MayoClinic.com: Resilience Can Help With Stress and Adversity

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Resilience is the ability to adapt in the face of trauma, adversity, tragedy or even significant ongoing stress. People who have resilience harness inner strengths and tend to rebound more quickly from a setback or challenge, whether it's a job loss, an illness or the death of a loved one.

A new feature on MayoClinic.com helps users test their resilience levels and provides tips to build resilience. The feature focuses on 12 characteristics of resilient people and ranks each user's scores after a series of questions. The questionnaire uses a gauge developed by experts at Mayo Clinic of how resilient an individual may be based on some of the characteristics that resilient people tend to have.

"People who are more resilient have the ability to say to themselves, 'OK, this bad thing happened, and I can either dwell on it or I can learn from it,'" says Edward Creagan, M.D., a Mayo Clinic oncologist in Rochester, Minn. "Resilient individuals have cultivated a sense of forgiveness, and regardless of the setback or slight, they're able to box it up, and let go of it."

Tips featured on MayoClinic.com to help individuals become more resilient include:

• Use humor and laughter
• Learn from experiences
• Remain hopeful and optimistic
• Accept and anticipate change
• Work toward goals
• Learn new things about yourself
• Think better of yourself

About MayoClinic.com

Launched in 1995 and now visited by millions of users a month, this award-winning consumer Web site offers health information, self-improvement and disease management tools to empower people to manage their health. Produced by a team of Web professionals and medical experts working side by side, MayoClinic.com gives users access to the experience and knowledge of the more than 2,000 physicians and scientists of Mayo Clinic. MayoClinic.com offers users intuitive, easy access tools such as "Symptom Checker" and "First-Aid Guide" for fast answers about health conditions ranging from common to complex; as well as more in-depth sections on over 25 common diseases and conditions, a wealth of healthy living articles, videos, animations and features such as "Ask a Specialist" and "Drug Watch." Users can sign up for a free weekly e-newsletter, "Housecall," which provides the latest health information from Mayo Clinic. For more information, visit www.mayoclinic.com.

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About Mayo Clinic

Mayo Clinic is the first and largest integrated, not-for-profit group practice in the world. Doctors from every medical specialty work together to care for patients, joined by common systems and a philosophy of "the needs of the patient come first." More than 3,700 physicians, scientists and researchers and 50,100 allied health staff work at Mayo Clinic, which has sites in Rochester, Minn; Jacksonville, Fla; and Scottsdale/Phoenix, Ariz. and community based providers in more than 70 locations in Southern Minn., Western Wis. and Northeast Iowa. These locations treat more than half a million people each year. To obtain the latest news releases from Mayo Clinic, go to www.mayoclinic.org/news. For information about research and education, visit www.mayo.edu. MayoClinic.com is available as a resource for your health stories.