Hello again, my dear friends.
It’s been a while since I’ve written something for all of you. If I’m honest, I haven’t known what to say. The world seemed complicated enough without throwing my two cents into it. It seemed best to let the experts do their thing and just be here to support those who actively sought me out.
Now that we’re entering the final leg of the pandemic, I thought I’d check in and see how everyone’s doing?
At the beginning of this whole thing, I held a workshop on resilience with the focus on being able to use the upcoming challenges life was about to throw at us so that we could emerge from the pandemic stronger and more capable of handling whatever came next for us in the future (you can download it here). Some of us sailed through this, others struggled a bit, some are, heartbreakingly, no longer with us. The good news is that we’ve almost made it to the other side of this particular life challenge. Much like the summary section at the end of a chapter in a textbook, I thought it might be useful to revisit the concept of resiliency and how we can integrate all that we’ve learned over this past year in a way that helps us to grow stronger instead of winding up with the equivalent of mental and emotional tendinitis.
I like to make parallels between physical strength training and mental-emotional strength training because I find that it helps to put life into a bit of perspective. I recognize that it’s not a one-to-one correlation and the metaphor falls apart in spots, but bear with me.
When we talk about physical rehabilitation and strength training, we use the concepts of resistance, challenges and muscle failure as well as rest and recovery in a way that most people are familiar with. I’m going to give a bit of an overview on that just to make sure we’re all on the same page.
Strengthening a muscle is relatively simple (it’s actually not at all - there are a whole bunch of nuances to building muscle strength that involve the difference between neural recruitment of muscle firing and training that process versus actually building true muscle strength outside of that process, but for the purposes of this analogy, let’s assume what I’m about to say is all that’s involved in the strength training process otherwise it doesn’t make as neat a metaphor for resiliency training). Each muscle fibre is made up of smaller subunits called muscle filaments. The goal of strength training is to provide the muscle with enough resistance to break some of these filaments. How can we know that we’ve broken filaments? The general rule is to take a muscle to a place just before ‘muscle failure’ - to lift a load that’s heavy enough that you can lift it a certain number of repetitions until you struggle to complete the task. That’s when we stop and let the muscle repair for at least 48 hours. We do this because that struggling to finish the set means that we’ve broken some filaments - we had enough to start the exercise, but in the process of doing it we’ve broken some so that it’s difficult to continue.
The key to this is to stop and rest at that point. Those broken muscle filaments mean that your body just received a signal that it didn’t have enough of them to complete the task. It will spend the next 48 hours adding new ones so that it will be able to complete the task next time. If you work out the same muscle within that repair time you run the risk of tearing a muscle fibre - you didn’t have enough filaments to complete the task and now you’ve broken some so you definitely don’t have enough to complete it the second time and you tear the larger structure. The problem here is that muscle fibres repair with scar tissue which is less functional and takes much longer to heal. Exercising that muscle again after tearing muscle fibres means you’re more likely to break more muscle fibres and risk damaging the overall muscle, leading to things like repetitive strain injuries, tendinitis and a lot of pain and frustration. Allowing the proper time for rest and recovery is how you build strength and avoid injury.
Getting the balance right between the weight of the challenge, how many repetitions before muscle failure, and how long you need to recover and repair is the secret to building strong, healthy muscles. This same concept can be applied to life challenges and is generally what we refer to as resiliency - being able to ‘bounce back’ from life’s challenges. The great thing is that resiliency is actually something you can train, much like strengthening a muscle. Building resilience is a delicate balance of challenges that are the right amount of difficult with enough time to recover from them between each challenge. And, like with strength training, we can become injured when we’ve pushed too hard. The mental-emotional terms we use for the challenge being too heavy to lift is ‘overwhelm’ and the one for not resting enough between challenges is ‘burnout’.
Learning to strength train resilience is a balance between getting close to the state of overwhelm without it actually overwhelming us - much like getting to the place of muscle failure where it’s difficult to lift the load at the end of the set but not so much that we do damage to the structure of the muscle fibre - and giving ourselves enough time to recover from that state by giving ourselves easy tasks for a while until we can heal enough to try again. This prevents the state of burnout, which is essentially mental-emotional tendinitis.
Now, all of that said, sometimes you don’t have a choice for what life throws at you. Many of us have experienced both overwhelm and burnout over the last year. And that’s okay too. We’ve all also overdone plenty of workouts. We have to to learn where that line of ‘too far’ is. It’s an important part of learning how to get it right. The important thing right now is to take stock of where we are and make a plan for what we need to get back to a healthy place so we can recover and move forward.
Not all of us are going to be in the same place mentally and emotionally as we exit this particular set of life challenges. For some of us, life didn’t change too much. Some of us had some challenges but didn’t have a very difficult time adapting to them. Many of us, however, are suffering from injuries and need to recover and rehabilitate them before we can begin to move forward. It’s important to take stock of where we are, how we’re doing, and what we need to be able to build healthy resilience from these challenges.
Why this process is important - it’s the same as evaluating where we are after a workout so we can properly plan for the next ones. Did we overdo our last workout and we need a few extra days to recover? Did we challenge ourselves enough? Should we do a cardio day or focus on strengthening another muscle group today? Doing this kind of evaluation can help us prevent injuries and set backs. It can be tempting to want to ‘push through’ a workout because you think you aren’t that sore and wind up injuring yourself, setting back your progress by a few weeks while you recover and rehabilitate that injury. The same will be true for this phase of the pandemic as well. People will want to return to normal and ‘push through’ some mild injuries and wind up with bigger injuries later for not having taken the time now to recover properly. It will be especially tempting when you see other people bouncing back quickly - like being in a weekly exercise class and not wanting to take the week off after the last workout because you don’t want people to think you’re weak. But many of those people have been doing these exercises for years and are just there to maintain what they’ve got rather than build new muscle. Keep that in mind. Building new muscle is a different beast than just maintaining what you’ve got. The same goes for building new resilience in life. Taking the time for the proper rest and recovery is what sets you up for success in the future. You’re aiming for longevity and healthy exercise over time. No one gets fit in two weeks. It’s sustained action over time that allows you to add in new challenges without injuring yourself. Keep that in mind about this next phase of life too. Slow and steady. How we exit out of the pandemic will be just as important for that future success as everything we’ve done up until now. This is just like how the strength training phase for a muscle eventually ends and you move to maintenance exercises, otherwise you wind up bodybuilder jacked and only so many people can actually pull that off, or you wind up falling off the exercise wagon entirely and gain weight and injure yourself again.
The goal of building muscle strength is so that you have that strength to use in the future. Once you’ve decided that you have adequate muscle strength for the life you are living, you switch to maintenance exercises that maintain that strength so you don’t lose it and wind up injuring yourself again. So knowing the physical demands your life requires is useful for knowing what kind of maintenance program you’re going to need. For instance, sure, showy muscles are great - but do you know how much time it takes to maintain that look? Is your life set up for that? Most people don’t take the time to think about their exit strategy of a particular exercise program, and the same can be true of life events. Resiliency is great. But are you willing to do the upkeep required for whatever life-level you just made it to? Do you want that life? Sometimes just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.
As a life example - you start a new job. That new job requires learning new skills. This challenges your resiliency - you go through phases of repeated overwhelm while learning these new skills that requires you to grow and learn and adapt until you eventually wind up at a place where you are competent and skilled and, hopefully, no longer get overwhelmed. This works only if the challenges you’re presented with are of the adequate strength to get you to a place of growth and not one of burnout, but let’s walk through all of the scenarios. Scenario 1 - you adapt and grow into your new job happily. Scenario 2 - you grow and adapt into your new job but discover you actually hate it, even though you can now do it. Scenario 3 - the challenges of the job are too much and leads to burnout. This is where the evaluation phase is so important. For Scenario 1 - now you get to decide if you want to stay here or challenge yourself with a promotion or other career advancement. Meaning, you have developed the ability for this life-level and have the desire to maintain your strength there or level-up to get stronger. For Scenario 2 - what is it about the job that you hate? Is it the challenges themselves? The environment you’re in? The lack of time for other things? The answers to these questions help you to know whether or not the overall field of work is right for you but requires some tweaks, versus you need to change to a different line of work entirely. Meaning, you have developed the ability for this life-level but you do not have the desire to maintain it so need to figure out if a change of activity is in order (think switching to yoga and swimming versus weight-lifting). And for Scenario 3 - you did not develop the ability for this life level and we need to focus on recovery and rehabilitation before we can even address the maintenance program questions.
So, where are you as you exit the ‘Pandemic Level-Up Challenge’? What abilities did you develop that you want to maintain? What ones can you begin to now ignore and no longer spend time on? What things did you struggle to learn or adapt to that caused an injury that we need to spend some time recovering from and rehabilitating? Let’s make a plan for how to transition life’s strength training challenge to a healthy set of maintenance exercises so we can use it for the lesson in resiliency that it was. What does that look like for you? What parts of life do we want to keep moving forward? What was awful and we never want to do again? What did we learn? What do we need to spend some time on healing and rehabilitating before we can get back to a more normal routine? We have an exciting opportunity to reevaluate a lot about our lives and really embrace what we want the next chapters of our lives to look like. Maintenance programs always work best when they actually fit into the lives we want. Injuries tend to happen when there’s a mismatch between what we want to do, what we think we should be doing, and what we’re actually capable of doing. Good planning can help you achieve whatever goal you set out for yourself.
As always, if you need some help, you know where to find me. But take the time to think about it. Future you will thank you for it.
Until next time, Folks!