Resilience for Teens and Young Adults: What it is and How to Build It with Teen Therapy
Resilience for Teens and Young Adults: What it is and How to Build It with Teen Therapy
When something goes wrong in your life, how quickly are you able to bounce back from it? When you encounter problems with your peers, do your feelings of frustration or hurt hang around for a while?
It’s okay if it seems that any time life’s challenges or stressors come around, they knock you down. We all fall apart at times. We all get into arguments with our parents and get bad grades in school. And while not all of us have experienced something major like the loss of a loved one or a serious illness, some have, and some will.
The thing about life is that these adverse moments and failures never stop occurring. When your grade school years come to an end, and you venture out into the world, there will still be moments where you disagree with your loved ones. You might not have any more tests marked in a red pen, but you will receive feedback and criticism, whether it’s from a boss or a client.
Upsetting and stressful moments will come and go, and they will impact us in ways that make us experience all kinds of emotions that feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. While we cannot always control most things that happen to us or even our initial reactions, we can control the impact that all of it has on our lives and wellbeing.
What is Resilience?
Resilience is a psychological term and quality that helps explain our ability to bounce back from life’s adversities.
Resilience is not something that makes your problems go away. Because when setbacks and challenges occur in life, we cannot escape them. It does not do us good to avoid or suppress our emotions, just as it doesn’t help us when we dwell on those problems either.
These emotional responses and behaviors only hold us back from moving forward and acknowledging the better parts of life. However, when we build resilience, we not only overcome life’s hurdles more quickly. We can also more clearly see and welcome in the things that bring us joy because we can see past the things that don’t.
The Impact of Low Resilience
Imagine a life where the struggles you face only make you come back stronger than before. Where the feedback you receive from a teacher or a friend doesn’t make you feel singled out. How many better and healthier choices could you make if you started making decisions from a place of calm rather than stress?
All of these are examples of what it means to be resilient. If you lack resilience, you might dwell on your problems. You might easily feel victimized, stressed, and overwhelmed. The longer you dwell on your problems, and the more frequently you feel this way, you might develop unhealthy coping mechanisms, such as self-harm behavior and substance abuse.
Furthermore, if you continue to react strongly to everything that happens, it becomes more difficult to manage and cope with your emotions in general. Intense and prolonged emotional reactions can ultimately contribute to mental health conditions like anxiety and depression. More resilience can help keep your thoughts from escalating into something more serious.
How Can I Build Resilience?
Resilience is like a muscle that you can make stronger every day. Some people are born with more resilience, and others go through adverse or traumatic experiences that make them more resilient. No matter what, resilience is something we all must build ourselves, and here are three ways you can do it:
Find the value in your failures
By now, you’ve learned that to learn lessons, you must make mistakes. This concept explains much of what it means to build resilience.
Make sure you always pause to celebrate your wins, no matter how big or small. When it comes to mistakes, setbacks, or failures, you won’t exactly feel like celebrating, but you can still take some time to pause, reflect, and learn.
The next time a difficult event or failure in life brings you down, try seeing things from new perspectives. Perhaps you choose to believe that everything happens for a reason and find a purpose that you resonate with. Maybe you remind yourself how helpful it is to have learned this lesson now so that you can apply it or avoid experiencing a worse version of it down the road.
Your capacity to accept your failures and your wins is critical to your self-growth and future successes. Many people never go as far as they want in life because they are afraid of failure; not necessarily afraid of failure itself but the uncomfortable emotions that follow. But if you can learn how to manage and control these emotions and choose gratitude instead, it will open more opportunities than you know.
Sit with your Feelings
When something happens to make you feel frustrated, angry, or stressed, pause and tune into your body sensations. Notice everything you feel. Rather than forcing any thoughts or sensations to come or go, try welcoming it all in instead. It’s never easy to sit with things that feel uncomfortable, but the more you practice acceptance, the less overwhelming everything will feel.
Talk to a San Francisco Teen Therapist
Believe it or not, therapy is not reserved for those going through major life changes or trauma. It’s not a treatment only for people who have been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, or another condition. Therapy is a wonderful outlet to talk about anything you have going on in your life, no matter how big or small you perceive your problem.
Some people seek therapy just to improve their overall mental health, and that includes building their resilience. Through therapy, you can learn helpful tools and techniques for overcoming emotions and challenges.
Whichever you decide to try, building resilience is one of the best things you will ever do for yourself and your mental health. There is no better time than the present to be proactive about building your resilience, and your future self will thank you for it too.
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