Welcome to Joy Lab!: Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach
Henry: Hello, I'm Henry Emmons and welcome to Joy Lab.
Aimee: And I'm Aimee Prasek. So here at Joy Lab, we infuse science with soul to help you uncover joy. To do that, we focus on building the elements of joy, the positive emotions and inner states that become the building blocks for a joyful life. The element for this episode is resilience. And as you've heard us say before, like all our elements here at Joy Lab, you're wired for resilience. We talked about that quite a bit in episode 13. Way back now, I guess. So head over there if you'd like, sort of more of the foundations of resilience. Let's start here though, with a definition of resilience, there's lots. Here's one that I like from Dr. Katherine Panter Brick. she describes resilience as a process to harness resources to sustain wellbeing. Kind of sounds boring when I say it out loud actually, but
Henry: It's succinct though!
Aimee: It is. Yeah. And like a lot of actually the definitions in the field, they do note that resilience is a process. And I think maybe in that succinctness it emphasizes that. I really like that. And it also acknowledges that resilience looks different among all of us and it doesn't require the absence of pathology.
Henry: Hmm.
Aimee: That might be my favorite part. That means whatever diagnosis you might have, you still have resilience. It is still there.
Henry: Ooh, I like that.
Aimee: Yeah.
Henry: Yes. I really, really do believe that resilience is an inborn quality that we all have. It's totally natural to each of us, and we have had it really for our entire lives, even if we don't always see it. But you know, it does wax and wane, of course. And here at Joy Lab we see it as part of our job to help build it up in every way possible.
And then to find ways to sustain it, you know, at a, a really high level if we can. Because even if we're doing just great right now, we're going to need our resilience again at some point.
Probably pretty soon. So I think of resilience, I'm not as succinct as your quote, Aimee. I think of resilience...
Aimee: I'm not either, that's why I gave the quote!
Henry: ...as the capacity to face whatever is happening with enough skill to deal with it.
You know, more or less successfully. Don't have to be perfect. And if it's not enough, if we do get knocked down by life's circumstances, then we're able to get back up again and again. So I also like to add this important thing to resilience, that you can face those things and still maintain some degree of equanimity and even some connection with joy.
Yeah, recognizing that Inborn quality of it, uh, and its fluid nature is really helpful, I think. And the evidence supports that inborn quality as well. There's been no individual demographic, personality trait, or biological factor that can universally predict or enhance resilience by more than a small amount. So evidence to say is just part of being human. Now, we'll get into this a bit more. But factors like chronic stress, uh, and lack of resources or protective factors in childhood can dent our resilience, but even in those circumstances, it's just not a direct link, to lack of resilience in adulthood or issues or problems later on.
I think that is good news because it means there's just not one thing that can always take it away, and there are lots of opportunities to build it up. And that's what we're talking about with this work on resilience, tapping into the factors that can boost resilience in meaningful ways and helping us identify what uniquely works for us. So we'll do this over the next nine episodes, which sounds like a lot, but I promise it will be worth it. And we'll also link it up to our element of Hope.
So across these episodes we'll cover the seven roots of resilience that Henry discussed in his book, Chemistry of Calm uh, and that were part of his resilience training program, a program that also helped inform the Joy Lab program. But here to start out in this episode, we want to get a good handle on resilience to really understand it in our own way, with respect to our unique individual differences and the factors around us. So let's quickly touch on some ways our resilience can be impacted by things outside of our control.
These factors are helpful because I think even if their impacts might be small, they can be meaningful. Henry, can you cover, uh, some of those along with, other common ways our resilience might get depleted over time.
Sure. So I just said that resilience is a natural inborn trait and I believe that, I think it's one of our birthright gifts, yet it is clear that resilience does vary from person to person. So why is that? Let me offer an image that I like to use in order to think this through. So imagine that each of us has a little tiny container in our brains, sort of, I imagine it like a little water cooler that you see in office settings.
And this little container has a magic elixir in it that keeps us afloat and that gives us our resilience. The size of that container is a little different for each one of us, and there are a couple of reasons for that which we cannot really control. One of those is our genetics. And you can just clearly see when problems resilience run in families.
You know, like when there's a lot of depression or similar kind of related problems. Now some of that is undoubtedly genetic and we just can't change our genes or... can we, so we're gonna come back to that in a future episode. Teaser!
Aimee: Teaser!? Yep.
Henry: The second thing that is largely outside of our control is the environment that we grew up in. How safe did we feel as young kids? How well nurtured were we emotionally? And you know, the sad truth is that, There are plenty of people who have really rough childhoods and you know, there are things we can do about that later in life, to reduce the impact it has on us, like psychotherapy.
But still, it does kind of set a tone for our emotional life and, and that has an influence on this capacity, this container, for resilience. In a manner of speaking, the size of our resilience capacity is set early in life. It is really nice if you have a large capacity for resilience, of course, but every one of us knows people who are incredibly hardy and yet due to some string of losses or just a whole bunch of stresses that occur in a short period of time, they still get brought to their knees. This can happen to any of us. Nobody is immune, but that's not the end of the story.
What I would like to tell my patients and really emphasize in my work is that, to me, the most important thing about resilience is not the size of your capacity for it, but it's how well you're able to keep filling up your container with just enough of that magic elixir to keep you afloat. So we use this up, this stuff, we use it to deal with whatever challenges life sends our way, and if at all possible, we want to try to reduce that we want to stop the bleeding when we can. But this is a dynamic system and so we can also refill it and that's what we wanna spend the next few episodes talking about. How do we keep refilling this container?
Aimee: Yeah. so, okay. We have this container size that might be a little different for all of us. I think it's a really helpful visual. And acknowledging that no matter what, we have strategies to refill it when it gets depleted. I love metaphors like this. It's like, I like acronyms too. So I'll keep it going with to describe, what that depletion looks like. Mainly through ongoing stressors, whether visible or not, or just pushing too hard on ourselves. So, this is a story from authors John Gordon and Damon West. They have a book called How to Be a Coffee Bean. haven't read it, but I do like the metaphor they've crafted. Let us know if you've read it. So here's my sort of altered version of their story. I'll take some liberties here.
A woman sits with her friend in the best gathering place, the kitchen, and she shares with her friend how hard her life feels. There's not necessarily anything in particular either, like some terrible thing she could point to and say, here's why I feel completely overwhelmed, instead it was everything. She felt like she hadn't met her career goals or her parenting goals. Her house felt both too small to live in and too big to clean. Her son was getting teased at school. She was annoyed that she had to take care of her aging parents, and at the same time felt guilty for feeling annoyed.
Her car was making this weird noise. Her cat was getting old and peeing everywhere. She wanted a haircut but couldn't make the time. Her health insurance was crap. It just all felt like too much and she was exhausted. Her friend listened, as she got up and filled three pots with water and placed each on the stove on high heat. She then put carrots in one pot. Eggs in the second and coffee beans in the last one. The pots started to boil and her friend let them roll for a good 20 minutes while they talked some more about all the stuff that was just adding up to what felt like too much. All these smells started to fill the room from the boiling pots, and her friend turned off the burners and said, "I wanna show you something." She scooped out the carrots and put them on a plate. Same with the eggs. And then she ladled some liquid out of the coffee bean pot and put it in two mugs.
Her friend placed everything on the table where they were sitting and asked, "what do you see?" She poked at the carrots, which were now a pile of mush on the plate. She cracked the eggs and they were the toughest, hard boiled eggs she'd seen with that notoriously dry, green, overcooked center. And then she wafted some of the steam coming from the mugs toward her nose. That sweet smell of coffee filled her.
Her friend then explained that each of these items, the carrot, the eggs, and the coffee beans faced the same adversity: boiling water. And each reacted differently. The carrot went in with a strong appearance, rigidly upright, mostly inflexible, but came out completely broken down. The egg went in fragile, thin outer shell that was no match for what laid ahead, and it came out seemingly unfazed, but inside it was completely hardened and dry. But the coffee beans, they remained intact and in a kind of harmony with the water, and then they actually transformed the environment around them, creating these cups of coffee.
" Which do you feel like?" Her friend asked her.
So I like the story because it offers a relatable image of how we can respond to stress and how it leaves us. Either down on the ground in a pile of defeat or hardened and closed off with a lot of anger or fear, sort of drying us out under the shell that we try to maintain. I also know that all of us really are coffee beans. We are made to be resilient. And with practice we'll make better cups of coffee amidst stress. And sometimes, even after we've been practicing and gaining skills, stress will hit, and we'll feel like we made a weak cup or a bitter cup of coffee. But I think even a crappy cup of coffee does a job sometimes. So I love it because it's, it's demonstrating how resilience is certainly a process.
Henry: It's just a great story. I have been each of those three different things at various times in my life, and I'll bet most of our listeners can also relate to all of that. So to me, that's actually one of the big takeaways from the images, that things change. And that we can change over time.
Aimee: Yeah.
Henry: and the outcome has really so much to do with how we relate to stress- the boiling water and the story. So, know, the story didn't exactly say this, but I'm thinking, you know, if, if it hadn't been in the boiling water for so long, it would've actually done pretty good things for the carrot and the egg. They both would've gotten better, at least for eating, if they'd been in the water just the right amount of time. Which is a reminder to me that stress itself is not the problem. It has a lot more to do with how strong it is and how long it goes on.
And then of course, how we respond to it. I believe our bodies are just perfectly designed to handle stress, but not too much of it. You know, we all know about the stress hormone adrenaline, which also goes by the name epinephrine. I dunno why they have two names for that.
They're totally different, but they do. And there's also a, a really important brain chemical that is almost the same chemically, and it's called norepinephrine. When we're stressed, this norepinephrine, basically the brain's version of adrenaline, it makes us really focused and alert so we can respond better to the crisis.
It basically activates our brain. Now because of our wiring, some of us are actually not designed to really do well with this kind of brain activation. It just kind of makes us anxious and nervous and restless. That's not helpful. That's the kind of thing that turns us into that mushy carrot.
There's another brain chemical called serotonin, which I actually think is kind of a good candidate for that magic elixir in our resilience container, and that helps to balance out this overactivation. It's kind of like, know, coolant for a car engine. So it's protective. But there are some other people who are wired so that if they get too much of this serotonin, normally good stuff, it just makes them feel more rigid or compulsive, kind of like the egg. And then when stress goes on for too long, all of these brain chemicals, in a sense can get depleted or out of balance.
And I think that right now we're seeing this on a really large scale, a really big scale after years of pandemic and all of the uncertainties that it brought to all of us. And I think to a large degree people are feeling kind of depleted. Even those who who might have initially been overactivated after a while you get kind of sluggish, you know, run down and, and maybe even depressed.
So I think every one of us needs to attend to our own resilience level throughout our lifetimes, not just here and there. But it's always something that we need to, to be mindful of. And, and so now we've really gotta take a look at our collective resilience and see how do we replenish that? So for us as individuals, you know, brain chemistry is an important piece of that.
And so we're gonna go into that a little more deeply in our next episode.
Aimee: Yes, I want to dive into the brain chemistry of carrots, eggs, and coffee in the next episode with you all. I used to also be sort of a sulfur smelling egg, so it'll be fun to explore that chemical process, amidst stress. The other thing that this story makes me think about is who's turning the heat up on that stove? Oftentimes it's me. I am turning it to full boil. You know, we'll focus on some body-focused strategies in the next few episodes and then we'll get into the mind and maybe that's where we can look at that dial a little bit more.
So we've gotten into today what hopefully will help you understand a little bit more about your unique resilience. Mainly that it's a process, that you have it, it's totally natural, it gets depleted, um, we likely have some tendencies in how we get depleted we can build it back up again, which is the point.
It's a buildable skill for every single one of us. So in the next several episodes, uh, we'll hit more on those seven roots of resilience. They're really helpful because they call out common ways we can get depleted, I think, and then offer some key strategies of how we can build our resilience back up and keep it more full. So to close, I want to share some very simple wisdom from author Anne Lamont. She says:
"Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you."
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