What is your focus?
What people focus on or their mindset makes a big difference to their level of emotional resilience.
In a study conducted by Professor Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina (published July 2009) it was found that people who consciously appreciate and positively register the times when they are happy tend to have greater emotional resilience when times are tough.
Fredrickson had 86 people keep emotional logs over a one month period. What she found was that people who recorded and were conscious of happy moments and also kept a focus on these moments as opposed to those that had a focus on when things go wrong, tended to report being happier generally. Further these people found it much easier to bounce back when things did go wrong.
Less emotionally resilient people on the other hand tended to focus on and register the unhappy events more. They have a more negatively focused mindset.
Comment: This is in line with a number of other studies which show that keeping score of happy events, remembering them and making being happy your focus is a big indicator of emotional resilience.
In my own research on disaster managers and emergency service workers, I found the emotionally resilient people tended to collect good moments and the less emotionally resilient people tended to collect and recollect the hard and difficult times more often. People who have emotional resilience tend to forget or at least focus on remembering the good times as opposed to the difficult times. Whereas people who have less emotional resilience recall the difficult times with ease, including the emotions and will play these back often.These people tend to have greater incidence of stress related illness and report felling stress more often than the people with the happy focus or mindset.
It’s like having a stamp collection in an album. Keep a happy times album is a good idea, and it is really important to leaf through the ‘happy times album’ frequently.
Tags: Add new tag, emotional resilience
Excellent Article!!! This is soooooo true!