Resilience, happiness and positive change
The combination of these three themes makes for a powerful mix, especially as each one contributes to the other two.Resilience helps protect our mood, reducing our risk of depression. It also helps us keep to our path when the process of positive change takes us outside our comfort zone.
Recent research reveals that positive mood states add an emotional buoyancy that helps us deal with setbacks and adversities. Happiness can also stimulate creative thinking, contributing to our ability to find ways through blocks.
Positive changes, like moving on from addictive behaviour or developing our strengths, can reinforce both resilience and life satisfaction.
The relationship, and synergy, between these three areas goes further and deeper still. For example, our beliefs about happiness influence our resilience, particularly in times of economic decline. If we cultivate sources of life satisfaction that don’t involve spending money, we will be in a stronger position to withstand financial strain. If we’re to become more resilient as a society and as a species, we need ways of living good lives that don’t depend on heavy consumption of material resources.