Everyone of us has experienced stress one way or the other in their daily life. This post will show you how positive psychology has a new way to address those daily problems and what wellness Wednesday has to do with it. 

Stress Nowadays

Experiencing stress is something that has become almost normal for most of us  in our nowaday life. May it be at work or personal relationships and sometimes even our free time activities seem to stress us. This is not without effects on our overall health, including physical, mental and spiritual health. The experience of stress, along with lack of exercise and an unhealthy diet, plays a major role as a risk factor for diseases of the cardiovascular system, type-2 diabetes, stroke and cancer. When we experience stress, our body is put on alert. It is a useful and necessary reaction of our body that helped us survive in former times. Imagine a tiger standing in front of you and you’re just relaxed and don’t care? You’d probably be eaten before you can blink). Stress activates, among other things, the so-called hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, or HHN axis for short, which is responsible for cortisol release. Cortisol activates our body cells, endocrine glands and brain to cope with stress. For a short period of time this physical reaction is great and helps us to react and cope with high energy situations. What happens when our bodies are high on cortisol all the time? We become sick, our immune system shuts down and our physical ability to produce hormones which will make you feel better (such as serotonin, dopamine and endorphins) decreases. Doesn’t sound good, does it?  So what we want is to experience stress as less continuously as possible. What can help us with that?

Positive Psychology

Stress and positive are two words that don’t sound right in one sentence. The goal of positive psychology, as a new wave of therapeutic methods are being called, tries to focus on what strengthens the human body, mind and soul. Instead of dealing with deficits and illnesses, positive psychology focuses on issues such as happiness in life, mindfulness, optimism and subjective well-being, the positive aspects of being human, as the name suggests. Indeed, positive emotions enhance our ability to cope with stress and thus increase our resilience (we’ll get to resilience a little later). A research team led by psychologist Frederickson nominated ten positive emotions that strengthen competence, resilience, optimism, sense of purpose and health: Joy, Gratitude, Serenity, Interest, Hope, Pride, Inspiration, Pleasure, Awe and, of course: Love. These seem to be protective factors that we want to strengthen so that we become more resilient. But what is resilience anyway?

Resilience

The world famous musician Ray Charles grew up in a very poor and underprivileged surrounding and turned blind at the age of seven. One of the world’s most famous Characters and a great example for resilience is Harry Potter. There are many such examples and you probably can think of somebody you even know in your own life. Many people experience traumatic events in their life and despite that live a fulfilled and joyful life. Seeing that can be very inspiring. What do we learn from that? Bad experiences don’t equal bad life. But what is it that makes the difference for some people to suffer more after such events and others don’t? Research has looked into this for the last decade and they say: its resilience. Resilience is the ability to maintain one’s mental health during difficult life situations or to restore it quickly afterwards. Studies have shown that people whose resilience is higher, can recover from traumatic experiences much better than people with little resilience. What does resilience exist of? Nowadays findings are certain about the following aspects. Resilient people see their lives as meaningful and have experienced that something changes when one acts. They also have stable social contacts and a realistic self-image, which helps them to better assess life dreams and goals and find ways to achieve them. Good access to one’s feelings and confidence also makes people resilient. According to the motto: It’s hard now, but it will get better. (For those folks who are interested into the genetic depths, have a look at the Gene “5-HTTLPR” which in its long-shape seems to make people more resistant to stress and at the same time makes them experience feelings of happiness more often.) How does one strengthen their resilience?

Some people would think to strengthen resilience one has to harden- as the old school way of raising children would. “One has to learn the hard way”. Luckily nowadays we know that this is not advisable and based on false thinking as research on how humans actually learn shows us differently. For becoming more resilient, there is another way: Relax- participate in activities where you can experience joy and deep relaxation. Learn ways to handle your own mental capacities. This could be by learning to say “no” when your limit of tasks is reached, take an extra break if you need to and connect with people who make you feel yourself. How can Wellness Wednesday support that?

Wellness Wednesday

Ms Yesha Sheth has invented the Wellness Wednesday at Antarang to create a space and room for  learning and experiencing  techniques that will help you find your own way to integrate relaxation in your daily life and therefore strengthen your resilience. One goal of all this is to create awareness for mental health. To help people understand the importance of creating habits of mental hygiene on a daily basis such as cleaning your body or brushing your teeth. For that we need new routines and tools that help us with this. This is what wellness Wednesday is created for: giving you tools for your own mental health to live your life abundantly.

~By Antonia Duerscheid