Bend, not break – using resilience to weather life’s storms
As a profession that advocates for prevention over cure, it can be surprising and saddening to know that the same approach isn’t applied to clinician wellbeing. From university training to entering the workforce, patient care and high-quality dentistry have been the focus, and rightly so. But what about the person at the other end of the mirror, the clinician? Surely their health and wellbeing are just as important as the patient’s?
With mental health concerns rising amongst dental professionals, it’s imperative that we focus on clinician wellbeing now more than ever. Adding tools to their wellbeing toolkit is a great start, and one of those tools is resilience.
Resilience, as a psychological resource, is defined as ‘the capacity to rebound or bounce back from adversity, conflict, failure or even positive events, progress and increased responsibility’ (Luthans, 2002). It can be described as our ability to bend without breaking, to expand our capacity to hold both the good and the bad.
What resilience is:
Focusing on what we can control and letting go of what we can’t.
Having various strategies to draw upon to help us get back to centre.
The capacity to hold experiences and emotions, and still act.
Part of sustainable growth and development.
An internal resource that’s dynamic and developable.
What resilience isn’t:
Pushing, grinding, and hustling.
Emotional suppression.
A show of martyrdom.
Tolerance of a toxic environment.
Compensating for a broken system.
Now that we’ve established the definition of resilience and the context in which it’s applied, let’s look at a few strategies that you can implement into your daily life straight away to increase wellbeing.
Proactive strategies
Proactive strategies are those that are implemented on a regular basis to develop your resilience and raise your adaptability setpoint, such as:
Healthy sleep patterns
Regular exercise
Journaling/writing
Mindfulness
Supportive relationships
Hobbies
Reactive strategies
Reactive strategies are those that are implemented in the moment, in response to the immediate situation, such as:
Reframing of thoughts
Box breathing
Slow counting
Progressive muscle relaxation
Posture shifting
Music
We are all individuals within a context, whether that’s the workplace, our family, or society at large, and have the capacity to positively influence our environment. But the next time you find yourself unable to shift the situation you are in, see if you can focus inwards and shift yourself instead. You hold a range of internal resources that can be drawn upon to help you weather life’s storms, and although resilience is often associated with challenges, it’s also an important skill to have if you want to thrive. Just like you need an array of instruments to produce quality work, you need an array of resilience strategies to produce quality mental health.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal; it is the courage to continue that counts.”
– Winston Churchill
