How to Know If You Have Emotional Resilience (And How to Work On It)

How to Know If You Have Emotional Resilience (And How to Work On It)

If you’ve been the victim of your own emotional explosions, inability to cope with difficult feelings like stress, and when life gets hard you feel like you are drowning without a life preserver — you are not alone.

It’s a common experience to feel equally surprised by emotions when they arise and unequipped to deal with them at the same time, a perfect storm for a cycle that feels impossible to climb out of.

And it’s not just when things are difficult, it’s when they’re good too.

Because when you don’t have the awareness or the resources to handle your emotions, you probably also feel them lurking in the background of your good experiences, waiting for the other shoe to drop sending you back into the spiral.

I hear it all the time.

“I wish my feelings would just go away.”

“I wish stress didn’t overpower my life.”

“I wish I could find a balance.”

And I get it.

This feeling of being completely at the helm of your own emotions can be terrifying and unsettling. Not to mention making it difficult for you to live a normal and balanced life with high self-esteem and a rich social life that helps you feel connected because you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen and how it’s going to affect you.

So you live with one foot in and one foot out of the depth of your experience because otherwise you’ll feel even more at risk for the turbulence of your emotions.

Or maybe you’re comfortable living this way at this point, and you’d rather not worry about how to fix something that you’ve already found band-aids for that are holding the ship together.

Saying honestly Alexa, I have other fish to fry and it’s taken me a long time to get to a point and I’m okay with how this is going. I’d rather stay right here where I’ve gotten comfortable than dive back in and rock the boat again. Don’t let me try and convince you! I totally get it, there isn’t a simple solution that’s going to happen at the snap of your fingers and you know you best to know the timing in your life just ain’t it right now.

Because developing emotional resiliency when yours is low it is not a small feat, but it’s also not impossible either. And let me be clear, this isn’t a black and white thing either, it’s not like you either have it or you don’t. This is also a spectrum, just like emotions are.

But if your answer is more along the lines of wait, it could actually be better than it is currently?!

Then buckle up and let’s chat, because I would never talk about just how difficult something might be for you without offering some sort of solution, and this isn’t just a solution that’s saying work with me and I’ll solve ALL your emotional problems, it’s actually one that you can deploy all on your own.

In living this first-handedly, I’ve become obsessed with understanding why some of us struggle with emotional regulation SO much that it seemingly detonates our ability to live an authentic and full life.

So let’s dive in and see if you’re someone who could benefit from working on emotional resilience but first understanding wtf is emotional resilience?

What Is Emotional Resilience?

Emotional resilience is the combination of having the awareness of a negative experience and emotion you’re experiencing as well as the resources to cope with that feeling in a timely and reasonable manner.

It’s the inner voice that says Hey! This is hard. What are we gonna do about it so that it doesn’t blow up our life?

Some quite lucky people are born with this motivation within that allows them to learn their own patterns from a young age when it comes to their emotional regulation and coping skills.

They also recognize that life exists on a spectrum of emotions, and that they won’t always be on the positive side of that spectrum. The people who are emotionally resilient aren’t always happy and joyful, they’re just more equipped when life gets difficult and don’t let it completely throw them off track, at least for very long.

And then there are the less lucky ones in this department that have a more difficult time fighting the tides of life, especially as they get older and the volume of stress increases.

TLDR; Life exists on a spectrum of emotions, and having emotional resiliency means you recognize that spectrum, have the self awareness to know where you are on that spectrum, and the tools and resources to cope in relationship to where on the spectrum you are.

The Emotional Resilience Scale

Self-Awareness is the first component of emotional resilience. In this case is best defined as ****being able to see yourself on the spectrum of emotions and to know what impacts, motivates, and drives you. You know your triggers just as much as you know what calms you down and relaxes you.

Typically someone who has self awareness in relationship to their emotions has a good grip on these skills:

  • Self-compassion
  • Empathy for others
  • Ability to realistically assess a situation for what it is
  • Reflective and analytical
  • Able to acknowledge stress and be willing to cope with it

Tools, skills, and resources is the second component of emotional resilience. Having the tools and knowledge to manage negative emotions and experiences that arise, with the keen ability to use these tools strategically as a way to get back to baseline:

Common tools, skills, and resources of someone who is emotionally resilient include:

  • Flexible thinking, or the ability to think about things from a different perspective or in a new way
  • Emotional regulation
  • Healthy relationships and a support system
  • Mindfulness practices, such as yoga, meditation, or breathwork

Why You Might Be Struggling with Emotional Resilience

So you’re not one of the lucky ones who was born onto this world with the motivation to not get stuck in the storm of your emotions. Allow me to allow you to feel better about why this is a difficult mindset and skill to develop in this current age we live in.

The Anxiety Endemic

The blanket statement that everyone is anxious isn’t THAT far off.

Anxiety is a pretty normal human emotion, it’s the levels to which people are anxious that lie outside the bounds of normal. With so much anxious energy running rampant, it’s especially difficult for those who already struggle with emotional resilience to not take on this energy from others.

Anxiety is a beast of an emotion because it can be contagious.

You’d know this if you ever sat next to someone on a plane who is having a panic attack that the plane is going to go down. No matter how hard you try, it can be really difficult to not also take on those feelings. Even if they’re not rational or real for you, they’re very clearly happening in your orbit and if you don’t have the tools and skills to recognize that these aren’t your feelings, you are now exposed to this threat.

People who have low emotional resiliency also tend to have high empathy, making this even more difficult for them to not take on the emotions and experiences of others, I’ll get into this a little later.

The Bands Aids of Big Pharma

Yes, I’m going to go there because this is a pressing issue that we’re all being impacted by. I’m not coming in here and bash Western medicine’s approach to managing emotions, because there is a place for it. Certain mental health conditions require the use of pharmaceuticals to help people live with more normalcy and stability.

And on the other side of that same coin, big pharma has a chokehold on the mental health industry, creating a system in which clinicians over-prescribe and under-inform, which causes many people who might not need to be on these medicines to be stuck on them feeling numb and disconnected from themselves and the world.

When I talk about big pharma and my frustration, this is the aspect I’m referring to.

SSRIs and Benzodiazepines are only helping about 42% of those who are prescribed. This leaves a very large gap of people who are struggling to find relief from their symptoms and feeling hopeless that meds aren’t working, or feeling totally numb to the world.

This was originally what led me down the psychedelic route by experimenting with ketamine treatment and eventually microdosing for my anxiety, and also not what I’m trying to push here.

What’s really important is that we have a big population of people that are feeling numbed out by meds they may not necessarily need to be on when there are other paths. And we have another massive subset that’s still struggling to find any relief and feel broken because they are unaware that other options exist. You can imagine that our collective perspective of emotions is skewed when this is the system we’re operating in.

You either benefit from getting your emotions to “go away” by band-aiding them with anti-anxiety and anti-depressants which is not a good long-term solution, or you’re broken. And this is all under the success metric that you’re cured when you stop feeling even the good feelings.

The point of this is that big pharma has become a first line defense to people who mention they’re struggling with symptoms of emotional regulation, and I’m saying, maybe we try other routes before taking such an extreme one.

Overstimulated and Overwhelmed (But Make Sure You Hide It)

Our nervous systems were not meant to know everything that’s happening in the world and in our extended friend groups at all times, yet that’s the world we live in.

When the internet exploded, it happened faster than human evolution could keep up with, which has resulted in us being overstimulated by devices and information as well as news around the world available 24/7.

It’s no wonder you feel so overstimulated. It’s a valiant effort to find places that are not broadcasting the most traumatic events happening across the globe even when you’re just trying to get our nails done and have a moment to yourself.

When we’re taking in as much information as we are at all times, it then becomes incredibly difficult to shut it down even when we’re separated from it. This overstimulation has downstream effects on your nervous system regulation, your ruminating thoughts, and even your ability to fall and stay asleep. All of which are vital to your overall wellbeing.

Because of this, it requires extra relaxation effort and skill to get back to baseline. It’s as if the bare minimum is no longer good enough because you’re being flooded with info at nearly all times if you live a normal, societally acceptable life. Outliers aside.

As all of this is happening, there’s also an intense pressure to not show that you’re overstimulated and overwhelmed. Cue my eye roll.

The way positive affirmations (which don’t work) are thrown in our face such as, “look on the brightside” and “good vibes only!” Even if the intention isn’t to invalidate the feelings you’re having of overwhelm, it feels like there is no room for this feeling to exist.

Extreme Social Pressures

On the note of societally acceptable lives, let’s have a look at social pressures, my favorite topic. If we aren’t married with a budding career, social life, mortgage, a maxed out 401K contribution, and kids by age 30, we are considered off-track…

The social pressures that are put on us to live this life are more intense for some than others, but nonetheless, this is pretty standard across the United States.

If this isn’t the life you choose to live, it requires much more effort and explanation to go a different path. And this is so baked into our society it’s hard to not feel the pressure of it often. Pop culture, social media, the generations above us that are pushing for and waiting for grandkids…Going another direction can feel like a disappointment to those around you.

Even if you’re confident in this choice to go against the grain, which is completely whitewashed and stereotypical and fascinating that we struggle to have other standards, it can be hard to not feel guilty or shameful for doing so.

In my experience of this, it has required me to separate myself from the mainstream and find other communities where I feel met, seen, and accepted, but these are not the norm and nor are they always easy to find. It’s not that they don’t exist, they’re just not as easily accessible in my opinion.

Whether you believe it or not, the way our society in the US is structured is quite hard to just step back from and not feel impacted by. Unless you move off the grid and live off the land, you’re likely to feel the reverberations of “the timeline” that has collectively been coined as the “American Dream” or the ideal.

It’s no wonder so many of us feel misplaced and confused, there’s such a lag of other options also idealized or acceptable.

Distractions and Procrastination

Most of what I mentioned above could also be classified as distractions, social media, the news, social pressures, pharmaceuticals.

The world around us is full of distractions at all times, and it starts from the moment we wake up with our handheld supercomputers waiting for us to open them.

But you already know what the distractions are, it’s more important to understand how they’re impacting you. One of the biggest enemies of emotional resiliency is your relationship with procrastination. Those who are less likely to procrastinate and put things off tend to have more emotional resiliency than those who do.

Procrastination is a coping mechanism and a common form of self regulation failure and is often coupled with the need to be perfect, therefore putting something off until you feel like you can satisfy that prompt.

It’s also difficult when we are constantly fighting a dopamine rush whether it’s from Instagram and Tik Tok, the endless amount of Netflix shows, the dispensary at every corner, or tasty snacks we have access to at all times in the work from home culture that now exists for a big portion of people globally.

Distractions and short bursts of dopamine make it much harder to have consistent levels of dopamine throughout the day to stay on task and feel accomplished. This has downstream effects on so much of your satisfaction with yourself, thus your ability to emotionally regulate and feel content and at peace.

It’s as if there’s always a battle to fight and even the tiniest decisions feel like you could lose the war.

Distractions are much more than just putting time limits on the apps on your phone, it’s about training your brain to stay focused and on task so that you can feel free from the relentless thoughts that come up when you transition from working to not working.

How to Know If You’re Emotionally Resilient

Emotional resilience isn’t so much as checking boxes and reporting back that you’re good! or not so good. It’s a spectrum, and where you lie on that spectrum is all relative to your own baseline as an individual.

Here are signs to know where you lie on the emotional resilience scale, and if there’s room for improvement for you.

Signs Your Emotional Resiliency is Struggling

You Fee Overly Sensitive

Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard the “You’re too sensitive” line.

You may feel like your emotions are easily triggered and difficult to manage when they arise. Feeling overly sensitive can impact your life, making it hard for you to have healthy boundaries, maintain relationships, and cause you to retreat from social activities because the fear of having an emotional outburst and being judged for it.

You’re likely the person who also struggles with trying to not have emotions at all, wishing them away and thinking that will make your life better.

This attempt to balance out the scale by being emotionless likely has you confused and defeated because it’s not possible to not have emotions (unless you’re on meds that intentionally numb you out).

You’re Frequently Overwhelmed

Are you often overwhelmed by life, even when there’s not a whole lot going on? Overwhelm can be a debilitating feeling when you’re simply trying to choose what to have for dinner and suddenly you feel decision paralysis and can’t find a way to move forward.

The difficult part of overwhelm is that it’s not just in your head, your nervous system is also reacting to this and causing feelings of fight, flight, or freeze when trying to manage simple life tasks and decisions. It’s the beast that continues to feed itself, as you unintentionally train your brain to never feel safe (and safety is critical to being able to do any healing).

If this is you, you likely even have a hard time when you intentionally try to relax such as on a vacation. Because you are often overwhelmed by life, relaxing can feel like a major threat to your wellbeing and cause you to feel unsafe.

You Have Difficulty Saying How You Feel

When you go to say how you feel to someone you care about, do you choke on your words? Or feel your throat closing up? Or think about it for a week to make sure you say it just right? Or do you talk yourself out of saying anything because it’s easier to shove your feelings down than it is to put them on blast?

Speaking up about how you feel is hard when you don’t know how you feel, or you’re afraid your feelings are going to be rejected and you’ll be abandoned for them. It may sound easy, but if you struggle with this, you know it’s anything but.

So much so that you’ll do anything sometimes to not have feelings so you don’t have to talk about them or convince yourself that everything is fine until you reach your breaking point and explode without warning.

You’re Reactionary

Do the littlest inconveniences throw you off track? Are you apologizing often for how you reacted irrationally? Do you hear the “you’re overreacting” line more than you’d like to admit? Being reactionary has way more under the hood than you might think.

A reaction happens when you’re subconsciously triggered by a threat and your first instinct is to defend yourself at all costs. People who are reactionary aren’t typically doing this because they want to act this way. It’s not a fun way to exist.

Because reactions nearly always come from the subconscious mind, there’s a certain level of awareness that doesn’t yet exist around the trigger that caused it. Which is why it can feel abrupt and unexpected as it’s happening even to the person who’s reacting.

Having a high reactivity is a sign that there’s a lot sitting at the root that’s begging to be brought to the light, and each reaction is an opportunity to investigate what’s happening internally to understand how it can be worked through and understood more.

Which is the part of the work that often requires safety and support.

You have Difficulty Maintaining Healthy Relationships and Codependency

Are you someone who finds yourself in romantic or platonic relationships that feel all consuming? Do you use your relationships as the main indicator of your self-worth and self esteem? Or do you feel constantly like you can’t trust other people? It’s pretty common for those who struggle with emotional resiliency to also have difficulty maintaining healthy relationships and become codependent.

Codependency is when you put others needs ahead of your own to be considered valuable and irreplaceable. It’s so prevalent for people with low emotional-resiliency because it’s an opportunity for that person to displace their own emotional imbalance on another person.

It may feel easier and exciting to regulate the emotions of another than it is to regulate your own, focusing all your attention on someone else rather than yourself.

Codependency is another channel to feel a lot, and taking on other people’s feelings is a key piece to this type of relationship which for some people with low emotional resiliency feeds their emotional bucket by being overly empathetic. It’s not that you necessarily want to feel more, rather, being overly empathetic is a way to subconsciously complete the emotional cycle by feeling someone else’s emotions. It also feels like it makes you more relatable and valuable in these relationships.

Healthy relationships require boundaries, trust, respect, communication, and compromise, and if you have low emotional resiliency you tend to have a hard time balancing these things without feeling threatened or unsafe, causing you to sacrifice your needs so you can be kept around.

You’re Self-Deprecating and Judgmental

How often are you saying negative things about yourself or others? Do you find yourself trying to punish yourself for making mistakes or reacting in a way you didn’t like? Or do you feel like you have to downplay your accomplishments so other people don’t think you’re full of yourself?

Low emotionally resilient people have a hard time feeling confident in their own accomplishments and expression and will often resort to downplaying or talking badly about themselves to make sure they don’t take up too much space.

Having low emotional resiliency often means you don’t have space for more stress or threats in your life, so eliminating as many as you can is a strategy you may not even realize you’re doing.

This is especially true when it comes to negative self-talk or judgmental behavior, it’s a way to take yourself out of the spotlight so that no one can be jealous of you or try to cut you down (ahem, exactly what I did because I was so afraid of feeling joy knowing I was a target).

When you judge other people, it’s simply just a balance of the opposite. “Well at least I’m not that bad” is likely comforting to you if you’re struggling so much with your self-worth, esteem, and image.

Signs of High Emotional Resilience

Self-Awareness

You know how you feel. You know what triggers you. You are aware of your perception of the world around you.

Highly self-aware people know that they are responsible for how they show up in the world, are less likely to blame others, and look for answers within themselves, rather than externally.

Self-awareness is strong for those with high emotional resilience because it indicates that someone has a strong understanding of their inner world. They’re much less likely to be surprised by their own emotions or responses to external stimuli, and they likely have a good grip on what they need to cope and aren’t going to project their pain or emotions onto others.

Ability to Accept and Respond to Stress

A highly emotionally resilient person is not happy and joyful all the time, rather, they are aware that stress is going to pop up and that they are equipped with the tools and skills to accept it and cope with it in a healthy way.

When you don’t run from stress or avoid it at all costs, you can recognize that it’s a normal and healthy part of life, so long as you have practices to move through it gracefully.

People who struggle with emotional resiliency are either trying to avoid stress entirely or they’re incapable of managing the symptoms and emotions that stress induces, causing them to spiral out.

Having a healthy stress response is incredibly important to have a healthy relationship with your emotions. In simplest terms, it’s part of being human.

Able to Maintain Work Life Balance

Work and career to the highly emotionally resilient person is a part of life where they can receive fulfillment and satisfaction, while also not taking it on as their identity or letting it drive them to burnout.

Having work-life balance is about knowing when to turn work off and enjoy life which is often misinterpreted for not being attached to work at all, which I don’t believe is true.

The whole point of balance is to be able to focus intentionally on different tasks without dwelling on the others during that focused time. Therefore not working and wishing you were doing anything else but, and not doing anything else but and feeling guilty that you’re not working.

Low emotionally resilient people struggle with balance because they have a hard time compartmentalizing and managing their emotions in a healthy way. Making them more likely to hyper-fixate on things at inappropriate times like during working hours, which can lead to dissatisfaction of performance and cause major guilt when they aren’t working. A cycle that can have detrimental effects on self-esteem and self-worth.

Has Energy to Focus On Wellbeing and Self-Development

The highly emotionally resilient person has time, space, and energy to focus on themselves in a way that feels additive and not depleting.

They are typically more likely to have a mindfulness practice, exercise routine, healthy eating habits, hobbies, and engage in activities where they can digest and learn information. In other words, they feel receptive to things that make them feel good and help them evolve.

This is much harder for people who have lower emotional resiliency because they tend to not be receptive. Because it’s common for people with low emotional resiliency to be in a stress response, their nervous system is dysregulated and they’re less likely to allocate time and energy to self-improvement and wellbeing activities because they’re just trying to stay alive.

It’s why you can read a lot of self-improvement books and take self-help courses and not retain much of it not because you’re helpless but because you don’t have the capacity to retain what you’re consuming.

Your body and brain are smart, they’re allocating just enough resources to make sure you survive, even if there’s not a life-threatening event happening.

Self-Compassion and Empathy for Self and Others

Having self-compassion and healthy empathy is a good sign that you have a high emotional resilience.

Self-compassion is the act of being kind to yourself during hard times, able to show yourself care, support and patience. It’s in this practice that you can create a more fulfilling and joyful life. And it’s not that life is always joyful when you have self-compassion, rather, it’s that you have healthy coping strategies when things are tough, less fear of challenge, and more patience with yourself to work through it at your pace.

Self-compassion and empathy also acknowledges that you have imperfections internally and externally, but they don’t impact your self-worth or deservingness.

If you have lower emotional resiliency you’re likely less self-compassionate and overly empathetic toward others. This results in an imbalance that other people can have imperfections but you can’t. This can be so pressurizing and make you feel unworthy and burdensome to those around you and also make it much more challenging when you are faced with any difficult circumstances.

Ability to Individualize and Self-Express

Individualization and self-expression shows that you are able to accept yourself for who you are and want to share this with the world without feeling bothersome or threatening.

This shows up in emotionally resilient people because they can manage their emotional responses and aren’t fearful of losing control or being dismantled. They use their self-expression as a way to individualize and evolve and tap into what their soul craves for the life they wan to live.

Self-expression is difficult if you have low emotional resilience because being you feels far less safe than you do being like everyone else. It’s also terrifying to not know what to expect or how you’ll manage challenges as they arise, so rather than go against the grain, you’re much less likely to choose the predictable route and go with it, even if it’s not what you want.

Healthy Relationships with Self and Others

The highly emotionally resilient person knows that their relationship with self is the most important one that they have, which has ripple effects in their relationships with others.

Having a healthy interpersonal relationship allows you to take responsibility for yourself, trust yourself, and have compassion for yourself so therefore when something challenging arises, you have the awareness and resources to go in and make it feel safe again.

If you have lower emotional resiliency you may struggle here because you either rely far too heavily on others to feel good about yourself, you’re afraid to look internally and face what’s wrong or you feel challenged to maintain healthy relationships because you’re much too inundated with the overwhelm and stress of life.

Healthy relationships are a vital sign of emotional resiliency because they show that not only can you manage yourself, but you can also manage yourself in relationship to others.

How to Work On Your Emotionally Resiliency

Luckily, emotional resiliency is a skill! And skills may take practice, but they’re certainly attainable.

Take it from someone who fell quite low on this scale not many years ago, it is certainly possible to move yourself higher up the spectrum so you can feel less of a victim to your emotions and much more equipped to manage them.

More than that, when you practice this skill, your emotions will feel like a unique part of your expression, hard to believe, I know.

My favorite approaches to developing emotional resiliency are both top down and bottom up. Changing the way you perceive your emotions, while also changing the way you manage them in the moment. And sometimes you just gotta fake it till you make it.

Daily Habits of the Highly Emotionally Resilient Person

Even the lucky ones who are born with more of a motivation to be emotionally resilient aren’t just skating by not practicing the skill. It’s a skill, just like some people are naturally talented at sports, they still have to practice to maintain their talent and evolve. It’s not a handout. Same with emotionally resiliency.

Therefore, if you’re someone looking to get better at this skill, you’re going to have to move through the stickiness of being bad at it before it can start to feel like you’re improving. I say this with full love because I’ve been there and the other side is totally worth it.

It wasn’t until I changed my daily habits and routines that I started noticing my emotional resiliency improving. It wasn’t enough to simply know about it, I had to practice what I was taking in. And I’m here to help you do the same in far less time than it took me I hope.

Let’s take a look at some habits and routines that you can begin to put into practice to develop emotional resiliency in.

Creating a Healthy Relationship With Yourself

Let’s start with the basics, stripping it all away and looking at your relationship with yourself.

How do you treat yourself? How much do you like being around yourself? How do you care for yourself? If you mess up, how do you talk to yourself?

If you’re answer to these questions feel like they could use some improvement, then we now have a perfect place to start.

Emotional resilience is a big part of your relationship with yourself, how you understand yourself, and how you treat yourself accordingly.

If you have an emotional outburst and you follow it up with “What is wrong with me???” You’re signaling to your brain that you’re broken and can’t be fixed. Except, you’re not broken and there’s nothing to fix, only things to become aware of and show compassion toward to lessen the reaction.

So the first place we start is with the self, because learning to understand yourself is going to change the way you show up for yourself. I won’t sit here and preach the self-love train, I think that takes time. Rather, I want you to feel more patient and compassionate with yourself so you can feel more equipped and know what to do when you have a big emotional response.

Here are some ways you can begin to show up more for yourself, again back to basics baby.

Get Enough Sleep

Simple really, how much are you sleeping on average? Are you waking up tired? Groggy? Or having difficulty falling asleep?

Sleep is vital to being able to do any habit reformation. It’s like working out, just like your muscles need rest days, your brain needs even more sleep the more it’s working to re-configure itself to change.

If you want to begin to work on your relationship with yourself, start by getting more sleep.

If you have trouble falling asleep, stay off screens an hour before bed or use blue-light blocking glasses.

Create a nighttime routine that gets you ready for sleep.

Cut back on caffeine late in the day.

Find ways that work for you to get more sleep so you can feel more refreshed and ready to change your brain to respond with more compassion for yourself.

Find Healthy Habits That Work For You

I’m not going to say change your entire diet and workout 5x a week, I would much rather you find something that works for you while keeping your health in mind.

Maybe it’s simply taking your lunch breaks and going for a walk rather than scrolling Instagram, or making one healthy meal a week that you get excited for.

The point of this is that you find opportunities to love and respect the meat suit that you’re living in and feel excited to take care of it.

You can still eat ice cream, you can still order french fries instead of the side salad. It’s a simple shift of appreciating the body you exist in and wanting to love on it a little more.

Never underestimate the power of eating a vegetable and going for a walk.

Compartmentalizing Work and Play

My favorite indirect hack of all time in regards to faking it until I make it for emotional resiliency has been compartmentalizing work. What I mean by this is allowing my working hours to be the only time I think about work. Am I perfect at this? No. But giving myself this simple prompt has changed the way I exist.

When I’m working, I can worry about work as much as I want. I don’t limit myself. I allow the full spectrum of my emotions to be felt.

However, when I shut my laptop down. No more thinking or worrying about work.

I’ve had my friends and family help me with this. If I’m talking about work stress outside of work, I have allowed them to politely and kindly steer me in a different direction.

The reason I do this is because this was such a pain point for me, never allowing me a moment to relax and just be and because I already struggled with emotional regulation, it made this so much more difficult for me.

By compartmentalizing work separate from just living, I’ve been able to create a healthier boundary and relationship to this part of my life. It is by no means a perfect cookie cutter solution to a bigger challenge, but it did help me see just how much I was overwhelmed by work all the time.

Like I said earlier, building emotional resiliency is a practice that requires effort and support, don’t expect perfection. Trust the process.

Intentional Social Life

Spending time in relationships with people that feel like they fill your cup is more important than you may give credit for.

One of the biggest things for me when I began to train myself to be more in relationship with my emotions was establishing the relationships around me that felt fulfilling and making intentional time for them.

Being in community and feeling supported by the people around you can be a great place to practice your emotional regulation and resiliency.

I know it’s not that easy to just say you’re not going to engage in toxic relationships any longer since that’s an entirely different challenge, but making more time for the people you feel safe around is a good start, even if it’s just a single person for now.

The emotionally resilient person engages in their community in a way that is both manageable and balanced with their time as well as supportive and additive to their overall wellbeing.

Self-Development Practice

Whether it’s reading a book, practicing mindfulness, communicating boundaries in difficult conversation, or even reprioritizing based on the unpredictabilities of life, the skill of self-development can drastically impact how you’re able to show up for yourself.

By practicing a couple of these on a daily basis, you build your resilience to handle hard things as they arise. The key is to slowly (!) integrate what it is you’re exploring.

It’s not as helpful to read 3 self development books in a row and wonder why things aren’t changing. Change takes time and effort, so do so in a way that you can digest and apply it to your life in a way that feels good for you.

Setting boundaries with yourself can be a good place to start. Only commit to reading one book or practicing one mindfulness technique at a time as to not overwhelm your input system.

This can trickle into how you set boundaries with others as well, however that may look for you. A boundary is a protection of your own self and your time based on a goal or a limit that you have. Not communicating boundaries, even with ourselves, can lead to resentment and anger.

Giving yourself space and time to focus on you is a great way to start this overall self-development practice.

Summing it All Up: How to Improve Emotional Resilience

The trick is to not overcomplicate it, and I recognize that’s difficult when emotions are in the picture, since they can be highly irrational and turn our logical brain nearly completely offline.

Which leads to my first point of: Have a plan. Walking onto this path will require you to know what to do and when to do it, and being equipped is half the battle.

If you want to improve emotional resiliency, you’ll want to focus your attention on building awareness and building resources. I would highly suggest working on one at a time.

Building awareness may look like:

Building resources may look like:

  • Finding strategies to feel through your emotions, whether somatically or through cognitive processing
  • Finding and engaging in community that feels supportive,
  • Exploring hobbies that can be explorative and fun.

Play is everything during this process, and being able to laugh at life when it gets hard not as a bypass but as a skill is a learning process.

If we haven’t meet yet, hi! I’m Alexa Joyal—emotional resilience and psychedelic integration coach for people want to live a more full life. If you like my content and you want more of Feel Trip in your life, here are a few ways you can connect with me:

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If you’ve been the victim of your own emotional explosions, inability to cope with difficult feelings like stress, and when life gets hard you feel like you are drowning without a life preserver — you are not alone.

It’s a common experience to feel equally surprised by emotions when they arise and unequipped to deal with them at the same time, a perfect storm for a cycle that feels impossible to climb out of.

And it’s not just when things are difficult, it’s when they’re good too.

Because when you don’t have the awareness or the resources to handle your emotions, you probably also feel them lurking in the background of your good experiences, waiting for the other shoe to drop sending you back into the spiral.

I hear it all the time.

“I wish my feelings would just go away.”

“I wish stress didn’t overpower my life.”

“I wish I could find a balance.”

And I get it.

This feeling of being completely at the helm of your own emotions can be terrifying and unsettling. Not to mention making it difficult for you to live a normal and balanced life with high self-esteem and a rich social life that helps you feel connected because you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen and how it’s going to affect you.

So you live with one foot in and one foot out of the depth of your experience because otherwise you’ll feel even more at risk for the turbulence of your emotions.

Or maybe you’re comfortable living this way at this point, and you’d rather not worry about how to fix something that you’ve already found band-aids for that are holding the ship together.

Saying honestly Alexa, I have other fish to fry and it’s taken me a long time to get to a point and I’m okay with how this is going. I’d rather stay right here where I’ve gotten comfortable than dive back in and rock the boat again. Don’t let me try and convince you! I totally get it, there isn’t a simple solution that’s going to happen at the snap of your fingers and you know you best to know the timing in your life just ain’t it right now.

Because developing emotional resiliency when yours is low it is not a small feat, but it’s also not impossible either. And let me be clear, this isn’t a black and white thing either, it’s not like you either have it or you don’t. This is also a spectrum, just like emotions are.

But if your answer is more along the lines of wait, it could actually be better than it is currently?!

Then buckle up and let’s chat, because I would never talk about just how difficult something might be for you without offering some sort of solution, and this isn’t just a solution that’s saying work with me and I’ll solve ALL your emotional problems, it’s actually one that you can deploy all on your own.

In living this first-handedly, I’ve become obsessed with understanding why some of us struggle with emotional regulation SO much that it seemingly detonates our ability to live an authentic and full life.

So let’s dive in and see if you’re someone who could benefit from working on emotional resilience but first understanding wtf is emotional resilience?

What Is Emotional Resilience?

Emotional resilience is the combination of having the awareness of a negative experience and emotion you’re experiencing as well as the resources to cope with that feeling in a timely and reasonable manner.

It’s the inner voice that says Hey! This is hard. What are we gonna do about it so that it doesn’t blow up our life?

Some quite lucky people are born with this motivation within that allows them to learn their own patterns from a young age when it comes to their emotional regulation and coping skills.

They also recognize that life exists on a spectrum of emotions, and that they won’t always be on the positive side of that spectrum. The people who are emotionally resilient aren’t always happy and joyful, they’re just more equipped when life gets difficult and don’t let it completely throw them off track, at least for very long.

And then there are the less lucky ones in this department that have a more difficult time fighting the tides of life, especially as they get older and the volume of stress increases.

TLDR; Life exists on a spectrum of emotions, and having emotional resiliency means you recognize that spectrum, have the self awareness to know where you are on that spectrum, and the tools and resources to cope in relationship to where on the spectrum you are.

The Emotional Resilience Scale

Self-Awareness is the first component of emotional resilience. In this case is best defined as ****being able to see yourself on the spectrum of emotions and to know what impacts, motivates, and drives you. You know your triggers just as much as you know what calms you down and relaxes you.

Typically someone who has self awareness in relationship to their emotions has a good grip on these skills:

  • Self-compassion
  • Empathy for others
  • Ability to realistically assess a situation for what it is
  • Reflective and analytical
  • Able to acknowledge stress and be willing to cope with it

Tools, skills, and resources is the second component of emotional resilience. Having the tools and knowledge to manage negative emotions and experiences that arise, with the keen ability to use these tools strategically as a way to get back to baseline:

Common tools, skills, and resources of someone who is emotionally resilient include:

  • Flexible thinking, or the ability to think about things from a different perspective or in a new way
  • Emotional regulation
  • Healthy relationships and a support system
  • Mindfulness practices, such as yoga, meditation, or breathwork

Why You Might Be Struggling with Emotional Resilience

So you’re not one of the lucky ones who was born onto this world with the motivation to not get stuck in the storm of your emotions. Allow me to allow you to feel better about why this is a difficult mindset and skill to develop in this current age we live in.

The Anxiety Endemic

The blanket statement that everyone is anxious isn’t THAT far off.

Anxiety is a pretty normal human emotion, it’s the levels to which people are anxious that lie outside the bounds of normal. With so much anxious energy running rampant, it’s especially difficult for those who already struggle with emotional resilience to not take on this energy from others.

Anxiety is a beast of an emotion because it can be contagious.

You’d know this if you ever sat next to someone on a plane who is having a panic attack that the plane is going to go down. No matter how hard you try, it can be really difficult to not also take on those feelings. Even if they’re not rational or real for you, they’re very clearly happening in your orbit and if you don’t have the tools and skills to recognize that these aren’t your feelings, you are now exposed to this threat.

People who have low emotional resiliency also tend to have high empathy, making this even more difficult for them to not take on the emotions and experiences of others, I’ll get into this a little later.

The Bands Aids of Big Pharma

Yes, I’m going to go there because this is a pressing issue that we’re all being impacted by. I’m not coming in here and bash Western medicine’s approach to managing emotions, because there is a place for it. Certain mental health conditions require the use of pharmaceuticals to help people live with more normalcy and stability.

And on the other side of that same coin, big pharma has a chokehold on the mental health industry, creating a system in which clinicians over-prescribe and under-inform, which causes many people who might not need to be on these medicines to be stuck on them feeling numb and disconnected from themselves and the world.

When I talk about big pharma and my frustration, this is the aspect I’m referring to.

SSRIs and Benzodiazepines are only helping about 42% of those who are prescribed. This leaves a very large gap of people who are struggling to find relief from their symptoms and feeling hopeless that meds aren’t working, or feeling totally numb to the world.

This was originally what led me down the psychedelic route by experimenting with ketamine treatment and eventually microdosing for my anxiety, and also not what I’m trying to push here.

What’s really important is that we have a big population of people that are feeling numbed out by meds they may not necessarily need to be on when there are other paths. And we have another massive subset that’s still struggling to find any relief and feel broken because they are unaware that other options exist. You can imagine that our collective perspective of emotions is skewed when this is the system we’re operating in.

You either benefit from getting your emotions to “go away” by band-aiding them with anti-anxiety and anti-depressants which is not a good long-term solution, or you’re broken. And this is all under the success metric that you’re cured when you stop feeling even the good feelings.

The point of this is that big pharma has become a first line defense to people who mention they’re struggling with symptoms of emotional regulation, and I’m saying, maybe we try other routes before taking such an extreme one.

Overstimulated and Overwhelmed (But Make Sure You Hide It)

Our nervous systems were not meant to know everything that’s happening in the world and in our extended friend groups at all times, yet that’s the world we live in.

When the internet exploded, it happened faster than human evolution could keep up with, which has resulted in us being overstimulated by devices and information as well as news around the world available 24/7.

It’s no wonder you feel so overstimulated. It’s a valiant effort to find places that are not broadcasting the most traumatic events happening across the globe even when you’re just trying to get our nails done and have a moment to yourself.

When we’re taking in as much information as we are at all times, it then becomes incredibly difficult to shut it down even when we’re separated from it. This overstimulation has downstream effects on your nervous system regulation, your ruminating thoughts, and even your ability to fall and stay asleep. All of which are vital to your overall wellbeing.

Because of this, it requires extra relaxation effort and skill to get back to baseline. It’s as if the bare minimum is no longer good enough because you’re being flooded with info at nearly all times if you live a normal, societally acceptable life. Outliers aside.

As all of this is happening, there’s also an intense pressure to not show that you’re overstimulated and overwhelmed. Cue my eye roll.

The way positive affirmations (which don’t work) are thrown in our face such as, “look on the brightside” and “good vibes only!” Even if the intention isn’t to invalidate the feelings you’re having of overwhelm, it feels like there is no room for this feeling to exist.

Extreme Social Pressures

On the note of societally acceptable lives, let’s have a look at social pressures, my favorite topic. If we aren’t married with a budding career, social life, mortgage, a maxed out 401K contribution, and kids by age 30, we are considered off-track…

The social pressures that are put on us to live this life are more intense for some than others, but nonetheless, this is pretty standard across the United States.

If this isn’t the life you choose to live, it requires much more effort and explanation to go a different path. And this is so baked into our society it’s hard to not feel the pressure of it often. Pop culture, social media, the generations above us that are pushing for and waiting for grandkids…Going another direction can feel like a disappointment to those around you.

Even if you’re confident in this choice to go against the grain, which is completely whitewashed and stereotypical and fascinating that we struggle to have other standards, it can be hard to not feel guilty or shameful for doing so.

In my experience of this, it has required me to separate myself from the mainstream and find other communities where I feel met, seen, and accepted, but these are not the norm and nor are they always easy to find. It’s not that they don’t exist, they’re just not as easily accessible in my opinion.

Whether you believe it or not, the way our society in the US is structured is quite hard to just step back from and not feel impacted by. Unless you move off the grid and live off the land, you’re likely to feel the reverberations of “the timeline” that has collectively been coined as the “American Dream” or the ideal.

It’s no wonder so many of us feel misplaced and confused, there’s such a lag of other options also idealized or acceptable.

Distractions and Procrastination

Most of what I mentioned above could also be classified as distractions, social media, the news, social pressures, pharmaceuticals.

The world around us is full of distractions at all times, and it starts from the moment we wake up with our handheld supercomputers waiting for us to open them.

But you already know what the distractions are, it’s more important to understand how they’re impacting you. One of the biggest enemies of emotional resiliency is your relationship with procrastination. Those who are less likely to procrastinate and put things off tend to have more emotional resiliency than those who do.

Procrastination is a coping mechanism and a common form of self regulation failure and is often coupled with the need to be perfect, therefore putting something off until you feel like you can satisfy that prompt.

It’s also difficult when we are constantly fighting a dopamine rush whether it’s from Instagram and Tik Tok, the endless amount of Netflix shows, the dispensary at every corner, or tasty snacks we have access to at all times in the work from home culture that now exists for a big portion of people globally.

Distractions and short bursts of dopamine make it much harder to have consistent levels of dopamine throughout the day to stay on task and feel accomplished. This has downstream effects on so much of your satisfaction with yourself, thus your ability to emotionally regulate and feel content and at peace.

It’s as if there’s always a battle to fight and even the tiniest decisions feel like you could lose the war.

Distractions are much more than just putting time limits on the apps on your phone, it’s about training your brain to stay focused and on task so that you can feel free from the relentless thoughts that come up when you transition from working to not working.

How to Know If You’re Emotionally Resilient

Emotional resilience isn’t so much as checking boxes and reporting back that you’re good! or not so good. It’s a spectrum, and where you lie on that spectrum is all relative to your own baseline as an individual.

Here are signs to know where you lie on the emotional resilience scale, and if there’s room for improvement for you.

Signs Your Emotional Resiliency is Struggling

You Fee Overly Sensitive

Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard the “You’re too sensitive” line.

You may feel like your emotions are easily triggered and difficult to manage when they arise. Feeling overly sensitive can impact your life, making it hard for you to have healthy boundaries, maintain relationships, and cause you to retreat from social activities because the fear of having an emotional outburst and being judged for it.

You’re likely the person who also struggles with trying to not have emotions at all, wishing them away and thinking that will make your life better.

This attempt to balance out the scale by being emotionless likely has you confused and defeated because it’s not possible to not have emotions (unless you’re on meds that intentionally numb you out).

You’re Frequently Overwhelmed

Are you often overwhelmed by life, even when there’s not a whole lot going on? Overwhelm can be a debilitating feeling when you’re simply trying to choose what to have for dinner and suddenly you feel decision paralysis and can’t find a way to move forward.

The difficult part of overwhelm is that it’s not just in your head, your nervous system is also reacting to this and causing feelings of fight, flight, or freeze when trying to manage simple life tasks and decisions. It’s the beast that continues to feed itself, as you unintentionally train your brain to never feel safe (and safety is critical to being able to do any healing).

If this is you, you likely even have a hard time when you intentionally try to relax such as on a vacation. Because you are often overwhelmed by life, relaxing can feel like a major threat to your wellbeing and cause you to feel unsafe.

You Have Difficulty Saying How You Feel

When you go to say how you feel to someone you care about, do you choke on your words? Or feel your throat closing up? Or think about it for a week to make sure you say it just right? Or do you talk yourself out of saying anything because it’s easier to shove your feelings down than it is to put them on blast?

Speaking up about how you feel is hard when you don’t know how you feel, or you’re afraid your feelings are going to be rejected and you’ll be abandoned for them. It may sound easy, but if you struggle with this, you know it’s anything but.

So much so that you’ll do anything sometimes to not have feelings so you don’t have to talk about them or convince yourself that everything is fine until you reach your breaking point and explode without warning.

You’re Reactionary

Do the littlest inconveniences throw you off track? Are you apologizing often for how you reacted irrationally? Do you hear the “you’re overreacting” line more than you’d like to admit? Being reactionary has way more under the hood than you might think.

A reaction happens when you’re subconsciously triggered by a threat and your first instinct is to defend yourself at all costs. People who are reactionary aren’t typically doing this because they want to act this way. It’s not a fun way to exist.

Because reactions nearly always come from the subconscious mind, there’s a certain level of awareness that doesn’t yet exist around the trigger that caused it. Which is why it can feel abrupt and unexpected as it’s happening even to the person who’s reacting.

Having a high reactivity is a sign that there’s a lot sitting at the root that’s begging to be brought to the light, and each reaction is an opportunity to investigate what’s happening internally to understand how it can be worked through and understood more.

Which is the part of the work that often requires safety and support.

You have Difficulty Maintaining Healthy Relationships and Codependency

Are you someone who finds yourself in romantic or platonic relationships that feel all consuming? Do you use your relationships as the main indicator of your self-worth and self esteem? Or do you feel constantly like you can’t trust other people? It’s pretty common for those who struggle with emotional resiliency to also have difficulty maintaining healthy relationships and become codependent.

Codependency is when you put others needs ahead of your own to be considered valuable and irreplaceable. It’s so prevalent for people with low emotional-resiliency because it’s an opportunity for that person to displace their own emotional imbalance on another person.

It may feel easier and exciting to regulate the emotions of another than it is to regulate your own, focusing all your attention on someone else rather than yourself.

Codependency is another channel to feel a lot, and taking on other people’s feelings is a key piece to this type of relationship which for some people with low emotional resiliency feeds their emotional bucket by being overly empathetic. It’s not that you necessarily want to feel more, rather, being overly empathetic is a way to subconsciously complete the emotional cycle by feeling someone else’s emotions. It also feels like it makes you more relatable and valuable in these relationships.

Healthy relationships require boundaries, trust, respect, communication, and compromise, and if you have low emotional resiliency you tend to have a hard time balancing these things without feeling threatened or unsafe, causing you to sacrifice your needs so you can be kept around.

You’re Self-Deprecating and Judgmental

How often are you saying negative things about yourself or others? Do you find yourself trying to punish yourself for making mistakes or reacting in a way you didn’t like? Or do you feel like you have to downplay your accomplishments so other people don’t think you’re full of yourself?

Low emotionally resilient people have a hard time feeling confident in their own accomplishments and expression and will often resort to downplaying or talking badly about themselves to make sure they don’t take up too much space.

Having low emotional resiliency often means you don’t have space for more stress or threats in your life, so eliminating as many as you can is a strategy you may not even realize you’re doing.

This is especially true when it comes to negative self-talk or judgmental behavior, it’s a way to take yourself out of the spotlight so that no one can be jealous of you or try to cut you down (ahem, exactly what I did because I was so afraid of feeling joy knowing I was a target).

When you judge other people, it’s simply just a balance of the opposite. “Well at least I’m not that bad” is likely comforting to you if you’re struggling so much with your self-worth, esteem, and image.

Signs of High Emotional Resilience

Self-Awareness

You know how you feel. You know what triggers you. You are aware of your perception of the world around you.

Highly self-aware people know that they are responsible for how they show up in the world, are less likely to blame others, and look for answers within themselves, rather than externally.

Self-awareness is strong for those with high emotional resilience because it indicates that someone has a strong understanding of their inner world. They’re much less likely to be surprised by their own emotions or responses to external stimuli, and they likely have a good grip on what they need to cope and aren’t going to project their pain or emotions onto others.

Ability to Accept and Respond to Stress

A highly emotionally resilient person is not happy and joyful all the time, rather, they are aware that stress is going to pop up and that they are equipped with the tools and skills to accept it and cope with it in a healthy way.

When you don’t run from stress or avoid it at all costs, you can recognize that it’s a normal and healthy part of life, so long as you have practices to move through it gracefully.

People who struggle with emotional resiliency are either trying to avoid stress entirely or they’re incapable of managing the symptoms and emotions that stress induces, causing them to spiral out.

Having a healthy stress response is incredibly important to have a healthy relationship with your emotions. In simplest terms, it’s part of being human.

Able to Maintain Work Life Balance

Work and career to the highly emotionally resilient person is a part of life where they can receive fulfillment and satisfaction, while also not taking it on as their identity or letting it drive them to burnout.

Having work-life balance is about knowing when to turn work off and enjoy life which is often misinterpreted for not being attached to work at all, which I don’t believe is true.

The whole point of balance is to be able to focus intentionally on different tasks without dwelling on the others during that focused time. Therefore not working and wishing you were doing anything else but, and not doing anything else but and feeling guilty that you’re not working.

Low emotionally resilient people struggle with balance because they have a hard time compartmentalizing and managing their emotions in a healthy way. Making them more likely to hyper-fixate on things at inappropriate times like during working hours, which can lead to dissatisfaction of performance and cause major guilt when they aren’t working. A cycle that can have detrimental effects on self-esteem and self-worth.

Has Energy to Focus On Wellbeing and Self-Development

The highly emotionally resilient person has time, space, and energy to focus on themselves in a way that feels additive and not depleting.

They are typically more likely to have a mindfulness practice, exercise routine, healthy eating habits, hobbies, and engage in activities where they can digest and learn information. In other words, they feel receptive to things that make them feel good and help them evolve.

This is much harder for people who have lower emotional resiliency because they tend to not be receptive. Because it’s common for people with low emotional resiliency to be in a stress response, their nervous system is dysregulated and they’re less likely to allocate time and energy to self-improvement and wellbeing activities because they’re just trying to stay alive.

It’s why you can read a lot of self-improvement books and take self-help courses and not retain much of it not because you’re helpless but because you don’t have the capacity to retain what you’re consuming.

Your body and brain are smart, they’re allocating just enough resources to make sure you survive, even if there’s not a life-threatening event happening.

Self-Compassion and Empathy for Self and Others

Having self-compassion and healthy empathy is a good sign that you have a high emotional resilience.

Self-compassion is the act of being kind to yourself during hard times, able to show yourself care, support and patience. It’s in this practice that you can create a more fulfilling and joyful life. And it’s not that life is always joyful when you have self-compassion, rather, it’s that you have healthy coping strategies when things are tough, less fear of challenge, and more patience with yourself to work through it at your pace.

Self-compassion and empathy also acknowledges that you have imperfections internally and externally, but they don’t impact your self-worth or deservingness.

If you have lower emotional resiliency you’re likely less self-compassionate and overly empathetic toward others. This results in an imbalance that other people can have imperfections but you can’t. This can be so pressurizing and make you feel unworthy and burdensome to those around you and also make it much more challenging when you are faced with any difficult circumstances.

Ability to Individualize and Self-Express

Individualization and self-expression shows that you are able to accept yourself for who you are and want to share this with the world without feeling bothersome or threatening.

This shows up in emotionally resilient people because they can manage their emotional responses and aren’t fearful of losing control or being dismantled. They use their self-expression as a way to individualize and evolve and tap into what their soul craves for the life they wan to live.

Self-expression is difficult if you have low emotional resilience because being you feels far less safe than you do being like everyone else. It’s also terrifying to not know what to expect or how you’ll manage challenges as they arise, so rather than go against the grain, you’re much less likely to choose the predictable route and go with it, even if it’s not what you want.

Healthy Relationships with Self and Others

The highly emotionally resilient person knows that their relationship with self is the most important one that they have, which has ripple effects in their relationships with others.

Having a healthy interpersonal relationship allows you to take responsibility for yourself, trust yourself, and have compassion for yourself so therefore when something challenging arises, you have the awareness and resources to go in and make it feel safe again.

If you have lower emotional resiliency you may struggle here because you either rely far too heavily on others to feel good about yourself, you’re afraid to look internally and face what’s wrong or you feel challenged to maintain healthy relationships because you’re much too inundated with the overwhelm and stress of life.

Healthy relationships are a vital sign of emotional resiliency because they show that not only can you manage yourself, but you can also manage yourself in relationship to others.

How to Work On Your Emotionally Resiliency

Luckily, emotional resiliency is a skill! And skills may take practice, but they’re certainly attainable.

Take it from someone who fell quite low on this scale not many years ago, it is certainly possible to move yourself higher up the spectrum so you can feel less of a victim to your emotions and much more equipped to manage them.

More than that, when you practice this skill, your emotions will feel like a unique part of your expression, hard to believe, I know.

My favorite approaches to developing emotional resiliency are both top down and bottom up. Changing the way you perceive your emotions, while also changing the way you manage them in the moment. And sometimes you just gotta fake it till you make it.

Daily Habits of the Highly Emotionally Resilient Person

Even the lucky ones who are born with more of a motivation to be emotionally resilient aren’t just skating by not practicing the skill. It’s a skill, just like some people are naturally talented at sports, they still have to practice to maintain their talent and evolve. It’s not a handout. Same with emotionally resiliency.

Therefore, if you’re someone looking to get better at this skill, you’re going to have to move through the stickiness of being bad at it before it can start to feel like you’re improving. I say this with full love because I’ve been there and the other side is totally worth it.

It wasn’t until I changed my daily habits and routines that I started noticing my emotional resiliency improving. It wasn’t enough to simply know about it, I had to practice what I was taking in. And I’m here to help you do the same in far less time than it took me I hope.

Let’s take a look at some habits and routines that you can begin to put into practice to develop emotional resiliency in.

Creating a Healthy Relationship With Yourself

Let’s start with the basics, stripping it all away and looking at your relationship with yourself.

How do you treat yourself? How much do you like being around yourself? How do you care for yourself? If you mess up, how do you talk to yourself?

If you’re answer to these questions feel like they could use some improvement, then we now have a perfect place to start.

Emotional resilience is a big part of your relationship with yourself, how you understand yourself, and how you treat yourself accordingly.

If you have an emotional outburst and you follow it up with “What is wrong with me???” You’re signaling to your brain that you’re broken and can’t be fixed. Except, you’re not broken and there’s nothing to fix, only things to become aware of and show compassion toward to lessen the reaction.

So the first place we start is with the self, because learning to understand yourself is going to change the way you show up for yourself. I won’t sit here and preach the self-love train, I think that takes time. Rather, I want you to feel more patient and compassionate with yourself so you can feel more equipped and know what to do when you have a big emotional response.

Here are some ways you can begin to show up more for yourself, again back to basics baby.

Get Enough Sleep

Simple really, how much are you sleeping on average? Are you waking up tired? Groggy? Or having difficulty falling asleep?

Sleep is vital to being able to do any habit reformation. It’s like working out, just like your muscles need rest days, your brain needs even more sleep the more it’s working to re-configure itself to change.

If you want to begin to work on your relationship with yourself, start by getting more sleep.

If you have trouble falling asleep, stay off screens an hour before bed or use blue-light blocking glasses.

Create a nighttime routine that gets you ready for sleep.

Cut back on caffeine late in the day.

Find ways that work for you to get more sleep so you can feel more refreshed and ready to change your brain to respond with more compassion for yourself.

Find Healthy Habits That Work For You

I’m not going to say change your entire diet and workout 5x a week, I would much rather you find something that works for you while keeping your health in mind.

Maybe it’s simply taking your lunch breaks and going for a walk rather than scrolling Instagram, or making one healthy meal a week that you get excited for.

The point of this is that you find opportunities to love and respect the meat suit that you’re living in and feel excited to take care of it.

You can still eat ice cream, you can still order french fries instead of the side salad. It’s a simple shift of appreciating the body you exist in and wanting to love on it a little more.

Never underestimate the power of eating a vegetable and going for a walk.

Compartmentalizing Work and Play

My favorite indirect hack of all time in regards to faking it until I make it for emotional resiliency has been compartmentalizing work. What I mean by this is allowing my working hours to be the only time I think about work. Am I perfect at this? No. But giving myself this simple prompt has changed the way I exist.

When I’m working, I can worry about work as much as I want. I don’t limit myself. I allow the full spectrum of my emotions to be felt.

However, when I shut my laptop down. No more thinking or worrying about work.

I’ve had my friends and family help me with this. If I’m talking about work stress outside of work, I have allowed them to politely and kindly steer me in a different direction.

The reason I do this is because this was such a pain point for me, never allowing me a moment to relax and just be and because I already struggled with emotional regulation, it made this so much more difficult for me.

By compartmentalizing work separate from just living, I’ve been able to create a healthier boundary and relationship to this part of my life. It is by no means a perfect cookie cutter solution to a bigger challenge, but it did help me see just how much I was overwhelmed by work all the time.

Like I said earlier, building emotional resiliency is a practice that requires effort and support, don’t expect perfection. Trust the process.

Intentional Social Life

Spending time in relationships with people that feel like they fill your cup is more important than you may give credit for.

One of the biggest things for me when I began to train myself to be more in relationship with my emotions was establishing the relationships around me that felt fulfilling and making intentional time for them.

Being in community and feeling supported by the people around you can be a great place to practice your emotional regulation and resiliency.

I know it’s not that easy to just say you’re not going to engage in toxic relationships any longer since that’s an entirely different challenge, but making more time for the people you feel safe around is a good start, even if it’s just a single person for now.

The emotionally resilient person engages in their community in a way that is both manageable and balanced with their time as well as supportive and additive to their overall wellbeing.

Self-Development Practice

Whether it’s reading a book, practicing mindfulness, communicating boundaries in difficult conversation, or even reprioritizing based on the unpredictabilities of life, the skill of self-development can drastically impact how you’re able to show up for yourself.

By practicing a couple of these on a daily basis, you build your resilience to handle hard things as they arise. The key is to slowly (!) integrate what it is you’re exploring.

It’s not as helpful to read 3 self development books in a row and wonder why things aren’t changing. Change takes time and effort, so do so in a way that you can digest and apply it to your life in a way that feels good for you.

Setting boundaries with yourself can be a good place to start. Only commit to reading one book or practicing one mindfulness technique at a time as to not overwhelm your input system.

This can trickle into how you set boundaries with others as well, however that may look for you. A boundary is a protection of your own self and your time based on a goal or a limit that you have. Not communicating boundaries, even with ourselves, can lead to resentment and anger.

Giving yourself space and time to focus on you is a great way to start this overall self-development practice.

Summing it All Up: How to Improve Emotional Resilience

The trick is to not overcomplicate it, and I recognize that’s difficult when emotions are in the picture, since they can be highly irrational and turn our logical brain nearly completely offline.

Which leads to my first point of: Have a plan. Walking onto this path will require you to know what to do and when to do it, and being equipped is half the battle.

If you want to improve emotional resiliency, you’ll want to focus your attention on building awareness and building resources. I would highly suggest working on one at a time.

Building awareness may look like:

Building resources may look like:

  • Finding strategies to feel through your emotions, whether somatically or through cognitive processing
  • Finding and engaging in community that feels supportive,
  • Exploring hobbies that can be explorative and fun.

Play is everything during this process, and being able to laugh at life when it gets hard not as a bypass but as a skill is a learning process.

If we haven’t meet yet, hi! I’m Alexa Joyal—emotional resilience and psychedelic integration coach for people want to live a more full life. If you like my content and you want more of Feel Trip in your life, here are a few ways you can connect with me:

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Enlist me as your coach. One-on-one microdosing and emotional resiliency coaching for the highly- sensitive or highly-avoidant, if you’re interested in having a mentor to help you build your toolbox to make emotions your superpower and live the most authentic version of you, then book your free intro call.

To get in touch with me directly email alexarayjoyal@gmail.com. Have a lovely day!

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If you're curious about the apparent magic of psychedelics but don't know where to start and have felt like you want more out of life but don't quite know how to get there—nice to meet you, I think you're gonna want to pay attention.

I coach and guide others using psychedelics as an ally and intentional integration as a way to connect with your deepest self 

My goal is to help you see that emotions are your greatest teachers and guides and when you're tapped into them, you can fully align with who you know you can be.

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If you're curious about the apparent magic of psychedelics but don't know where to start and have felt like you want more out of life but don't quite know how to get there—nice to meet you, I think you're gonna want to pay attention.

I coach and guide others using psychedelics as an ally and intentional integration as a way to connect with your deepest self 

My goal is to help you see that emotions are your greatest teachers and guides and when you're tapped into them, you can fully align with who you know you can be.

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Want an expert approach to microdosing for real change? I've poured my heart into this guide to give you the full protocol I not only take myself through, but all my clients. From intention setting to specific integration practices, this is the best microdosing guide you'll find if you really want to tap into the plant wisdom.

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