Confronted with some of life’s upsetting experiences - marriage breakdown, unemployment, bereavement, failure of any kind - many people become depressed. But others don’t. Why is this? A person who goes through experiences like that and does not get depressed has a measure of what in the psychiatric trade is known as “resilience”. According to Manchester University psychologist Dr Rebecca Elliott, we are all situated somewhere on a slidling scale.
“At one end you have people who are very vulnerable. In the face of quite low stress, or none at all, they’ll develop a mental health problem,” she says. “At the other end, you have people who life has dealt a quite appalling hand with all sorts of stressful experiences, and yet they remain positive and optimistic.”
They include cognitive flexibility - our capacity to adapt our thinking to different situations - and also the extent to which our brains concentrate on processing and remembering happy, as opposed to sad, information.
The research is not yet complete, so Rebecca Elliott can’t say whether there are distinct differences in brain function between the groups. But there are encouraging hints, such as the correlations she’s finding between the psychological measurements of her subjects’ resilience and how they perform on some of the tests.
“For example, our early data suggest that people who are more resilient are more likely to recognise happy faces and less likely to recognise sad or fearful faces. The more resilient someone is, the better they remember positive words and pictures.”
Above is one of my favorite prayers which my dear mother required for me to memorise by heart as a child. Whenever in great distress, whenever I feel I am about to be overwhelmed with so much anxiety, apart from either watching or performing stand up comedy, I repeat this verse over and over again, and remind myself never to dwell in the unpleasant things of life. :)
Also, I recommend for everyone who has not yet seen the film “Life is Beautiful” to go Torrent it, or rent a DVD copy. ^_^
Love and Light,
Ze Geek Goddess
