I turn the faucet on to wash my hands and the water goes down. It contains some soap, the debris from my hands, and residual toothpaste from my vanity. The water goes down the sink into the sewage and it meets a larger body of water. The larger body of water has different concentrations of different things, so while in flux it tries to balance out the different concentrations.
This is basic physics and chemistry. Things in space tend to cause pressure changes until it balances out to a state of equilibrium. Put salt into your boiling soup and at first, only the part of the soup that came in touch with the salt will be salty; but over time the salinity will balance out to the rest of the soup.
The phenomenon is also visible in biology as well. Your heart rate can elevate after exercise but it goes down to a base pace. When it’s too low while sleeping, it will come back to the base pace after you wake up. Peeing works the same way, your liver detoxing works the same way.
What about our mindscape? It also happens in our mindscape. When we get upset over something, we feel the tension in our body and mind but over time we forget about it and return to our default feelings. When we feel great because of a very uplifting news or an achievement we feel awesome for some time, but eventually come down to the default feelings. This state of equilibrium is present in all of our experiences of life.
What causes equilibrium in the physical realm? Pressure, concentration, kinetic energy and so on. In biology osmosis or homeostasis is responsible for equilibrium. In the mind we have something called resiliency. Resiliency can be a general term for being tough in the mind, especially in the face of obstacles but for the purposes of today’s writing I refer to it as the recoverability of the mind after positive or negative stimulus.
Resiliency is responsible for dampening the fluctuations of the mind. When it works well, it should recover you to your base mental state with a reasonable pace and it should keep you within some kind of a range from your base mental state. What I mean is, if a trigger causes you to have a bad day and you wake up tomorrow feeling better, that’s resiliency working in action. But if a trigger causes you to have a bad week or a month, then your resiliency might not be pulling its weight.
In another way, if a trigger happens and you’re upset to the point where you can yell or happy to the point where you’re jumping up and down, that’s resiliency working in action. But if a trigger causes you to reach for a lethal weapon or it causes you to buy a ledger on some high-risk investments based on unrealistic hope then your resiliency might not be working properly.
This has implications for coaching in two ways. I don’t know about working with other coaches, but when you work with me I encourage you to step outside of your comfort zone of thinking. This means your existing belief systems will be challenged a lot. It’s not that I want you make you feel bad, it’s more like — all the beliefs that you have about your life, we have to go through a process of verifying whether it’s based on truthful reality or not. Because if you’re suffering because of a reason that’s not based on reality… Isn’t that something we can address?
If you’re not a high schooler anymore but I keep waking you up in the morning so you don’t miss PE class in the morning, isn’t that ridiculous? Many of our instances of suffering work like this. We suffer because of very concrete reasons in our heads but when we go through a series of verifications we find that we don’t need to hold on to the reasons we suffer.
But every time I try to verify a belief with you and you can’t get yourself to objectively assess reality because your emotional state has been altered, it will impede your ability to be coached. This can definitely happen, and thankfully my coaching sessions are typically spaced weekly so you can come back next week with a different kind of energy. What happens though, when you can’t recover to your default state by the next week?
The other implication is that your resilience can have been impacted for such a long time that your default state becomes ill. Like a body with a compromised immune system or a mind after addictive processes, the default state is now different from what the default state used to be when you were healthy. This is when I would tell you that your mind may not be healthy, and encourage you to work with a psychiatrist who can prescribe medication.
Of course, can I heal some acute pain and can I give you solace with my sessions? Sure, but I am not a licensed therapist nor a psychiatrist. This means I cannot give you a board-approved method of healing mental illness nor prescribe you with medication.
I believe happiness has no condition, so you could work with me while being mentally ill. I just think that it’s like trying to walk up a hill with stilettos when you have a pair of hiking shoes available. Walking up the hill will still be meaningful, but using more accessible ways of getting to the top of the hill is important because the hill is just the starting point of a lifelong process I’m setting you up for.
So how might you know whether you’re resilient or not? I have a pretty comprehensive quiz you can take to assess your mental resiliency. Check the quiz out here to learn about the different dimensions of resiliency and where you stand on it.