Hello Friends,
And happy Monday!
Today, 3 insights on willpower and resilience.
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First, an interesting video on willpower and action:
How to stop screwing yourself over 22min
"If you listen to how you feel, when it comes to what you want, you will not get it, because you will never feel like it."
The impulse window is 5s only - then your brain will kill the idea and you won't act on it.
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Second, a fascinating academic paper on the science of resilience:
Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience - Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events? (Bonanno, 2004)
There Are Multiple and Sometimes Unexpected Pathways to Resilience
Hardiness
A growing body of evidence suggests that the personality trait of hardiness helps to buffer exposure to extreme stress.
Hardiness consists of three dimensions: being committed to finding meaningful purpose in life, the belief that one can influence one’s surroundings and the outcome of events, and the belief that one can learn and grow from both positive and negative life experiences.
Hardy individuals are also more confident and better able to use active coping and social support, thus helping them deal with the distress they do experience.
Self-Enhancement
Trait self-enhancement has been associated with benefits, such as high self-esteem, but also with costs: Self-enhancers score high on measures of narcissism and tend to evoke negative impressions in others. This trade-off may be less problematic, however, in the context of highly aversive events, when threats to the self are most salient.
Repressive Coping
In contrast to hardiness and self-enhancement, which appear to operate primarily on the level of cognitive processes, repressive coping appears to operate primarily through emotion-focused mechanisms, such as emotional dissociation. For instance, repressors typically report relatively little distress in stressful situations but exhibit elevated distress on indirect measures, such as autonomic arousal.
Emotional dissociation is generally viewed as maladaptive and may be associated with long-term health costs. However, these same tendencies also appear to foster adaptation to extreme adversity.
For example, repressors have been found to show relatively little grief or distress at any point across five years of bereavement. Further, although they initially reported increased somatic complaints, over time repressors did not show greater somatic or health problems than other participants.
Positive Emotion and Laughter
Historically, the possible use-fulness of positive emotion in the context of extremely aversive events was either ignored or dismissed as a form of unhealthy denial.
Recently, how-ever, research has shown that positive emotions can help reduce levels of distress following aversive events both by quieting or undoing negative emotion and by increasing continued contact with and support from important people in the person’s social environment.
Several recent studies have supported these ideas in the specific contexts of loss or trauma. Bereaved individuals who exhibited genuine laughs and smiles when speaking about a recent loss had better adjustment over several years of bereavement and also evoked more favorable responses in observers.
Toward a Broader Conceptualization of Stress Responding
The evidence reviewed above presents an important challenge to the view that adults who do not show distress following a loss or violent or life-threatening event are either pathological or rare and exceptionally healthy. Rather, this evidence suggests that resilience is common, is distinct from the process of recovery, and can potentially be reached by a variety of different pathways.
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Finally, a short video on resilience as lived by a Navy SEAL:
Navy SEAL Has a '40 Percent Rule' And It's the Key to Overcoming Mental Barriers 4min
"When your mind is telling you you're done, you're really only 40% done."
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You might also enjoy some of my previous newsletters related to this topic:
Systematize Success #12 - Potential, Grit & Failure
Systematize Success #16 - Happiness & Stoicism at work
Thanks for reading, and have an imperturbable week ahead,
V