Resilience is the ability to cope with adversity, bounce back from setbacks, and adapt to life’s challenges. In Occupational Therapy, fostering resilience is key to helping individuals build emotional strength, develop healthy coping strategies, and maintain well-being in the face of stress. By strengthening resilience, we empower individuals to navigate challenges, maintain well-being, and continue engaging in the activities that are meaningful, leading to more fulfilling lives.
Why do I need to build resilience?
Building resilience is important to continue to enjoy healthy relationships with family and friends, and promote wellbeing, in spite of stressful situations.
When you build resilience, you gain:
- Greater life balance and adaptability
- Increase in longevity
- Greater life satisfaction
- Less mental health issues
How can an Occupational Therapist help me boost my resilience?
An occupational therapist is equipped with the expertise and experience to use proven therapies that help you analyse your routines, promote participation, and develop a personalised approach to boosting resilience. They create innovative strategies and therapeutic interventions to facilitate engagement in meaningful activities, which helps prevent the negative effects of illness and disability. Ultimately, this approach promotes the positive impact of activity participation on your overall health and resilience.
Health and Wellbeing
Occupational therapists work towards creating a balanced routine doing things you enjoy, socialising, resting, eating well, sleep, and exercising. These activities help your brain become more resilient to stress, helping you to feel more alert, productive and present.
Improve your mindfulness
Practicing being mindful, or paying full attention to the present moment without judgement, can help improve your stress reaction, and improve your resilience. This a helpful skill to have both for children and adults. An occupational therapist will teach you how to grow more aware of your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations
Build a resilient mind
How we feel is often a consequence of how we think. Utilising approaches to promote positive thought patterns increases resilience. An occupational therapist uses evidenced based interventions such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to help you to recognise unhelpful thinking patterns and the impacts on our behaviours. We work with you to develop skills to cope with difficult situations and create a greater sense of confidence in your own abilities to cope.
Sustainable relationships
Holding meaningful relationships can lead to increased satisfaction in life, bringing feelings of confidence, self worth and a sense of belonging. An occupational therapist builds skills for sustaining relationships such as communication, reading body language, interpreting social cues and managing emotions.
Focusing on strengths
All people hold strengths that can be a resource and nurtured, to bring the best out of you as an individual. Strength based approaches adopted by occupational therapists, will focus on your abilities to lead your own best life and foster individual resilience.
Rebuild, Recover and Reengage
In summary, occupational therapists focus on rebuilding, recovering and reengaging, focusing on your individual journey, to boost resilience and wellbeing.
Get in touch with an occupational therapist at Allay today to start working on building your resilience.
