is always learning, it's always adapting. That's where neuroplasticity comes in. It's always rewiring. So you're retraining yourself to recover faster. If I had a plan and I got punched in the face, what now? Well, I can get back up and try again. Resilience is not pretending life doesn't hurt, it's about training yourself to recover. It's not saying I'm never gonna get hurt. What are you gonna do? Live in a bubble? I mean, I suppose that's possible, but I don't see how. But life is just gonna keep coming. It's not that it's not gonna hurt. You don't say I'm not gonna have a bad day. You just kind of go, I'm not gonna have a bad life. If I have a bad day, I know I can recover it. So every time you calm yourself, instead of blowing things out of proportion, instead of completely catastrophizing things and making it life or death or turning a mountain out of a molehill, before you do that, you're gonna strengthen your neural pathways in your brain that are associated with safety. You're gonna say, I'm safe anyway. You're gonna learn that you're stable and have emotional control. It's self-care through neuroplasticity. I know we a lot of times think about self-care being like a zen retreat or I'm gonna go get a facial or a massage. Yes, those are important. I think you should absolutely do them. I love a good massage, but rewiring my brain is not saying that nothing bad's ever gonna happen to me. It's saying I'm confident that I can move forward anyway. I'm confident that I can recover. I've strengthened those pathways in my brain. I have told my brain it's okay, we can recover. Oh, this bad thing happened. Cool, we're gonna move forward. I can say I don't like it. That scared me, that made me mad, whatever emotion that made me feel. But that doesn't mean I'm gonna allow it to keep me stuck. I'm gonna do whatever I can to move forward. Oh, I had a good plan and it didn't work out. Okay, I'm gonna do something different. There's neuroscience to that. When something stressful happens and life happens, your amygdala, that's the in your brainstem, sounds the alarm. Danger, danger. Your stress hormones actually flood your body and your nervous system braces for survival. The response is automatic. It's biologic. You're not gonna stop it. You're not gonna try to tell it stop. That's gonna be impossible. But your resilience is what happens after the stressor. What do you do after? Oh, I'm someone who recovers, I'm someone who starts again. You don't have to have it all figured out. You're just someone who I can start again, I can do this. Here's an example: like imagine you're standing at the edge of a major life decision. Okay, it feels like standing at a cliff. I bet all of you just felt that in your body. Like, oh good. But you're likely feeling the stressor just from hearing. That's how the brain works. That's your mirror neurons. Somebody mentioned it, a major life decision, you know, something unfamiliar, uncertain. You probably felt stress just thinking about it. But every instinct says, stay where it feels familiar, stay where it's comfortable. I'm uncertain of what's gonna happen, so stay stuck. That's how the brain works. Fear keeps you stuck. But your brain can learn to value things, it will value predictability over your happiness. It wants to predict to the brain survival is prediction. Can I predict the outcome? And it's going to choose that before it chooses your happiness. So let's talk about what that life stressor might be. Let's say two people lose their jobs, right? Same economy, same industry, same salary, same experience, very similar. Like let's say on paper they're the exact same thing. Well, resilience is what happens next. One person might, oh, I have no opportunities, it's a tough economy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. And that person is probably stuck. Three months later, they have no job, no offers, no interviews. We all know the story. The other person says, okay, maybe this is an opportunity for me to do something else with my life. Maybe I'm gonna change industries, maybe I'll go work at a different company, etc. But that same person, three months later, has been on 30 interviews and had three offer letters. Why? Because they were open to possibilities. They recovered faster. That's not to say that the other guy wouldn't get a job. He might, but it's probably gonna take him longer because he's creating a lot of things for his brain to predict everything to back up his evidence. There's not a lot of opportunities. The other person's brain said, Oh, maybe this is an opportunity. I'm open to something different. And the the filter in the brain scans for opportunities, so it finds a whole bunch of them. But that resilience comes from being trained. So person two, who had all the opportunities, just became more resilient by having a resiliently trained brain. The other person was stuck in fear. I'm afraid I won't get what I want and nothing will work out for me. Well, self-fulfilling prophecy there. So resiliency is about recovering. It's about one small step. Maybe you have to send the email, you have to apply for the job, you have to have the conversation, you have to go to the networking event, you have to talk to the people, you have to put yourself out there, you have to set those boundaries, make the appointment. For me, that was like record the first podcast episode, and something incredible happens. There's evidence to the brain. Now that we've been doing this for a couple of weeks, I'm very different than I was in the beginning, but I train myself to be resilient. I'm just gonna show up and do it, regardless of how I feel, whether I'm fear or whatever. And things are evolving, but that's how it works. Resiliency is trained. Your nervous system begins to learn I survived that, that I can survive uncertainty, that I can trust myself. And that's how resilience is built. One nervous system victory at a time. It's not about winning the race, it's about putting on your shoes and getting to the starting line. That's how resilience is built. Because the amount of times that you show up, you've trained your brain to train your nervous system. We're safe. We don't have to worry. Some people are not born stronger or weaker. That's a myth. We develop a nervous system that more or less is flexible under stress, kind of like a rubber band. Think of your nervous system like a rubber band. What happens if you stretch it? How far can you stretch it without it breaking? But if you let go, it's gonna snap back to where it was. So think about that. How far can you stretch yourself without breaking? That's building your nervous system. Again, people are not born stronger or weaker. Some people just develop the ability to get up and go faster than others. Repeated patterns. That's resilience. How many times can you get back up? So as you think about stretching that rubber band, it's a lot about regulating your body. You should not try to think your way out of survival mode. Neuroscience actually shows that the body has to calm first. That's a lot of what I mean by your nervous system. Your nervous system has to calm down so that your body is out of survival mode and you can process. What are some things you can do? You can inhale for four and outhale for six. That is one of the easiest ones. One to two minutes longer, exhale actually activates the parasympathetic nerve system. That's your body's braking system. It tells the brain we're safe now. Take your foot off the brain. That is one of the simplest ones. And we don't focus much on our breathing. Many of us are not exhaling properly. So just get comfortable with breathing in for four and out for six. One to two minutes of that longer exhale will actually tell your body you're safe. It will turn off your alarm systems. It will stop pushing for your survival mode. So instead of saying things like, this will ruin everything, maybe you could ask yourself, what specifically am I afraid of? This will actually re-engage your prefrontal cortex or the logic brain. That will reduce fear. So take a couple long breaths. And then instead of letting yourself go, this will ruin everything. Maybe stay away from terms like always and never. That's a lot. Just what am I afraid of? What scares me? And I bet if you haven't figured it out right away, it will start becoming the answer. I don't know what the answer is. My brain can't predict the outcome. That's really what I'm afraid of, the unknown. That's most of us. But you can build evidence and not motivation. Motivation is fleeting. It's unreliable. Inspiration, unreliable. Fake it till you make it, unreliable. Your nervous system hasn't taken that in. Resilience grows from evidence. That's how your nervous system learns what it needs. It's every small action. It will teach the brain I can handle discomfort. The nervous system will not be firing on all cylinders and bracing for impact. Building that evidence, motivation, letting that nervous system sit in and believe that you're someone who can handle things. You're someone that can get back up. Small acts of courage over and over again. Make the phone call. Go to the gym when you're anxious. Speak up. Apply anyways. Try again after somebody rejected you. The more times you get up and do that, the more you're training your brain to tell your nervous system, I am someone who can recover. Confidence isn't magic. It's basically remembered evidence. Oh, I did this thing, I can do it. Wanna talk about confidence? Survive death. Come back to life after that. You'll learn you can do almost anything. Well, if I survive death, I can probably survive that. So confidence doesn't have to be the big thing like what I went through. My confidence in living life came from walking each driveway at a time, each breath, slowly doing things and building evidence that I could do it again after a trauma. That's resilience. Again, confidence is not magic. It's not anything more than your brain remembering evidence. Remember, your brain predicts. So stop rehearsing failures. Stop. Just stop telling yourself, oh, all these big things that I did. Okay, you failed. All of us have failed a little bit. Your life is not over because you failed at something. Your brain doesn't know the difference between real and imagined. If you constantly rehearse your disaster lives and failures, your nervous system is going to practice stress. It's going to think it's in failure or danger all the time. But if you start rehearsing what could happen or just it is, I'm someone who. If you start practicing that, your brain will learn from repetition. I am someone who, whatever it is that you want to do. Like for me, I'm someone who recovered. I'm someone who got back to my life after a stroke. These are repeated patterns. Instead, practice successful regulation. What does that look like? Not about perfection, but again, the brain learns from repetition. So just practice what you want to do. I'm someone who. I'm someone who makes my bed every morning. I'm someone who arrives safely and gets a parking space. I'm someone who doesn't allow people to mistreat me. Whatever that thing is, just practice it because your brain will learn through that prediction. But you can actually train your recovery as well. I find this part fascinating because this was a big part of my healing journey. You can train your recovery system. You can absolutely train it, not from constant performance. Like we think of athletes going and practicing and practicing and practicing, but they still have to recover. They pause a rest and recover. So recovery is not constant performance. Resilience is not pushing yourself to the limit nonstop. High resilience actually requires some stress recovery. You have to rest and recover and let your nervous system settle. Or you might not be easily able to take on the next thing. I remember I had a therapist that told me, you're not healing trauma just to be able to handle more trauma. You're healing trauma so you can let the joy back into your life so that you can learn to live with peace and joy. And you don't have any experiences from this. I had a very traumatic life with many things that I'm not going to get too much into, but they all got stored in me. And so I didn't know that it was possible to live in peace. I didn't know what peace was. I didn't know what joy was. I didn't know what emotional regulation was. But those things all got trained through repetition. So you can train recovery and resilience the same. I'm someone who is one of the best ones out there. You repeat that enough time. Your brain is going to look for evidence that you are someone who does those things. So if today you feel stressed out about something, I failed at X, okay. Tomorrow I'm someone who survived the failure of X. I'm someone who recovers. I'm someone who tries again. And your brain will look for evidence of that. Yes, I wish I could tell you it's overnight, like click, click, deliver now. No, it's probably a one to two month process. And then as that skill becomes part of you, it will keep expanding. But that's your baby step is I'm someone who. So, what are some things you can do to uh provide evidence to your brain for I'm someone who? You can sleep. As simple as that is, just sleep is part of rest. I'm someone who recovers, I'm resting. Movement, I'm walking, I'm rolling my shoulders, I'm shaking my hands, I'm going to the gym, I'm getting outside. Move your body. Hydration, your body needs water. Plain and simple. I'm not gonna be one of those ones who carries around one of those big jars that tells me how much to drink every hour. If you like that, please feel free. I had one once, it just didn't work for me. But I think hydration, how are you getting that hydration in your body? It needs it. Sunlight, you gotta get sunlight in your eyes. Sorry, you just do. Let that sunlight in your eyes. The morning light is better than the afternoon light, but get sunlight in there. In your eyes, on your skin, it will just improve your mood. Social connections, have some people in your corner, have people to connect with. I know some introverts who have a hard time with the social connection because they prefer to be alone. I'm the exact opposite. I prefer to be around people. And so for me, the recovery requires quiet, which used to feel really weird and uncomfortable. And now I enjoy it because just because I'm alone doesn't mean I'm lonely. I prefer that quiet time. So that's the opposite for me. But I have a family member who is extremely introverted and could deal without people for days on end. They'd be fine. And so for them, getting out and getting the social connection is the opposite. But those are all recovery things because if you don't recover and get your resilience, burnout is gonna happen, whether that be in your soul, your mind, your mind, body, or soul, burnout's gonna happen. And when it does, it's not going to do anything but keep you stuck. Burnout is going to just sap all your energy. It's literally gonna make you feel like you're walking through the mud. Like you can't get forward easily. Everything takes effort. Recovery is a part of performance. Again, think about athletes. Many of them that go work out and work hard, they take time to recover, whether that be downtime, ice baths, massages, you are the same. So for me, like I'm not a physical person. My gift to the world is my mind. And so my mind is like an athlete. It trains, it reads, it absorbs knowledge, but it still needs to recover. So I need peace and quiet where my thoughts can turn themselves off, or I will hit burnout. Resilient people are not always calm. We're not. I'm not always calm. I'm extremely resilient, but I would not say calm is a word for me. Research shows that we can still experience stress, even if we're resilient. Fear and anxiety, they happen. It doesn't matter how resilient you are, they're going to happen. But what's different in me than others being extremely resilient? My nervous system can recover faster. Now, it's not gonna recover in an instant. Sometimes I have to take a sick day and lay in bed. Sometimes I gotta tune the world out and just ignore my phone for a day. I do need to recover. My brain needs to recover. But it's not that I don't experience fear, anxiety, and those kind of things. I'm just able to recover from them. Again, resilience is like a rubber band. How far can you stretch and then snap back to yourself, right? It's kind of like that. So I can stretch pretty far with resiliency before burnout. Now, that's not to say that I have to. I'm not going to put myself in a situation where I'm being forced to stretch, but life is gonna force me to stretch sometimes. It just is. I'm able to recover, take care of myself, and bounce back so that it's not life or death. When you're stretching the rubber band of you, think about the fact that your brain is designed to remember danger. Remember, it's a prediction machine that's called the negativity bias. So your brain is processed or trained to process and remember all those things. So the brain stores your painful experiences more strongly because survival depends on learning from threats. Your brain needs the evidence of all those negative experiences that it stored as danger. It needs those to predict the next things. It's the data that your brain requires to keep processing because your survival depends on the predictions from the brain. It depends on that. After you repeat those so much and the repeated stress, your nervous system becomes hyper-vigilant. It goes into overthinking, catastrophizing, worst-case scenario thinking, emotional exhaustion, trouble relaxing, feeling on edge, shutting down. This is your nervous system expecting danger, and it gets used to that. It gets used to that even when there is no danger. Resilience is about recovering from that, recognizing that it's there. My brain is remembering bad things and bringing them up to keep me safe. And that is naturally biologically sending my nervous system into threat mode. So, how do you deal with this? Most people think it's a lack of discipline when what they're actually dealing with is complete nervous system dysregulation. It's not life or death, it's not a discipline or motivation thing. It's a your nervous system is dysregulated and biologically you can't figure out what to do. So what do you do? You go to your brain and go, how do I do this? I need to get motivated. And you start looking for evidence, and your brain goes, danger, danger, danger. And you're just reinforcing more danger. And so, how do you become resilient? You create micro courage. You start with daily things. I'm someone who, because fear will shrink your world when avoided repeatedly. So fear will shrink you. Every tiny act of courage will expand it back. So if you repeat fear, you're gonna continue shrinking your world. And when you add micro courages, you just keep expanding it. So how do you do that? You speak your truth, you introduce yourself to strangers, even if it's scary. You try something and it's okay if you don't do it perfect. You start asking for help. Oh, that was a big one for me. Asking help still is. That's setting a boundary, saying no to something. These are all small steps that you can do. And as you keep doing them, that's repeated evidence to your brain that you have the courage to keep going. I'm someone who don't forget that yes, you're resting and recovering and resetting your nervous system. That's huge. But to create that micro courage and keep yourself moving forward and to keep it moving, you gotta do small things. Speak your truth, say what you have to say, send the email, have the hard conversation, tell somebody no, I don't feel like doing that. You don't have to be rude. You don't have to be nasty to tell someone no, but you can say no and just let it be. I said no, I didn't want to do that, and I said no. That's it. Don't overthink it, don't make it life or death. Don't provide your brain evidence to fear and overthink. What if they think this? What if, what if, what if? That's okay. You didn't have to do it. And that won't matter in a year from now that you said no. Right now it feels pretty scary in the moment, but you create that micro courage by doing those little things. It's those tiny brave moments that teach the brain fear is survival. And over time, fear is no longer in charge. So as those moments happen, you're someone who, I'm someone who gets back up, I'm someone who is resilient. And your brain will start looking for evidence that you are, and you're providing that with your acts. Actions. You are providing those actions of I'm doing the hard things. And pretty soon fear is no longer in charge. And your brain will take a lot more to set it off because it goes, uh, this is unpredictable, this is uncomfortable, we're gonna be okay. It doesn't fire all the other biological systems that keep you stuck. Again, the brain learns what you repeat. Neurons that fire together wire together. So what are you repeating? And if you're someone who practices panic and worst case thinking, those pathways are gonna be strengthened. But if you continually practice regulation, recovery, grounded action, and courage, those will be the pathways that strengthen. Again, the brain is neutral. It doesn't know the difference in what's good for you and bad for you. It only does what you repeat. What you do, it will give you more of. So it will adapt and rewire based on what you repeat. So what are you repeating? And that part you absolutely have control of. So with resilience, getting back up, having courage to go another day, it's also the courage to recovery. I think that as a society, and this is my worldview, that we spend more time awarding people for performing and overextending themselves than we do for honoring themselves and giving themselves space to recover. I didn't really learn that lesson until I spent six months without working, where I had to recover. And of course, I had some hard things to recover from, but I really realized that I had never in my life until that moment actually given myself the space to do what was best for me. I had always been giving myself away piece by piece, the kids, the job, the expectations, you name it. I was busy in survival and hustle mode. I never spent the chance to recover. So learning that resilience took recovery, that was a big one for me. I became much more resilient than I was before by giving myself space to recover. Again, the brain does what you repeatedly do. The body couldn't keep up with the fact that I was constantly going and going and going and going. Taking the space to recover allowed me to be a different form of resilient than I was before. So if you repeatedly practice regulation, recovery, grounding, action, courage, those are your pathways that are gonna strengthen. But if you practice panic, fear, hustle, life or death, you know, overthinking, you're just gonna strengthen those pathways. And again, you have complete control of that. So if you wanna be an overthinker with panic thinking, by all means, you have my permission to go do that. But I don't think that's what many of us want. I think we want peace. We want to bounce back. I think most of us as adults understand that life's gonna hit. Some days the waves are just gonna crash, unexpected things are gonna happen, but they don't have to take me down and let it be always or never, right? It doesn't have to be that extreme because the brain adapts to what I've repeated. So I repeated peace. I repeated resilience. It's not becoming emotionless. I'm not emotionally numb, but it is becoming adaptable. I cry, I scream, I'm human. But resilience is I recover and return to neutral faster than most. And that's because I train myself to do that. Resilience is actually built in moments that don't look dramatic. They don't look dramatic at all. It's usually not the big ones, it's all the quiet decisions. It's every time you try again, every time you set a boundary, take a deep breath, have an uncomfortable conversation, the choice not to quit on yourself, the choice not to give up. All those little moments train your brain to be resilient. It adapts to what you repeat. So every time you get back up, you're helping future you get up that much faster. You're getting up after being knocked down. So you can practice returning to yourself. And over time, that will be what you expect from yourself. I wish I could say it's gonna happen overnight. That would be great, but no, it's you practice returning to yourself. You practice it, you repeat it over and over again until it becomes normal. And then when danger happens, you trust yourself to get through it. You don't panic, you remain calm. You can say it is what it is. You take a breath and you pause and you do what you gotta do. But resilience is recovering from all of that. It's how fast can you get back up? That's resilience. And again, people are not born weaker or stronger. Some people are just have trained their mind to recover faster. I'm someone who is one of the fastest ways to do that. Thanks for joining me today to talk about resilience. I hope you can get up faster. Remember, karma is real, energy is contagious. Check your vibes.