The Resilient Body

What makes a body resilient, or what characteristics does an otherwise “resilient” body possess? Is it the ability to lift hundreds of pounds? How about the ability to go days without food? Or the ability to be more or less unperturbed whether it’s in a 120 C sauna or a bathtub filled with 1 C water?

The first answer that comes to mind is: It depends.

As we know already from the past 2 articles of the resilience series, resilience is entirely relative.

For an able-bodied 20-something-year-old person, lifting hundreds of pounds of weight overhead could certainly stem from some form of resilience. So too does a recent car wreck survivor demonstrate resilience when they take their final step out of their wheelchair after months of arduous rehabilitation. Whether it’s 1 degree Celsius water, or 6; 1 hour or 1 week without food, difficult is difficult. The only thing that matters here is the attitude to steer yourself in a positive, growth-oriented direction.

As a brief reminder, resilience in its most simple definition is the ability to withstand adversity and positively adapt somehow.

It should be no surprise that not all adversity is the same; some is voluntary, and some is involuntary. The element of having a choice in the matter is a critical distinction.

Some people have the luck of the draw which allows them to decide which adversity they are faced with, while others have no vote and can be faced with immense and unrelenting adversity. Both of these avenues can lead to resilience based on several factors, including things in our control like attitude and choices, and things out of our control, like the organization of our neurology that sensitizes us to negative emotion that stems from early life trauma or genetics.

Thankfully, whether you find yourself in one boat or the other, the potential to improve and cultivate resilience is always within reach. And in this short article, we’ll look at ways in which you can develop a resilient body.

The Resilient Body

Resilience, the more I come to learn, is incredibly holistic. What benefits one system, often benefits another system. For example, if you begin to improve your body's resilience by beginning a workout program, you’ll quickly find that your psychological resilience begins to follow suit. Or improving your physiological resilience by removing alcohol from your diet to improve the health and function of your blood-brain barrier (BBB), the brain fog that has kept you low and depressed begins to lift. That’s because at the top of the resilience pyramid, is an attitude from which all these benefits can manifest.

So how might one influence the resilience of their body after deciding to embody this attitude of willful approach towards adversity and to try and become stronger because of it? Make use of the unique quality of the domain; and what does a body do that the brain and mind can’t?

Movement. Movement is one of the oldest languages our bodies are familiar with. Our neurology evolved under the loose pretence that usually “movement means safety, exploration, or goal-oriented behaviour” while “no movement means danger and famine”. The logic behind this is relatively simple: If we can move about our environment, it usually means we aren’t needing to hide from predators (safety) or we are on a mission to find food or a mate (goal-oriented). Alternatively, if we aren’t moving, it probably means at least part of our neurology is sensing a threat which must be hidden from, or we are sick, or tired, or not so negatively, we’re focused on something valuable. For those of you sensing something strange about the way this is written, you are not mistaken.

Let me explain.

Much of our behaviour is a product of hundreds of thousands of simultaneous neuronal conversations, which combine to produce certain behaviours. The problem with this rough model is that not all neurons know what is being spoken about by other neurons (much like how you don’t know what the topic of conversation is at the table next to yours in a restaurant), so we have entire cognitive systems that aim to reverse engineer our internal state and behavioural choices and try to infer a reason. Just like how we might infer what the topic of conversation is at the other table by looking at the body language of the patrons, or the redness of their face, or other useful cues. Another useful example I can think of is noticing that your heart is beating quickly and then, if the conditions are right, attributing it to “oh, I must be anxious about something”.

This is one of the reasons you might feel so good after getting some form of exercise in, whether that is walking around your local block, or getting a workout in the gym. That workout serves as evidence for that reverse engineering department of your brain for safety, exploration, or goal-oriented behaviour, which tends to feel very good.

Another useful component embedded within movement that we’ve talked about here before is posture, or how you move.

While the gestalt of our movement can tell a lot about our internal environment, how we move is another valuable avenue that can be manipulated.

What comes to mind when you think of resilience? What does a resilient person look like to you? To me, a resilient person walks or moves with genuine proudness, their head held high, not so high that they are attempting to intimidate everyone around them, but high enough to have people know “here I am”. They aren’t trying to make themselves smaller than they are, nor larger than they are. They are taking up their space, filling it with humble authority.

Our posture, just like our movement, tells the world, and our observing self, a lot about our internal state, which makes it a very useful thing to be aware of. And luckily for us, it works well with our probably over-stated dry definition of resilience; facing adversity and positively adapting.

Take any sort of involuntary adversity; say you lose your job. Dang! Your default response to that is to walk a little slower with your head down, or your shoulders rolled forward, not looking anyone in the eyes as they walk by. That posture, although perfectly logical, is congruent with your internal state. You feel down on your luck, and you communicate that to the world. Now, what if you decided to flip that? What if, despite your aloofness, you decided to carry yourself in a way that mimics what we were just talking about, with humble authority. That reverse engineering part of your brain just lost 1 huge piece of evidence that was fueling your depressed mood, and chances are, there might be a reflective change in your internal state! You just changed the way you felt by adjusting the way some muscles and bones were organized - so simple!

As we’ve come to learn and will continue to learn, there are so many ways to influence the adversity-adaptation system we have in us. And as you’ve seen here today, our body can be an immensely useful tool in flipping the script on both the adversity component; “how bad could that have been if I’m still walking and carrying myself with humble authority” and the adaptation component; “phew, that sucked, I was really down and out for a while, but here I am, using it as a weight vest to develop an appearance and internal adjustment to strength, stoicism, and resilience”.

Learning how to make use out of each domain’s best asset is one of the best places to start on your journey into resilience.