Do you remember that toy from the 1970s, the Weeble? Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down.
As a young girl, I had an incredible amount of resilience. I would fall off a horse and get back on (literally). I would doggedly pursue what I wanted — even if it didn’t belong to me (like another kid’s toy). I believed that no matter if other kids thought I was weird, I could achieve what I wanted through my own actions.
Yet somewhere along the line, it withered away. I followed the rules, but still failed. I listened to my peers, but found little success. My internal local of control morphed into blame-shifting and learned helplessness.
The good news is, as Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University of Minnesota found, we can change our capability to be resilient. In fact, Jane McGonigal, author of New York Times bestseller Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.
There are four different kinds of resilience:
Mental resilience: The ability to pay attention and motivate yourself to do something that’s difficult.
Emotional resilience: The ability to invoke positive emotions when you need them, like optimism, curiosity, or joy.
Social resilience: The ability to reach out to others for help when you need it. This also means learning to be the kind of person that others are likely to want to support and encourage.
Physical resilience: The ability to face physical challenges.
Most likely, you’ll find that you’re stronger in certain kinds of resilience than others — I’m particularly good now at overcoming physical challenges; I’ll fail lifts 20-25 times until I get them correctly, adjusting my body position and timing ever-so-slightly. However, I know my mental resilience needs strengthening, just like any muscle would. The great news? You can play a game and do it! I highly recommend trying SuperBetter, created by Jane McGonigal herself, which helps people build resilience in all of these areas by going on “quests” and conquering “enemies” like certain emotional triggers or negative habits.
I’ll report back in a few weeks as to how effective this has been in changing my current resilience level — but if you feel like you’re losing your bounce, don’t worry. You can become a Weeble again.