How Resilience Works To Reduce Stress

Resilience Means No Stress

With resilience you don’t get the negative stress reaction. You read that right! This means that a high level of resilience is the key to managing your stress. With resilience you get high performance and wellbeing; both without compromise. This fundamental capability is about adaptability; your capacity for change.

The Resilience Dynamic offers a straightforward look at stress: what triggers stress, the good and bad sides of it, and how resilience acts as a buffer to help you reduce stress.

See from the infographic the detail behind why the Resilience Dynamic has been calling out for awareness around the gradual slide backwards in resilience. We see a shift towards Coping, and towards what we call Fragmentation. In these states, stress dominates.  Both performance and wellbeing are under threat. Have a go and discover your resilience level relative to our Resilience Dynamic® model by using our free self-assessment, the Resilience Dynamic® Indicator.

Yet those with the highest resilience don’t experience the negative side of stress at all.  They have both high performance and wellbeing; both without compromise. As Alistair Fraser, VP Global Health in Shell said in 2013:

‘Resilient people are more likely to speak their mind…They are more likely to take principled decisions and are better at tolerating change and pressure’

‘If you want to improve human performance, the key is the person, so how do you give them the tools, techniques and policies to help them deal with a fast-changing world.’

Alistair Fraser, VP Global Health, Shell

Shell moved from a mindset of managing risk around health to one where health was seen as ‘a business enabler’. Since initiating team and peer-to-peer resilience training, Shell has seen both engagement and resilience rise. 

What Is Stress?

In order to know how to reduce stress, the Resilience Dynamic has researched what triggers stress the most. It’s pretty straightforward in the clients we work with; leaders and managers across all sectors. Stress is triggered by overload.

It’s related to one of the Top 3 Barriers to resilience.

This barrier is a cracker – we fundamentally overestimate the capacity we have in ourselves, versus the capacity required to execute what’s on our to-do list. The rot sets in and things get worse until we experience overwhelm. 

• We start off having expectations of working a bit harder, a bit longer.
• We get more tired. 
• We lose sight of what capacity is actually required for our tasks because of our tiredness. We continue to say ‘yes’. 
• The gap between what is required and what we actually have the capacity to do gets even bigger.
• We get more tired.
• We lose sight of the criteria for what is urgent and important. 
• We stop getting energy back from the things we do because we’re not doing any of them well any more.
• The gap between what is needed and what we actually have the capacity to do becomes bigger again. 
• And so it goes…

Overload. People with the highest level of resilience do not experience this. They have all sorts of ways to interrupt this spiral and reduce stress.

How Can We Reduce Stress When It Impacts All Of Us Differently?

How can one person react differently than another to the same situation? It’s all down to resilience.

There are stressors that everyone would find traumatic. These are entirely outside our control and we call them ‘absolute’ stressors.

‘Relative’ stressors are quite different; people’s reactions to stress will depend on their resilience.

Looking At Stress Through The Lens Of The Resilience Dynamic® model

A  person with high levels of resilience will respond flexibly to stressors. They will look truthfully at the data of the situation, including their own response, and by understanding the data more, will seek different options. Their response will also derive from deep-rooted intentions. A highly resilient person acts coherently with who they are and what they wish for in life, even in very unexpected situations.

If a person’s resilience is low, their response to stressors will be entirely variable. If the situation tips them into feeling unsafe in some way, they will experience their stress response. Their reaction will be quite independent of whether they believe in what is triggering the stress. They may, for example, really want this new structural change in the department! But at this moment in time, they are unable to take that change on because their capacity for change is very low. Instead you get the well-known stress response of ‘fight’ or ‘flight’, and/or ‘freeze’ or ‘appease’.

The key is to notice the difference in the response. If someone who has been vocal about something, is suddenly rather quiet, they may be suffering from the ‘freeze’ stress response.

To incorporate the person’s response into your thinking and handle any situation, you will have a number of options of how to handle any situation. If your resilience is high, you’ll spot the resilience data in the situation and act flexibly. In particular, when dealing with someone acting from their stress response, you’ll help the person raise their resilience in simple and immediate ways, thus giving them more energy and perspective. That in turn will unlock their capacity for change. And lo and behold your conversation together will be much easier and more constructive. 

How The Stress Reaction Works

The Resilience Dynamic’s research insights illustrate how the stress reaction works in our brains and body. There is a clear tipping point during any stress reaction, when normal stress-reversal mechanisms stop working. At this point, the stress reaction ‘hijacks’ you.

People at high levels of resilience do not cross this tipping point. They have built a platform of resilience that acts as a buffer to the negative stress reaction, and issues are mostly dealt with before they become something bigger.

There are three core phases of any stress reaction. Phase 1 is good, phase 2 is a bit of a warning, and phase 3 is dangerous. Resilience allows the stress reversal mechanisms to function well, and so anyone with a high level of resilience will naturally thrive as a result of phase 1, will intervene if they spot they are in phase 2, and so they never end up in phase 3.

Imagine that! Getting the good stuff from this normal, performance-enhancing reaction, without getting the bad stuff. 

How Resilience Works To Reduce Stress

Resilience is a buffer to stress. Those with the highest resilience do not suffer from the negative side of stress. How does it work?

The more resilience in your system, the more you can choose your reaction to stressors.

That means you can choose not to feel the negative stress reaction. In order to be in a position to choose, you need to build the foundations for your resilience so that your reactions in any context can be open, thoughtful, appropriate and honouring what you need. This means addressing the top barriers to your own resilience, and putting in practice a resilience habit via the things that enable your resilience (by being present, boosting your energy and learning). With resilience you proact in order to react well.

Being resilient doesn’t mean you don’t step outside of your comfort zone, where stressors are at play. Actually the opposite! But you don’t have to experience the negative stress reaction. Any release of adrenaline and cortisol is performance-enhancing and not bad-stress inducing.

The bottom line of how to reduce stress? Shift your attention to enhancing your resilience on a daily basis.

Do get in touch if this article has prompted a query: [email protected]. We’d be delighted to help.