How Mindfulness Strengthens Resilience
Discover how robust your capacity for recovering, adapting, and growing can become.
Everyone has a base level of mindful awareness, which can be elevated through attention exercises.
Practicing mindfulness changes the brain1 because anything you do repeatedly changes the brain. If you practice the violin consistently, you’ll develop the brain of a person who can play the violin.2 When you learn a new language, the grey matter in your brain grows a bit denser.3
Whether we realize it or not, we train our attention daily, but we usually increase our internal friction, escalate unpleasant feelings, and wait for our circumstances to improve. All of this is unintentional, of course.
By never exercising selective attention, we reinforce the impulse to move toward comfort and certainty and avoid discomfort and confusion.
In her book Mind Your Life, my colleague Meg Salter writes, “Resilience is the ability to recover, adapt and grow in response to threat or challenge.”
Physical exercise prepares your body to face the physical challenges of life. While it doesn’t guarantee that you won’t become ill, recovery tends to go better if you were in good health before you got sick.
The attention exercises we explore in mindfulness help prepare us for psychological challenges by improving our ability to savor pleasant sensations and practicing more effective responses to physical pain, emotional discomfort, and confusion.
In this way, mindfulness practice changes the brain in ways that improve emotional regulation, boost resilience, and make your baseline contentment less dependent on comfort and certainty.4
When we pay closer attention to ordinary perceptions in real-time, we begin to ask some potentially liberating questions.
Is it possible to briefly observe some physical and emotional discomforts before I try to eliminate them?
Can I detect any pleasant sensations to notice during unpleasant situations?
How does my relationship to ambiguity and confusion show up in my habitual behaviors related to distraction, panic, and numbing out?
Do I ever feel at home in my life as it is, or am I always waiting for some vaguely better version that will be easier than it is right now?
Repeatedly pausing to investigate comfortable and uncomfortable sensations can disrupt the automaticity of our habitual responses to them. Doing this strengthens the underrated skills described below before we need them.
Focus under pressure
When you consciously choose what to pay attention to, you improve your ability to let distractions fade into the background. Knowing this is possible isn’t enough. You have to practice.
Regardless of the type of perception you choose to focus on—sights, sounds, body sensations, thoughts, or feelings—the pull of distracting perceptions will always be strong. By gently and consistently redirecting your focus back to your chosen subject, you train yourself to remain more engaged with what is most important, especially in challenging situations.
If you set aside a few minutes a day to notice your energy level and mood, you’re familiar with how challenging this is to do. It’s difficult to remember to practice. There’s a lot of uncertainty and guessing involved. It can also be grounding to steer your attention temporarily away from the contents of your mind and toward a palpable sense of your body.
When you encounter a high-pressure deadline at work or need to have a challenging conversation with your spouse, having practiced this internal move numerous times without intense external pressure helps you gather your thoughts and maintain focus. The preparation allows you to manage the understandable urge to panic or avoid addressing what needs your attention.
Scaling down instead of giving up
It’s not possible to sustain attention for several minutes.
The best we can hope for is to observe a sensation or perception for a few seconds and then do it repeatedly for a predetermined amount of time. If you’ve tried to do this, you know it’s more complicated than it sounds.
Waiting for a meditation timer to signal the end of a practice session can be excruciating. It’s much more satisfying to briefly observe one sensory detail at a time, such as a sound, an exhale, an itch, or a spike of agitation.
When we narrow our focus to what’s observable at any given moment, we can see through the false sense of control we derive from predicting how things might turn out.
Immunity against internal escalation
One of the most impactful things I’ve observed while meditating is the strong tendency to brace myself against the possibility of future pain.
It’s not just that my knee hurts a little right now. It’s how quickly I can overwhelm myself by wondering how much worse the pain could get.
Stoic philosopher Seneca observed, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” He’s not implying that our pain isn’t real, but reminding us how easy it is to escalate pain into misery by habitually imagining worst-case scenarios.
Pain is inevitable. Eroding our resistance to pain requires a lot of counterintuitive practice. But even a little erosion can result in a surprising amount of relief.
Making gradual progress without guarantees
Savoring comfortable sensations can teach us how to respond to uncomfortable sensations with more neutrality and less internal interference.
Inviting discomfort into our mindfulness practice erodes our understandable resistance to inevitable human discomforts.
This isn’t a quick or easy fix. It’s also optional.
Making tiny, counterintuitive leaps of faith feels vulnerable. However, observing discomfort instead of resisting it now and then can lead to taking the pain of personal growth less personally.
When we acknowledge what we can’t fix or control, we increase the odds of discovering how robust our capacity for recovering, adapting, and growing has already become.
Your brain is constantly changing.
Living on autopilot strengthens the capacity to feel perpetually homesick for better circumstances. Exercise your attention—more often than never—to develop the brain of someone who feels more at home in the messiness of real life.
Books and research articles on the evidence-based, neurological impact of practicing mindfulness.
Ferreri, E. (2016, March 7). Studying a virtuoso violinist’s brain with MRI. Duke Today. https://today.duke.edu/2016/03/koh
Mårtensson, J., Eriksson, J., Bodammer, N. C., Lindgren, M., Johansson, M., Nyberg, L., & Lövdén, M. (2012). Growth of language-related brain areas after foreign language learning. NeuroImage, 63(1), 240–244. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2012.06.043
Goh, C. (2016, October 11). Meditation keeps emotions in check. Mindful.org. https://www.mindful.org/meditation-keeps-emotions-in-check