#straightfromcait: What Is Stress Resilience? And How Do You Get More Of It?

You deserve more than feeling constantly fried to a crisp. Welcome to Fried, the burnout podcast, where you get the understanding, the community, and the information you need to end burnout for good. I'm your host, Kate Donovan, and all of my work focuses on hashtag ending burnout culture.

Outside the pod, you'll find me on stages at conferences giving keynotes, in offices providing corporate trainings, doing virtual VIP one-on-one work, or supporting our group program, Unfried, that is run by my right-hand woman, Sarah Vosen. Both Sarah and I have been through burnout and came out stronger, happier, and more fulfilled. And we want that post-burnout growth for you too. Hey, fried fam.

So what is stress resilience exactly? And what is it made of? And why do people, some of us, have more of it than others? I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day that said stress resilience starts with self-awareness. And while I love a good self-awareness moment, like hello therapy nerds, I've got to say that's not exactly where it starts. That's where it starts to improve, but where it really starts is genetics.

Yes, your base level stress resilience is built into your DNA. And even self-awareness, specifically the kind called interoception, your ability to notice what's going on inside your body, is genetically influenced. Some of us are born more sensitive to internal signals. Some of us are not. It's not good or bad. It just is. so we are not all working with the same exact operating system genetics can shape how we perceive and respond to stress

That includes how strongly our bodies react to stressors, how fast we recover and how we interpret in physical and emotional cues. All of those things can be related to genetics. For example, people whose bodies have a dampened stress response, which means their nervous systems don't fire up as intensely, can actually be more prone to things like impulsivity, addiction, and burnout.

Why? Because their internal alarm bells don't ring as loudly. The danger signals are not as sharp. This isn't about willpower or mindset. It's about how your system is wired. So the next time you look at someone who seems to be handling it better or worse than you, I want you to pause before you judge. It might just be biology doing its thing. I also want you to pause before you judge yourself for handling it better or worse because it might just be your biology doing its thing.

The next layer of stress resilience that's still body-based is upbringing and trauma. These things are layered on top of genetics and also influence how genetics interact. So your early life experience, we've talked about ACEs a lot on the podcast, so adverse childhood experiences. trauma, family dynamics, etc. These also shape the wiring of your stress response on a biological level.

So between your DNA and your developmental environment, you've got the base code of how your system responds to the world. That is not the whole story. That is not where it ends. But this is your base. Yes, over time you can influence this. Yes, your mindset matters. Yes, you can meditate and shift it. But your base levels, before you do anything with them, they're built in out of these components.

Now, that's sort of like the stress and stress response part. I want to look at resilience as a concept separately and then bring the two back together. A lot of people think that resilience means being strong or being able to tough things out. But, let's be honest, gritting your teeth through life is not resilience, it's survival mode with a smile slapped on.

In a classic Harvard Business Review article, Diane Kudo, in 2002, she broke resilience down into three key... One is your ability to not sugarcoat your reality, to look at things exactly as they are and just name it for what it is objectively. The next is your ability to stay attached to your values and your purpose. Knowing what your values are, being aligned with them, knowing what your purpose is, being aligned with them.

And the next is your ability to innovate and adapt. So your ability to pivot when necessary. When you see things are not going in a way that's in alignment with you, to shift until you're back on course. Now, in that same article, there are two other components that sort of got skimmed over that I think are incredibly important. It was about children. It was research that was done on children that she mentioned and that resilient kids tended to have

One of two things. So kids that were more resilient than average tended to have one of two things. One was some sort of special skill, like being a star athlete or a top student. And the other... their ability to engage adults in helping them. And the only way they could get that ability to function was by asking for help. These things are so important and they both matter so much. Your special skill, your talent. is totally part of your resilience equation.

The more you lean into your new unique abilities and express who you really are, the more true you are to yourself, the more likely you are to end up doing things that energize you and attract support in the process.

That's wild and fascinating and should make you happy. And also... I missed a spot. I'm going back. The ability to ask for help and this special skill, the thing that these two create for you. The thing that happens when you have these two things is an expansion of your resources. So if you have a special skill or talent or purpose and you are very aligned to it and you're living it, you are more likely to attract help, which increases your resources.

If you are able to ask for help and support in the ways that would be best for you, and it works, and you attract help and use it and take advantage of it, then you are, again, increasing your resources.

so your base stress response is about a lot of it is based in genetics of course yes later on you can shift it with self-awareness and mindset etc but the base of it is built in And then the whole idea of resilience, those three key traits, but also this idea that resilience is access and use of resources should be really important to you. So if you have the full equation, all the things together, if we're going to build it out, the stress resilience equation would look something like that.

Genetics plus upbringing. This shapes your base level stress response. The traits of resilience, the reality values and pivotability and talent, these boost your ability to bounce back. And the ability to ask for a new support amplifies your resources and your capacity to recover. Now, I think I have to point out because this comes up a lot in this community. Resources only help if you actually use

You can have all the time, money, love, or therapy access in the world, but if you refuse to use it, it does not change your level of resilience. This is something that I have to learn over and over again. Recently I was doing a jigsaw puzzle.

And I was... sort of fighting through it it took a long time to put together and i was at the last 20 percent Now, the back of this jigsaw puzzle had letters and those letters were related to where in the puzzle this piece more or less belonged there the puzzle was like poster size and there was only six letters it was a b c d e f so a through f and so you know each letter section was fairly large but still you could hone it down

The first 80% of this puzzle, I refused to use the letters on the back of the pieces because I felt like it was cheating. And I felt like it wasn't going to be worth it if I didn't do the puzzle the right way. It wasn't until I was like 80% done that I was like, what are you doing? There's this resource here available to me, and I am not putting it to use. I am using extra time, extra energy, extra input.

For a jigsaw puzzle. This is not my work. This is not. There's nothing important about this. I do jigsaw puzzles to give my brain time to process things. So if you have resources and you're not using them, or if you ask for help and then you don't actually accept it, you're not doing yourself any favor. Now that we have the base equation of what stress resilience is, this is where we can start to talk about self-awareness.

It's not the starting point of stress resilience, but it is a key to unlocking how to shift and improve your resilience as you move forward within the brain and body and system and framework that you already have. If you, and you probably don't because none of us really do, you don't know your genetic code or how your body responds to stress in cortisol levels and response levels. This is where we can use self-awareness as a tool.

You can build self-awareness to how your body reacts to certain situations through journaling, therapy, reflection, doing body scan meditations or yoga nidras. You can have honest conversations with people whose feedback you trust. All of those things will help you figure out what level of stress and workload and emotional strain, etc., is a good mix for you. Like, what actually works for you and what doesn't. When your resilience part is in balance, so when...

Things are working. When your stress resilience is in your life, doing all the things that it needs to do without causing any harm to your system, this is how you'll know. You'll keep up with healthy habits fairly easily. You'll sleep well. You'll feel pretty emotionally steady. And you'll be able to handle your workload and your life without spiraling.

If those things are off, your current demands are outpacing your current resilience. Full stop. So what do you do about it? You have a few options. You can reduce demands. That's not always easy, but sometimes necessary. We call this life pruning in Unfried. Sarah does this in Unfried.

B. You can increase alignment with your talent and purpose and do more of what enters... This will increase your overall stress resilience because you will attract help and you'll feel more aligned. Both of those things attract, boost your stress resilience. And C, you can boost your resources. You can ask for help and then accept it when it's offered.

Those three options, so you can reduce demands, increase alignment, or boost your resources, all of those things will increase your overall stress. and make it so that you can handle things easier. But I want you to really notice that the second one is increase your alignment with your talent and your purpose and do more of what energizes you.

It's going to be really hard to long-term increase your stress resilience if you are stuck in a job that does not work for you. If you're stuck in a system that does not work for you. If you're stuck with people that do not work for you. There's only so much of that that your body can take before it starts to break. This is where we keep using the self-awareness from this level.

When you're looking at those traits of resilience that were mentioned in the article, you have to be radically honest about where you are. Not where you should be, not where you want to be, not where you think that you are because it matches something on a list that you made when you were 16. Where you really are. You might have everything that you thought you ever wanted and still feel like shit. But you've got to be honest about that in order to make a change.

You have to realign with your values. If you have not defined them lately, it might be time we have a core values exercise that most people have to do multiple times because it's hard to be honest about what you really and truly value. You can get that at katedonovan.com forward slash freebies dash value. I think, but I'll put it in the show notes so you don't have to remember that. And

This is something that we talked about recently on the episode with Anne-Marie Anderson where she said when she feels disenchanted, she starts to look for a change. She starts to understand that she's no longer in a position that's right for her, so she looks for what's next. You have to learn to pivot and move toward yourself all the time. If something's not working, it's not a sign that you're weak. It's a sign that the system around you might need to change.

Your stress resilience is going to be like pounded on when you are out of alignment, when you are not doing the things that you want to do and living the life that you want to live. So... Stress resilience is not about being superhuman. It's about knowing your body, knowing your system, honoring it, and then building a life that works with it, not against it. Alright, folks. It's time for you to go do you. Loudly, proudly, and hopefully, with a little help from your friends. Until next time.