In today’s episode we are talking about cultivating inner strength.

So I should start by saying that I am your podcast host, not your doctor, so please don’t consider my show as replacing any professional advice.

Today we are talking about inner strength and how to cultivate it. First lets define what we mean when we say inner strength. Inner Strength is “a human resource that promotes well-being, involves healing, and is connected to over all health (Lundman et al., 2009). What I’ve found is that there is particular interest in the research of inner strength particularly within the nursing community. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Nurses are the healthcare works who are every present in the recovery process. They are the people who see a person through their hospital stay. As I like to say, they are the backbone to the mental health system. Actually, here is your first action step: Thank a nurse in your community by donating to the corona virus response fund for Nurses through the American Nurses Foundation. I don’t know this foundation personally, I don’t endorse them, I am not affiliated with them, but I can see that they are doing great work out there during a difficult time.

Okay, lets get back on topic here. Just to repeat. Inner strength is the human resource the promotes well-being, involves healing, and is connected with health. Along with that is Resilience which is the ability to come back psychologically after a set-back.

So. In an article published by the International Journal of Nursing Studies defined “inner strength as the ability to face adversity and move through it. It’s the ability to stand with both feet firmly planted on the ground, while being connected to others, family, friends, society, nature and the spiritual and be able to transcend. Having inner strength is to be creative and flexible, to believe in oneself- your ability to act, make choices, and influence your life in a meaningful direction.

Sounds great right. But don’t forget it also about community. Inner strength is about having the willingness to shoulder responsibilities for oneself or others, to endue and to deal with difficulties and adversities as they arise.

Broken down, the qualities associated with inner strength include the found core dimensions: connectedness, creativity, firmness (discipline) and flexibility.

So let’s take a moment to think about this, when we have inner strength, we become more stable in our being. We are able to respond to the stressors in life and move through them. This doesn’t mean that you don’t have feelings or emotions as they arise, it means that you have the confidence that you can endure.

Neuropsychologist Dr. Risk Hanson, author of Hardwiring Happiness sees inner strength as resources of the mind. This includes our capabilities, positive emotions, attitudes, somatic inclinations, and virtues. (Just One Thing, n.d.)

• Capabilities like mindfulness, emotional intelligence, resilience;
• Positive emotions, such as gratitude, love, self-compassion;
• Attitudes like openness, confidence, determination;
• Somatic inclinations like relaxation, grit, helpfulness); and
• Virtues like, generosity, courage, wisdom.

Seen in this way, these are resources that we can start to develop over time.

Depending on upbringing, parenting, resources growing up, experiences, life circumstances, and emotional intelligence our inner strength can vary, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t start cultivating inner strength now. With the way the world is right now, cultivating inner strength is something that we all use a little more of. Now that we’ve defined it, let’s talk about how we can cultivate more in our life.

Dr. Hanson mentioned in his Ted talk those inner strengths are built by experiences of those strengths. Meaning, that it doesn’t just magically appear if we think or analyze hard enough. No, we need to start by doing. And in fact, Dr. Hanson talks about how these experiences can impact our brain.  The barrier is something called a negativity bias which is our ability to hold on the the negative experience while letting the good experience pass by. This occurs because our ancestors needed to remember those negative occurrences for survival so they can avoid it in the future.  What Dr. Hanson proposes is that we learn to take in the good and retrain our brain so that we can counteract the negativity bias that impacts our ability to develop the skills that bring inner strength. HE developed an exercise where you are able to do just that. The acronym that he used, H.E.A.L. stands for

H-have a good experience

E-enrich it – let it last, let it grow in the body

A-absorb it – let it sink in.

L- link it with a negative experience. 

From these four things, we begin to retrain our brain to hold onto the positive experiences and with time out number the negative experiences that arise.

But it’s important to remember, that it isn’t about avoiding the negative. Actually, when we do that, we have the opposite affect that we desire. It’s about focusing on the positive experience not just intellectually but within ourselves and our bodies. When we do that, we can use the last step on the HEAL acronym to LINK the positive emotion to the negative memory thus neutralizing it. Another resource for those positive feelings discussed by Dr. Hanson is seeking connection and feeling cared for by another. This ties back into the original research that was discussed at the beginning to this conversation. When we connect with others and genuinely feel loved, seen and cared for we also build up our inner resources OR inner strength.

Now that we talked about the HEAL technique provided by Dr. Hanson we will now discuss the use of Meditation to help cultivate inner-strength.

Mindfulness is defined as the ability to be fully present- meaning we are fully aware of the where we are and what we are doing, non-judgmentally. The key is to help be present and not focused on what happened yesterday or what needs to be done tomorrow.

Its important to note that meditation and mindfulness are not the same. You can be mindful without meditation and there are other types of meditation outside of mindfulness meditation.

According to Yoga International,

Meditation is a precise technique for resting the mind and attaining a state of consciousness that is totally different from the normal waking state. It is the means for fathoming all the levels of ourselves and finally experiencing the center of consciousness within.

In meditation, the mind is clear, relaxed, and inwardly focused. When you meditate, you are fully awake and alert, but your mind is not focused on the external world or on the events taking place around you. Meditation requires an inner state that is still and one-pointed so that the mind becomes silent. When the mind is silent and no longer distracts you, meditation deepens.

(The Real Meaning of Meditation, n.d.)

I’d like to add that meditation originated from the Buddhist tradition and while is it commonly used in Western society today, it was a part of a larger context of Buddhism that should be noted. While there are benefits of mindfulness meditation – like inner strength – we also want to learn and acknowledge the tradition from which it originated. Part of this Feeling Seen and Being Heard community is to learn new things but also have reverence for the practice and its origins. We want to be aware of when and if, we are appropriating rich cultural traditions and morphing them into a Western package.

This does not detract the impact of mindfulness meditation; it simply puts the practice into the context from which it originated. This podcast is not long enough to dive deep into the Buddhist origins of mindfulness meditation however, if you are seeing to start a mindfulness practice and searching for teachers, I suggest you find teachers who rich knowledge of the traditions from which it came.

The development of a mindfulness meditation practice can help with developing the skill to help reduce the overwhelm and create distance when distressing things arise in our lives. Now if you’re listening and thinking, well okay I want to do that but it’s hard and I don’t know how. As someone who tries to maintain a meditation practice, let me tell you- I feel you.

The practice of mindfulness meditation is learned through practice and guidance from teachers. Mindfulness is used in other ways outside of meditation including a therapeutic context. Mindfulness is used within therapy to help those with anxiety and other related mental health struggles. Overall, there isn’t much downside to starting a mindfulness meditation practice. The only thing you will need is time, practice, and discipline to maintain.

Now that we’ve talked about mindfulness next let’s talk about routine and self-discipline. If you can recall earlier, we identified the qualities associated with inner strength to include: connectedness, creativity, firmness (discipline) and flexibility.

Routine and discipline can help cultivate inner strength as well. This can look like maintaining daily habits for your overall health. Maintaining a routine and using self-discipline to overcome the mental struggle of breaking old habits. This contributes the development of mental toughness- a common trait among top performing athletes that further contributes to inner strength. In the field of sports psychology the researchers  Jones et al. found the definition of mental toughness as having the natural or developed psychological edge that enables you to: (Jones, 2002)

1. Generally, cope better than your opponents with the many demands (competition, training, lifestyle) that sport places on a performer.
2. Specifically, be more consistent and better than your opponents in remaining deter- mined, focused, confident, and in control under pressure.

Dr. Kristin Neff, a widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on self-compassion. On her website she describes self-compassion as:

Having compassion for oneself is really no different than having compassion for others. Think about what the experience of compassion feels like. First, to have compassion for others you must notice that they are suffering. If you ignore that homeless person on the street, you can’t feel compassion for how difficult his or her experience is. Second, compassion involves feeling moved by others’ suffering so that your heart responds to their pain (the word compassion literally means to “suffer with”). When this occurs, you feel warmth, caring, and the desire to help the suffering person in some way. Having compassion also means that you offer understanding and kindness to others when they fail or make mistakes, rather than judging them harshly. Finally, when you feel compassion for another (rather than mere pity), it means that you realize that suffering, failure, and imperfection is part of the shared human experience. “There but for fortune go I.”

Self-compassion involves acting the same way towards yourself when you are having a difficult time, fail, or notice something you don’t like about yourself. Instead of just ignoring your pain with a “stiff upper lip” mentality, you stop to tell yourself “this is really difficult right now,” how can I comfort and care for myself in this moment?

Self-compassion is a practice of goodwill, not good feelings. In other words, even though the friendly, supportive stance of self-compassion is aimed at the alleviation of suffering, we can’t always control the way things are. If we use self-compassion practice to try to make our pain go away by suppressing it or fighting against it, things will likely just get worse. With self-compassion we mindfully accept that the moment is painful, and embrace ourselves with kindness and care in response, remembering that imperfection is part of the shared human experience. This allows us to hold ourselves in love and connection, giving ourselves the support and comfort needed to bear the pain, while providing the optimal conditions for growth and transformation.\(Self-Compassion, n.d.)

Next, we are going to talk about the development of a gratitude practice and the impact on inner strength.  There are many studies over the past decade have found that people who consciously count their blessings tend to be happier and less depressed. Dr. Robert Emmons who is considered the world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude from my Alma Mater UC Davis has published and written extensively on the topic of gratitude. In 2013 article about the how gratitude can help during hard times-Dr. Emmons points out that it’s easy to feel grateful when life is good, but when disaster strikes, gratitude is wort the effort.(How Gratitude Can Help You Through Hard Times, n.d.)

In a research study where three groups were divided into writing down their negative experiences + therapy, Gratitude letters + therapy and just therapy, they found that those who wrote a gratitude letter reported significantly better mental health four works and 12 weeks after their writing exercise had ended. From that study they found that gratitude helped shift the attention away from the toxic emotions and into their blessings in life. Further it found that the positive effects of writing a gratitude letter increased over time. (How Gratitude Changes You and Your Brain, n.d.)

Therefore, the use of a gratitude journal can help you reframe an otherwise difficult time in your life or the experience. Again, this doesn’t mean avoiding the negative it’s about looking at an event in a new way. Some questions you can ask yourself is

• What lessons did the experience teach me?
• How am I now more the person I want to be because of it?
• Have my negative feelings about the experience limited or prevented my ability to feel gratitude in the time since it occurred?
• You can find more in the article “How gratitude can help through the hard times” – Link bio.

More a deeper dive into self-compassion and gratitude will be shared in future episodes.

Lastly, the development of community or “connectedness” to develop inner-strength. Finding community and/or someone (s) who loves you and sees you for who you are makes all the difference. Finding connection and connectedness with people who like you without anything in return can greatly help in the long run. Having loving a adequate support can help build those mental resources and give us confidence in our capabilities.

Hardwiring Happiness Dr Hanson Tedx Talk

https://youtu.be/jpuDyGgIeh0

How Gratitude Can Help You Through Hard Times. (n.d.). Greater Good. Retrieved November 2, 2020, from https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_gratitude_can_help_you_through_hard_times

How Gratitude Changes You and Your Brain. (n.d.). Greater Good. Retrieved November 2, 2020, from https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_gratitude_changes_you_and_your_brain

Jones, G. (2002). What Is This Thing Called Mental Toughness? An Investigation of Elite Sport Performers. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 14(3), 205–218. https://doi.org/10.1080/10413200290103509

Just One Thing: Grow a Key Inner Strength. (n.d.). Greater Good. Retrieved October 29, 2020, from https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/just_one_thing_grow_a_key_inner_strength

Lundman, B., Alex, L., Jonsén, E., Norberg, A., Nygren, B., Fischer, R., & Strandberg, G. (2009). Inner Strength—A Theoretical Analysis of Salutogenic Concepts. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 47, 251–260. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2009.05.020

Self-Compassion. (n.d.). Self-Compassion. Retrieved November 2, 2020, from https://self-compassion.org/

The Real Meaning of Meditation. (n.d.). Retrieved October 30, 2020, from https://yogainternational.com/article/view/the-real-meaning-of-meditation