Resilience is doing well when you shouldn’t be doing well.
— Dr. Sood, executive director of the Global Center for Resiliency and Well-being.
We’ve passed the 1-year mark of this pandemic, and it’s time to draw from our personal stores of personal strength to maintain our pace through the rest of the pandemic triumphantly. And the buzz word seems to be resilience. It’s the key to your wellbeing through COVID 2021 and beyond. Resilience means you bounce back from difficulty, recover, and more forward.
We don’t know yet if we’ll see this pandemic wind down in 4 months, 6 months, 9 months or a year. But for your own wellbeing and that of your family, your co-workers, our economy, and our community, we must develop the power to hold steady and see this challenge through.
The way we can do it is by developing and strengthening our resilience.
Since resilience is vital to our life and ability to survive emotionally, financially, in our healthy relationships, our mental and physical health, as well as our ability to handle trauma and loss… even our basic happiness… Well, we need to build it up, don’t we?
In fact, bolstering your resilience is probably the best thing you can do to prepare yourself for the challenges and changes you’ll face this year.
So How Can You Strengthen Resilience?
Each time you push past something that feels like a limit, you’re strengthening your resilience. Doing your sit-ups even though you’re not in the mood, getting up and dressing and leaving the house when you don’t feel like getting out of bed, choosing healthier foods like a salad when you’d rather have the smothered bacon fries…these are acts of resilience. They come from discipline and build resilience.
When you turn off the TV and get yourself out the door to volunteer to help others who need what you can give, your resilience grows.
It’s choosing self -control. It’s choosing to not give up. Things you do every day that build your inner reserves to call upon when the need arises.
While it’s true that some people are born with more resilience than others, it’s still good to invest in developing it. And even people who have a lot of natural resilience tend to keep cultivating it.
The challenge is to invest yourself to cultivate it when you never have before. Because by doing that, your ability to meet the challenges this year and next year will be far better than it was last year.
It’s worth the effort.
Motivation can power resilience. Getting up and doing those things you know you need to do can help you build the purpose so you can see the point of doing those things.
Practicing jazz on the saxophone for the hundredth time may feel like monotony, but it’s building skill on your instrument, as well as resilience.
How Do You Acquire Resilience?
We acquire resilience from the inside out and from the outside in. What does this mean?
Resilience comes from the rich stores inside you of self-love, self-worth, faith, hope, positivity, gratitude, courage, and conviction.
Resilience that comes from the outside in draws upon our support system, your community of people who care about you and for whom you care, your family, your friends, and your co-workers you feel connected to.
So it’s not hard to see how important it is that you choose that community carefully, guarding its impact on you, to help you build the inner strength and resilience you’ll need to draw from in difficult times. Because it’s the key to wellbeing through COVID 2021 and beyond.
Neuroplasticity Is a Wonder that Improves Resilience
As you know if you’ve been reading my posts awhile, neuroplasticity is the ability of brain cells to change or adapt. We’ve often talked about the neuroplasticity that ketamine treatment initiates.
That’s something a normal healthy brain does to help you adapt through life. But when you’re depressed, or affected by another disorder, that ability to change can become impaired.
On the other hand, when you build your resilience, neuroplasticity can function as it should.
The big obstacle is stress. We’ve talked about stress often, because it is so destructive to brain structures in the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, and the amygdala.
And one of the most important things you can do to bolster your resilience is to reduce the stress in your life. Because when you reduce stress, and let some time go by in a more “de-stressed” state, the brain cells in these structures can return to their normal working condition.
Then again, we also know that this stressed state can become severe enough that de-stressing isn’t enough to restore healthy function. Sometimes symptoms become so severe that suicidal thoughts begin to dominate your thoughts.
That’s when you need an intervention. Sometimes, lots of interventions. In some cases, medication can help. But since it only helps a small percentage of patients, you may need to seek out new help, other strategies, or other treatments.
When medications fail to bring you relief, and you’ve tried at least two different trials…you may want to find out if you’re a candidate for IV ketamine treatment.
That’s where we come in… because if you are a candidate, IV ketamine can be masterful at cranking up your neuroplasticity and your resilience.
And transformation can be soon to follow.
Resilience is the key to your wellbeing through COVID 2021 and beyond.
At Innovative Psychiatry, we meet people who are depressed, anxious, and sick of it all to determine if ketamine treatment might help. Many walk out at the end resilient, joyful, and full of hope.
Invest in resilience and build your inner joy to face what lies ahead. But if your efforts aren’t enough, and medications haven’t helped, call us.
If you’re a good candidate for serial titrated IV ketamine treatment, it will be our pleasure to help you through that process.
We also take your safety to heart in the midst of this pandemic and have invested in world class technology that removes COVID-19 causing virus from the air and surfaces in our offices. We use additional air sterilization processes that lay down microbarriers. And even with that presence, we still wear masks and ask that you wear them, too. We test ourselves and our staff with SARS-CoV2 PCR tests with a local DNA lab that gives us same day PCR results–incredible!–at least once a week. We also keep the door locked, to ensure that only those we’ve prescreened can enter. You can feel safe with us, and we know you need to feel safe so you can relax, receive treatment, and recover.
Don’t hesitate. Let’s find out if IV ketamine treatment can help you get your traction back. Your resilience. Your life.
We want to help.
To the restoration of your best self,
