Resilience is often misunderstood. A lot of people think of football players when they think of resilience – able to take a hit, pick themselves up off the turf, and go for another play. Well-meaning students trying to celebrate resilience might support each other staying up until 3am trying to finish a paper.
A resilient person is a well-rested one. When an exhausted student goes to class, he lacks
cognitive resources to do well academically, he has lower self-control, and he’s often moody AF
(not sure we can use that abbreviation here, but we’re going to because moodiness from not
sleeping is for real).
Overwork and exhaustion are the opposite of resilience.
Resilience is the adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or stress. It
means rebounding from difficult experiences.
The more time a person spends in their performance zone, they more time they need in the
recovery zone. So the more imbalanced we become due to overworking, the more value there
is in activities that allow us to return to a state of balance. In other words, the value of a
recovery period rises in proportion to the amount of work required of us.
Most people assume that if you stop doing a task, like working on your Bio Chem homework,
that your brain will naturally recover. When you start again the next morning, you’ll have your
energy back. But we are confident that most of us reading this has had times where we lie in
bed for hours, unable to fall asleep because our brain is thinking about all the things we need to
do. If we lie in bed for eight hours, we certainly have have rested, but we can still feel
exhausted the next day. Rest and recovery are not the same thing. Stopping does not equal
recovering.
Internal recovery is the short periods of relaxation that take place throughout our day – via
short scheduled or unscheduled breaks, shifting our attention, or changing to other tasks when
the mental or physical resources required for task completion are depleted.
External recovery refers to actions that take place outside of scheduled work – so evenings,
weekends, holidays, vacations. If after your day you lie around and get riled up by news you
read on your phone or stress about the paper you have due on Monday, your brain hasn’t
received a break from high mental arousal. Our brains need rest as much as our bodies.
In other words – it’s taking time to do things that are fun and enjoyable. It’s doing different
things like going outside and moving your body. It’s letting your brain take a rest by unplugging
and getting good sleep.
Ideas to help:
But when all’s said and done, the best person to tell you how to recharge is YOU. You know
what makes you feel refreshed – do those things! At least one of them every day.