What is emotional resilience?

As daily life becomes more stressful and uncertain, cases of mental health difficulties are on the rise. In fact, one in six people in Ireland will experience a mental health problem every year. Emotional resilience is like reinforcement for our mental health and, as mental health expert Dr Harry Barry states, it’s something that is becoming more crucial.

“Emotional resilience could probably be defined as our capacity to negotiate the challenges and difficulties of life. It relates to our individual capacity to cope with those adversities. Resilience comes from the word ‘resilio’ which means, ‘can bounce back,’” says Dr Barry.

As we journey through life we meet a number of obstacles. From entering college to having children, holding down busy jobs and caring for ageing parents, throughout life we each experience these challenging scenarios.

“What we’ve known for years is that people seem to have an amazingly different capacity to actually handle these situations. Some people seem to deal with them much more easily than others and we call that their resilience, their ability to cope with them, to bounce back, to adapt,” says Dr Barry.

“For years I’ve been saying that emotional resilience is probably the most needed skill, really, of them all. We are looking, as a society, particularly at, say, the adolescent generation and under 30s, but really at all levels of society where we seem to be becoming less and less resilient.”

The reason for our lessening resilience, Dr Barry believes, is down to the fact that we have grown up in more sheltered environments, meaning we haven’t had to face the same trials that our parents and grandparents went through.

“In our fore-father’s time life was incredibly harsh and they were forced from very early on to encounter the harshness of life and to face it all head on from very early ages. Many people were leaving school or leaving home by 15, 16, 17, leaving the country and all the rest of it. So they ended up developing all these skills… They had to learn how to problem solve and how to deal with situations,” he says.

The younger generations now, Dr Barry says, are growing up slightly more sheltered and while that’s not a bad thing, it does mean that we’re not as resilient. Dr Barry is keen to emphasize that cultivating emotional resilience is a good thing to do as it helps prepare you for when life doesn’t turn out as planned.

“You’re preparing yourself for the difficulties of life. It’s very much in your interest. I would say that in my experience of dealing with significant numbers of people over the years that lots of the people who end up with mental health difficulties, they’re often struggling with emotional resilience,” he says.

“It’s very interesting that there’s a lot of evidence showing that our university students over the last 30 years are getting increasingly less resilient. They’re crumbling much more quickly when difficulties come. But I think it’s going on right across society. I feel very strongly these are skills we need at all stages of our life. It’s not just our young people who need them.

In his new book, Emotional Resilience: How to Safeguard Your Mental Health, Dr Barry outlines 20 key skills to help people cultivate their resilience. These skills can be used by anyone. In fact, Dr Barry says that our brains are capable of great change at any stage of our life.

“The thing about any skill is that we can learn it, we can practice it, we can develop it and then we can pass it on to others so that’s a wonderfully exciting idea. In other words, if I could actually teach myself some critical skills, well then I could rapidly improve my emotional resilience. It’s very exciting,” he says.

One of the most crucial skills that Dr Barry encourages people to learn is how to develop unconditional self-acceptance as this stops us from allowing events outside us to influence our sense of self-worth.

“If you play the rating game, it means that everything that happens to you, whether it’s good or bad, has a direct influence on how you feel about yourself. If I do very well at something, I think I’m wonderful and if I do very badly at something, I think I’m terrible,” says Dr Barry.

“Now you just think of the world of social media – if somebody likes all my stuff I’m fantastic. If somebody doesn’t like my stuff I’m terrible. I am associating everything that I do and whether it works or not as basically defining who I am. And of course I can change and break that cycle, which is what I teach people to do. That’s absolutely ground-breaking. It empowers the person completely and frees them for the rest of their life.”

Dr Barry’s hope for his new book is to help people and show them that they are capable of handling the various obstacles that they may face.

“I would love to see many of these skills being introduced in some shape or form into our schools and colleges to try and help people to become more resilient,” he says.

“My idea is that if we can teach these skills, particularly from a very young age, but at any stage, we can learn these skills and suddenly notice that we’re handling situations a lot better. We’re not getting so stressed. We’re not getting so anxious. We’re coping better and our lives are getting a lot smoother.”

Emotional Resilience by Dr Harry Barry (Orion Spring, €14.99) is out now.