Resilience Training

Overview

Resilience is an individual's ability to adapt well and recover quickly after enduring stressful, life-changing situations. The Complementary and Integrative Medicine program at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota offers resilience education and training to help you develop positive strategies to manage stress and foster resilience in your life.

Traditional resilience training is offered as a series of sessions that often exceed a total of 40 hours. Mayo Clinic's Integrative Medicine specialists provide resilience education and training in one or two 90- to 120-minute sessions. The vast majority of people who have participated in Mayo's resilience training say they experienced significant and positive changes in their well-being and outlook on life.

At Mayo Clinic, resilience education and training is integrated with other medical care to achieve well-being of the mind, body and spirit. Doctors take the time to listen and thoroughly understand your needs and then identify the most appropriate resilience skills and strategies to teach you. Sessions are followed by DVD-based instruction in paced-breathing meditation.

About Resilience

Resilience is the ability to adapt well to stress, adversity, trauma or tragedy. People who have a resilient disposition are better able to maintain poise and a healthy level of physical and psychological wellness in the face of life's challenges. Individuals who are less resilient are more likely to dwell on problems, feel overwhelmed, use unhealthy coping tactics to handle stress, and develop anxiety and depression.

Resiliency can be developed by learning and practicing mindfulness and other mind-body techniques. Mindfulness helps you achieve an elevated sense of awareness by consciously recognizing and accepting the present. It brings purposeful, trained attention out of the negative thoughts of the mind and into the reality of the world in the present moment.

Forming a resilient disposition entails:

• Fostering acceptance
• Finding meaning in life
• Developing gratitude
• Addressing spirituality
• Retraining one's attention

A resilient approach leads to addressing problems rather than avoiding them, a positive, optimistic outlook and a flexible, adaptive disposition. Research has shown that these techniques engage the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates emotion, thinking and behavior.

Resilience Training

Resilience training empowers individuals to change unconstructive behaviors, actions and ways of thinking. Increased activation of the prefrontal cortex correlates with a resilient disposition and the skills needed to increase resilience.

Training helps people develop four types of resilience to lead a more balanced and healthier life:

• Cognitive — preserving attention, memory, judgment and problem-solving skills.
• Physical — maintaining well-being through regular exercise, a healthy diet and restful sleep.
• Emotional — approaching life with a realistic, balanced and flexible disposition and addressing rather than avoiding problems.
• Spiritual — practicing and keeping in mind the concepts of forgiveness, acceptance, compassion, true meaning and purpose.

Read more about resilience at MayoClinic.com.