Resiliency and Anxiety: Changing Outlook Can Change Lives | Maryellen Dance | TEDxNazarethCollege
Transcriber: Giang Do Doan Truong Reviewer: Almudena Torrecilla Today I want to talk about resiliency. But I am not going to just be talking about resiliency. I’m also going to be talking about another kind of prevalent mental health term you may have heard of: Anxiety. And you may not think that these two things are directly related. But I'm here to talk about why they are directly related. And not only that, but why we’ve actually been looking at these things in a way that is forgetting how resilient we are and focusing on how anxious we are. And boy, are we anxious! And what happens when we focus on anxiety? Well, it grows. So to start, I want to talk about what resiliency is. In short, resiliency is the power to adapt. I can think of some things that we’ve adapted to in the past few years. In... I don’t know, February of 2020, that date might ring a bell to some of us. I was in the grocery store and I saw someone wearing a face mask and I thought: All right, that’s a little overkill. Fast forward a few weeks, I’m in the grocery store and I see someone not wearing a face mask and I think: (Gasping) Where’s your mask? I adapted to that without even trying, without even realizing. I was resilient to that. Now, we’ve all been resilient to small things like face coverings. But to huge life events: Working from home. School from home. Everything from home. Job loses. Divorces. Deaths of loved ones. And you may be thinking: Okay! I’ve gone through a few of those things in the past few years and I guess I’ve been resilient to them, but why are you here reminding me of these terrible things that I’ve gone through? And that brings me to my next point, which is what resiliency is not. Resiliency is not the absence of pain. It is not the absence of suffering. It is not about being the smartest or the best. And the question has now become, has the suffering outweighed the adaptation? I want to let you in on a little secret: Seeking support for our suffering and recognizing how resilient we are are not mutually exclusive. It is imperative that we do these things at the same time. And it sounds difficult, but it’s actually not that hard because we are born with resiliency. A baby trying to walk falls and gets up every single time. But we also learn resiliency. We know that when a baby is trying to walk and fall, we're not supposed to run over and ask if the baby is okay. We’re supposed to say: “It’s okay. You can do it, it’s fine.” So we have this innate resiliency and then we learn resiliency along the way. But a tricky thing happens as we become adults. We also learn some other things. We learn things we’re not good at. We learn our weaknesses. We fail at things. And as adults, we remember when we fall, unlike babies. And so at this point, you may have been able to guess the link between resilience and anxiety. But one of the most common symptoms of anxiety is difficulty controlling feelings of worry. Just for fun, let’s break down worry a little bit. Uncertainty, unease and allowing one’s mind to dwell on difficulties or struggles. Kind of sounds like the opposite of resiliency, if you ask me. So you may be thinking: Great, we just solved anxiety. Just, you know, don’t dwell on your worries. Well, unfortunately for anyone with an anxiety related disorder or anyone who simply has anxious feelings from time to time, we know that it's not that easy. We've probably all heard the phrase what you focus on grows. It turns out that phrase is true. We all have these neural pathways in our brain. And the more we focus on things, the more we talk about things, the more we engage with things, the thicker and stronger those neural pathways get. We are in a mental health movement right now, which is incredible. We are recognizing and identifying mental illness more. We are encouraging people to seek support for mental illness more. It is incredible. Yet, I’m worried. I’m worried that it has made us metaphorically continue to run to the baby who has fallen down. I’m worried that it has strengthened those anxious neural pathways in our brain. And weakened all the resilient pathways in our brain. I’m worried [that] it has kept us stuck in a fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is when we believe that things like personality and intelligence are fixed, are unchanging. Has anyone ever heard anyone say? Or maybe they’ve been the person to say: “Oh, I’m just an anxious person.” That’s a fixed mindset and that’s keeping us stuck. We are not just anxious people. We are people who may struggle with some anxiety for good reason, who also have a lot more resiliency than we realize. So what do we do about this? Well, I’m glad you asked. We do two things. The first thing to do is to promote the relearning of resiliency. We have to promote that we can seek support for suffering, we can give people support for suffering and remind them of their resiliency. Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is one of the most evidence-based forms of therapy out there. Cognitive behavioural therapy as an intervention alone is 50 to 75% effective at helping anxiety and depression. In a nutshell, cognitive behavioural therapy is challenging those thoughts. It’s saying I don’t want you to focus on how anxious you are. Yes, I want you to get support when you’re struggling. Yes, I want to give you support when you're struggling. But I want to change that thinking. I want to change that thinking to focus on how resilient you are instead. It's a lot harder than it sounds. And one of the reasons that it’s a lot harder than it sounds is because we have to believe it. Kelli McGonigal studies stress, and she cites that people who believe that they can manage stress actually have a decreased risk of dying than people who do not believe they can manage stress. Dr. Brené Brown cites that people who believe they are worthy of a human connection are more likely to have fulfilling human connections. So this whole believing in ourselves thing is not really new. And it may sound difficult to believe that we’re resilient, to believe that we can manage our anxiety. But it’s actually not, because all of us in this room have so many examples of resiliency every single day that we’re not thinking about. So I challenge us all to do what we’re born to do - to do one of the things that we do best, to embrace resilience. And although we’re adults and we may not be able to forget the times that we’ve fallen down, we can also start to remember all of the times that we’ve gotten back up. Thank you.