Self-improvement technique for stress
CLEARING your head has never been easier. Or has it? From Modo yoga to Qigong healing, reflective awareness to autogenic training, recent years have brought so many "self-improvement" techniques that sometimes it's hard to think for all the meditative mumbo-jumbo. Never mind tell the difference between them.
Zen-like poses and deep breathing are no longer relics of the New Age. Instead, they're being practised by business leaders, celebrities and politicians.
First, there was mindfulness – a brain-training technique aimed at achieving mental clarity – which came to the fore in 2011.
Fast-forward three years and it's being taught at organisations as diverse as Google, AOL, Transport for London, Astra Zeneca and the British Home Office, with high-profile users such as Bill Clinton extolling its benefits. Next, the great and good took up "transformational breathing", a US craze that teaches us how best to use our lungs.
But already, there's a new technique in town – and it's fast-becoming the buzz word of 2014: "emotional resilience" and it is more hard- hitting than many of the other methods.
Head teachers from 200 of Britain's leading independent schools will attend a conference next month to learn how to equip their pupils with emotional resilience, so that they can deal better with stress.
Robert Milne, deputy head master at King's College School in south London, said that resilience, more often associated with war or poverty, could prove effective in helping children from affluent backgrounds in pressured academic environments.
"People are now starting to look at why these pupils – who have so many things tangibly there for them to succeed – are struggling to cope," he added. "We need to make them understand that it is OK when things go wrong."
The American psychologist Emmy Werner was one of the first to use the term "resilience" in the '70s, in a study of children from Kauai, an impoverished region of Hawaii.
Werner found that of the children who grew up in difficult circumstances, two thirds exhibited destructive behaviours in adulthood, whereas one third behaved normally.
She called this latter group "resilient", saying they had genetic traits that were different to the others.
Similar studies followed, including an influential one in the US in the '80s, based on the children of schizophrenic parents, which found some thrived despite a lack of parental attention.
Academics built up a body of research in the US and Australia, where it is called "psychosocial resilience", and as the concept garnered attention in Europe, its therapeutic effects began to emerge. Resilience, explains Prof Richard Williams, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of South Wales, comes from the Latin resilio, which means to jump – or bounce – back.
Now, emotional resilience measures our ability to cope with or adapt to stressful situations or crises – be this a hurricane in Kathmandu or an A-level exam in Kingston. Indeed, Williams says, the two situations aren't so different – rather, they're on a "spectrum of adversity".
"It's about helping our children cope with the things that life throws at them," he explains. "Disasters are the exception. They take you closer to your levels of tolerance. How we cope with adversity and how we cope with catastrophe are on a continuum." So, next time you find yourself comparing a stressful day to surviving a disaster zone, you might not be far from the truth. –The Telegraph
