How Habits Affect Resilience

Resilience has an easier time revealing itself when you are feeling strong. In other words, you are more likely to exhibit resilience and embody personal power when you’re not giving your power away to things that don’t serve you. Take your power back with good, consistent habits.

A strong and healthy body is more willing to do the work and to follow your command.

A clear mind has an easier time focusing on what’s important instead of worrying about what’s not.

You have a better chance of stepping into resilient action when you are accustomed to existing in discomfort, but combat that discomfort with tools to help you thrive. The easy life never gifted anyone anything. Comfort builds complacency and undermines discipline. Not to say it shouldn’t be indulged in, but it should never occupy your entire existence.

Whenever you need to, or however you can, create en environment for yourself in which you are required to reach for discipline. Where your mindset is tested and so is your willpower, dedication and strength.

The development of resilient characteristics within yourself will help support you in following through with healthy habits. These habits will in turn build more resilience within you and create an inner terrain in which you feel strong enough to reach for even more.

This is the process through which you change your luck.

YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT

Eat real food. Your body is never going to thrive when it’s filled with ‘edible’ things that don’t actually nurture it. Instead of labelling food as good or bad, approach it like a sliding scale. Try to add more food to your lifestyle that isn’t packaged or labeled with a barcode. Eat food that’s as close to as nature intended as possible. Your body will thrive off of this. A healthy body clears the mind and a clear mind will operate in a much more powerful way. Fuel, hydrate, heal.

TRAIN

Moving your body is critical, not only to health, but it allows you to break through mental barriers by experiencing temporary physical hardship. The mental strength that gets built from physical training is invaluable. Not every session needs to be 10/10 RPE, but learn your body and mind through the process. Understand when lighter movement is more beneficial than a hard effort. Learn when you try to excuse yourself into comfort when you really would benefit more from a harder session. Regardless of how you approach it, do not stop moving.

REST UP TO POWER UP

Get enough sleep. Know how many hours of sleep your body thrives on, but be honest about what that number actually is. Don’t push through with 4 hours a night when you know you’re better off with a consistent 6. Create a good routine before you sleep so you’re not rushing to bed. Jumping straight from a screen into bed is not beneficial for anyone. Read a book instead. Creating a pattern of going to sleep around the same time each night whenever you can will support your bodys natural rhythms.

MIND OVER VICES

It’s never been so tempting to fall prey to vices that numb, sooth or indulge the senses. The lure of comfort is overpowering and becomes increasingly so the more we give in to it. Balance things like alcohol, TV, screen time, addictive foods and other vices very carefully. Know how to identify when you're falling too far into their use. Protect your mind and your energy from harmful patterns by leaning more into discipline activities that create discomfort and build momentum and confidence.

DISENGAGE DISTRACTION

Catch yourself when you reach for distraction in order to avoid mentally tough processes or sitting with emotionally uncomfortable situations. It can be a sly habit that weaves its way into your daily patterns before you recognize that its become a problem. Notice when you reach for your phone or any of the vices you find comfort in. Distracting yourself feels safe but is very detrimental in the long run. It will never serve you. Life is happening in and around you right now. There’s no need to ignore the one life you’re given.

DISCIPLINE: YOUR GREATEST ALLY

Discipline is everything. It will pull you through discomfort and allow you to do what’s tough when you want to do anything but. Understand that it’s not limiting life, it’s giving you the ability to direct it. Yes, it inherently will bring you away from comfort. The more it does, the more beneficial the experience will be. Build as much discipline into your life as you can, but balance it with creative play that will give you the freedom you need to reward yourself for the hard work you’ve done. You will end up creating moments that you deeply appreciate instead of taking for granted the beauty that’s all around you.

Nothing great has ever come from a process that bypassed discomfort. Allow it into your life and know that the more you feel it, the more you build the strength that you will call upon when life gets complicated. The more you sit in discomfort, the more confidence you will build in yourself to handle whatever comes in the furture. you will begin to understand exactly where your threshold for pain lies, both physical and emotional, and how that can be moved, moulded and used to your advantage.

To live a great life you need to at some point embrace all the hardship that comes with it. In pushing it away, you will make it more painful. Avoidance will never serve you, but rather sap you of so much personal power you will be left with only a fraction of yourself. That’s no way to face an inevitable adversary.

Remember this… life never lets anyone off the hook. We all have demons and we all experience pain. As soon as you embrace that, you take your power back from the impossible task of trying to perfect everything and always feel good.

There is no perfect life. Yet, in that imperfection, everything is so beautifully, heartbreakingly as it should be.

You are human. You are meant to transcend this.

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