Build Resilience by Creating an Upward Emotional Spiral

In today’s world, resilience might be the single most important character trait you can have. Grit—tenacity—helps you overcome the inevitable obstacles that present themselves in your personal and professional life.

Resilience can be built, and you’re much better off working on your resilience now instead of waiting and building it after tragedy strikes.

One huge element of resilience is your emotional baseline. If you’re prone to negative thoughts—don't worry, we all are! But working to create a more positive baseline, intentionally seeking out and savoring positive experiences, can make a big impact on your ability to bounce back from adversity. Think of it like creating a well of positivity you can draw from in troubled times. (The mindfulness work involved in monitoring your emotions, by the way, is also great training for resilience!)

Psychologists have found that negative thoughts such as fear, anger, and sadness act like velcro in our mind—they get stuck in our awareness. We nurture these harmful emotions by attaching to the situation that caused them and worrying about what it means for us moving forward. It's hard to be resilient when you're chronically stressed even in times of relative calm.

Increase Moments That Glisten

Positive emotions, on the other hand, are notoriously fleeting—happiness, awe, and humor never saved anyone from a saber-toothed tiger. These emotions have a tendency to come and go quickly, easily dismissed by our hypervigilant mind. The result is that even if your life is mostly filled with good things, your emotional life might be more negative than positive.

Barbara Fredrickson, PhD, one of the pioneers in the field of positive psychology, found that the ideal is a three-to-one ratio of positive to negative emotions. Though scientists still debate whether we can set an exact ratio to an emotional experience, there is no argument that a higher positive to negative emotion ratio has important implications for mental health, overall wellness, and cognitive support.

People who tend to their emotional experience in this way tend to thrive at a higher level; they actually have a wider view, figuratively and even literally—with positive emotions we see and notice much more of the world around us.

Whatever your current ratio is you can tip it in the right direction … and it doesn’t mean walking around whistling a happy tune and pretending that everything is fine. Implementing these three subtle practices can, potentially, make a profound difference.

Three Steps to Cultivating Positive Emotions

Be open. Whatever the circumstances of our lives, there are always ways to find some light. Positive emotions such as gratitude, wonder, curiosity, and awe are easily accessible if we are willing to turn toward them. Look for little things to be grateful for or curious about. Widen your gaze to notice the color of the sunset in the clouds or to sit in awe as you listen to a bird sing.

Hold it gently. When you open yourself to these positive emotional states, shift your awareness to your body. Notice the sensations of gratitude, humor, curiosity, and wonder. Feel them swirling through you and let yourself bask in those sensations.

Let it go. Trying to hold too tightly to these positive emotions can have the opposite effect that you are looking for. You might feel a sense of loss that you can’t hold onto a feeling of gratitude or meaning, but they are not meant to be held onto. Let them go as softly as they arrived, return to your awareness, and be open for the next moment.

With enough practice, we can shift our ratio toward positive emotions. Doing this, we don’t lose touch with reality, we simply become more able to deal with the reality that presents itself to us in a more compassionate and creative way.

Read more about Fredrickson’s take on love.