A new take on ‘resilience’ as a tonic for today’s stress

Welcome to Healthyish. Thank you for joining us today. I hope you are having a healthysh day. Of course. I am Felicity Harley, host of this daily podcast from Body and Soul. Today we're joined by Soria Chamalay.

Now.

She's an award winning writer, journalist, and activist. You may have read her first book called Rage Becomes Her. Well, today we're talking about her new one, the Resilience Myth, and why she's calling for a paradigm shift around the word resilience. Now, if you like what you hear from soriah, I know you will make sure you're listening to extra Healthy Ish, where she talks about the importance of cognitive flexibility.

I'm well, Thank you, I'm delighted to talk to you, Felicity.

Yeah, I'm looking. I'm actually very looking forward to this chat. Now. Your book is very powerful, it's so well researched. You are calling for resilience to almost be rebranded. What is our current view flawed or what's your view of how we view it right now?

I think the way we view it now is quite narrowly defined and limited, and in fact, what I'm arguing is that that definition and those limits undermine us actually in lifelong resilience. And so I'm arguing for a paradigm shift between thinking about resilience and highly internal, mind based and individualistic ways and thinking of it more relationally. How do we actually create environments in which people can be resilient?

How do we.

Sustain relationships of mutual care so that, in fact, when we aren't feeling quote unquote strong, it's okay.

To rely on other people.

It's okay to ask for help without feeling shame or without feeling like you're vulnerable, fragile and.

Not resilient, which is okay because you're almost saying, you know, there's so much masculinity around resilience today. It's like, you hard not be strong, You'll be okay, But often we just can't. We just don't feel like that when we're in the groups of something terrible.

That's right, and it's okay to feel grief, It's okay to feel loss. It's you know, this idea that, especially in our society, which is an accelerated society, this idea that you have to feel good fast and that somehow that is resilience. But if you feel good fast at great cost to yourself, to your relationships, to the people around you, that's really not resilience. That's the performance of

What is it that we want when we say resilience.

I think there was a lovely phrase you used in the book called collective care, and I thought this for me was such a it's almost as softening. But let's just put our arms around each other like that is resilience to me, whereas often and hold each other up exactly exactly, and often that is seen as you know, naediness is seen as weak.

It's seen as weak, and also it's just not valued, you know. I think in Australia, as in the United States, we have this rugged individualism, we have this his darric recognition of people who had to stand on their own two feet and go into the wilderness and survive. And you know, that may have been true in a certain time, in a certain context, but it has long outlived its

Now a lot of us are almost you know, too embarrassed or ashamed, or we don't ask for help when we're in the midst of trauma or stress because that also is the other herd or when it comes to shifting this you know, let's called brand of resilience. How can we get better at this and asking for help and putting a hand up and saying I'm not okay.

You know, I think one of the most important changes we can make is to think about how invested in the mind our myths are. Be mentally tough be strong, develop grit, be optimistic, you have gratitude. It's all focused inside of us, and not just inside of us as bodies that have material needs, but inside of our disembodied minds.

And what that.

Does is it detaches our approaches to resilience and adaptation from the very real, pragmatic fact of our fragility of our bodies, of our needing food, needing water, needing companionship. And so if we're overly invested, as we are in this hierarchy of mind over body, then it's easier to ignore the body, ignore other people's needs, and essentially tolerate brutality against entire categories of people and then say, well,

Yeah, absolutely, Can you give us some tangible ways that we can perhaps take action, you know, whether we want to help ourselves build our own resilience, So whether there's people around us who perhaps are going through a tough time.

It's important to rest.

It's important to depend on people and feel that there's nothing wrong with that.

You're not a bad woman.

For example, if you actually say I'm completely sleep deprived, I need help, you know, whatever your situation might be, I'd say that's one thing. The other thing is we hear a lot about the importance of optimism and gratitude and how it's important to keep a positive attitude, and all of that is true, but not if it's untempered. People can hold on to optimism in a way that distorts reality, that reduces their ability to assess risk, and that definitely undermines their ability to.

Plan to avoid adversity and trauma.

So I advocate instead for cognitive flexibility and strategic pessimism. You can be optimistic, certainly, but it's also important to be realistic. And I will note that the important thing about optimism that we again don't talk about, isn't that it's just a state of mind.

It is that optimistic people tend to have.

The ability to attract other people around them, and so again, relationally, it's more about the fact that they have social networks that they have people they can rely on than it is about being positive.

Yeah. Absolutely, Sarah, thank you so much for your us on healthy Ish.

Thank you for having me, Thanks.

For listening to this chat with Soriah. If you do want to read more about well, a new view on resilience, perhaps the one we meet well I think it is. Her book is called The Resilience Myth, New thinking on grit's strength and growth after trauma. It is out now. I will leave a link to it in the show notes. If you did enjoy this chat, tell us rate and