How To Build Mental Resilience Like A Stoic

Building resilience is such an amazing skill to carry as it helps us in recovering instantly from difficult situations. Do you know what resilience means? In simple words, whenever life knocks you down, you bounce back, and keep on going…that’s resilience.

Also Read: What is Resilience and Why Building Resilience is Important?

Moreover, resilience is something that is not god-gifted or passed through heredity; it is something that you build with time. Mostly, our life’s experiences and challenges make us strong. Resilience does not only benefit you in your professional life but also in your personal life.

It makes us the strength to move on, to leave, to live peacefully, and most importantly to stay mindful. I personally believe that it is important to be knocked down by life to learn to bounce back stronger.

Additionally, resilience makes us less afraid to get knocked down again by life. If you’re going through a difficult phase, this blog is for you! This piece will help you to build more resilience like a stoic. So, let’s get started.

Ways to Build Mental Resilience like A Stoic:

1. Step out of your Negative Thoughts Cycle.

Whenever bad things happen to us, we often stuck on negative thoughts which do not benefit us at all! They only outcome in more negative fallouts! We keep on ruminating on our past experiences instead of getting over them and solving them.

Therefore, you really need to quit your negative thoughts cycle and work on the plan of action. If you need time to bounce back stronger, you can take a behavioral break like, try slow breathing or exercise.

2. Keep questioning the catastrophe

Catastrophic situations arise when we have not expected the worst outcome. For example, if you have failed in your exams, you may start believing that you’ll always be a failure.

While most of us do not catastrophize ourselves this much, however, many of us still believe that outcomes will be worse as a part of our destinies, the only way to break this pattern is to keep questioning our abilities.

Instead of questioning our destiny or luck, why don’t we start focusing on our best abilities? By gaining control over this type of negativity, you will be able to develop resilience.

Being resilient is all about observing all the negative thoughts and overcoming them with appropriate skills to handle them. You can start with actively pursuing all the challenges. Choose those challenges which provide you opportunities for developing resilience and improving your life in amazing and unforeseen ways.

3. Try to overcome the fear of failure

We all fail, we all win, and one thing that always comes along throughout is “hard work”. I know we all try to avoid failures, but they are a part of life that can’t be avoided. We all are afraid of failure.

Also Read: How To Overcome Your Fear Of Failure

Failure makes us ashamed. What if I tell you to make your failures your strength? You don’t have to treat your failures like diseases. By treating your failures like learning you will be able to overcome challenges and learn resilience easily.

Now, the question arises here, how are you going to conquer your failure in order to become resilient like a stoic?

Let me answer this for you if you feel like your failure is a threat then prepare your body for a fight mode and feel like you are fighting in a battle. Keep the mindset of doing something focused and hard so that no one can defeat you. Take it more like a challenge, a challenge that you can win without giving up and bouncing back even stronger

4. Take the Benefits from Past Mistakes.

Ever thought about why we focus more on bad things over good things coming our way. Why do we make our challenges so hard that it always results in failure? To overcome this, we really need to focus on past mistakes. Many people might tell you to take action and keep reflecting on your failures! But, what about the dark clouds of negative emotions that show up after failures?

Before you become upset due to a failure, it’s high time to get up and see the benefits you can evaluate from a failure! Just try to find effective solutions from failures. By practicing this, you will be able to strengthen your capability to overcome failures and defeat negativity in every tough situation.

In order to find the benefits, you can begin by writing a few things that you have learned from your failures. For example, if you have failed in an assignment, you might observe prioritizing important points and writing your assignment in a more professional way.

You can also ask these questions to yourself:

• What can I do to change this situation into a more positive situation with results?
• How can I be grateful for the learning?
• What can be the best way to start up again?
• What did I learn from this failure?
• What can I do to grow and develop more optimistically from this situation?

4. Emotionally distance yourself from negativities.

While you experience a failure, negative emotions take place in your body and your mind gets stuck on negativity which results in emotional distancing. To overcome this, you can try to recall a recent conflict you had with someone. Make sure you’re choosing only one instance of conflict.

Also Read: How To Emotionally Detach Yourself From Someone

For example, you had a fight with your partner about performing the house chores. Do not think about each and every fight you had with your partner. Just try to focus on the most recent fight.

Now, try to imagine the whole event from someone else’s point of view. Now, ask yourself a few questions:

• Will someone understand the reason behind your sadness?
• Will you ever be able to see your partner’s view on this situation?
• In what way, the observer is going to feel after evaluating the whole situation?
• Is the observer going to evaluate this situation in a different way than you pretend it to be?

6. Daily Affirmation: “This too shall pass.”

The other technique that can help people to avoid stressful situations and negative emotions is a daily affirmation. For example, you can fill up yourself with positive statements like; this too shall pass or time heals all wounds.

The capability of thinking about a future wherein you’re no longer feeling bad or sad about your struggles will help you to get through rough phases like a stoic. Along with this, it also reduces the intensity of negative thoughts. So, whenever you feel distressed, try to observe the situation from a positive outlook.

For more affirmations, refer to the below-mentioned blogs:

• 25+ Growth Mindset Affirmations
• 30 Positive Affirmations
• Explore the power of affirmations and transform your life

7. Keep finding the silver linings.

The capability of finding the silver lining in difficult situations can be referred to as reappraisal ability. Reappraisal ability helps in generating positive emotions even when there’s nothing to hype about positivity. Silver linings help in counteracting negative emotions, speed up recovery, and improve our overall mental health.

Now, the question arrives, how do we find silver linings? For example, think like you’re in a café and you’ve dropped your snacks on the ground. You might start feeling bad about others’ judgment and about dropping your food.

However, you can think like you’re lucky for visiting a café even when there are many people who are sleeping on the road with hunger. Or you can also see this is an opportunity to do something better with the dropped food.

Also Read: 10 Rules of IKIGAI That Will Change Your Life For Better

8. Daily Metaphor: “Run at the dog.”

When I say, run at the dog. I probably do not mean it. This is how this metaphor works! It’s about running towards uncomfortable situations is a great way of overcoming discomfort and building resilience. There are various things that make us uncomfortable.

For example, if you’re being body shamed, you might want to end your negative feelings by having a glass of beer. However, this type of emotional avoidance is hazardous. Because there is no end to emotional avoidance!

However, you can imagine yourself seeing this as a challenge. Face it, cope with it, become resilient, and thrive through your talents. Do not let someone’s body shame you again! Keep running at the dog, do not let yourself back down, do whatever you want to do, face your fears, and prevent yourself from toxicity.

I hope this blog helps you to be more resilient like a stoic. Comment down and share your experiences with resilience. For more such content, follow Calm Sage on all social media platforms.

Thanks for reading.

Sending positive vibes to you!

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