Tag: acceptance

In times of crisis, life can feel genuinely overwhelming. Uncertainty dominates, emotions run high, and survival becomes the priority. Feeling disoriented is a normal response, and it’s also possible to build real resilience, and even grow, through adversity.

Resilience is more than bouncing back. It’s learning to adapt, connect, and find genuine meaning. With practical tools and the right mindset, a crisis can become an occasion for real growth rather than just something to survive. Here’s how to stay resilient through one, and build a foundation for long-term strength.

Prioritise Survival First

When disaster strikes, survival is your brain’s primary focus. This is why the foundation of the values pyramid in Brad Hook’s book Start With Values is survival itself. Before you can genuinely focus on ideals like purpose or creativity, you need to secure immediate needs, safety, food, water, shelter. Briefly connecting to your values during acute distress can still help re-establish a sense of normality and purpose, even in a small way.

Acting out of alignment with your usual values during this time isn’t a failure. It’s genuinely human nature under real pressure.

Cultivate a Resilient Mindset

Mindset is a genuinely powerful tool for navigating crisis. Instead of asking “why is this happening to me?”, ask “what’s my next best move?” That single shift moves attention toward actionable steps rather than rumination, and reframing the crisis as an opportunity to learn, connect, and grow turns it into a real chance to strengthen character and relationships, rather than just something to endure.

Accept What You Can’t Control

One of the hardest lessons in any crisis is genuinely letting go of what’s outside your control. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) teaches acknowledging painful realities honestly, without judgment, while focusing energy on what you can actually influence. Fighting the uncontrollable creates real, unnecessary stress; acceptance frees that same energy for meaningful action instead.

Lean Into Genuine Connection

Crisis often brings people together in real, tangible ways. Acts of kindness, shared struggle, and collective effort can build a genuine sense of purpose and belonging. It’s worth being honest about the fuller research here rather than repeating the popular version of it. Some studies have found short-term suicide rates dip during major collective crises, including wartime, likely tied to a temporary sense of shared purpose and belonging. But that’s a narrow finding about one specific indicator, not evidence that crisis is broadly good for mental health. Research examining the London Blitz specifically has found real, lasting psychological harm for many people exposed to it, and researchers at King’s College London have explicitly cautioned against the popular “Blitz spirit” narrative for understating the genuine mental health toll of that period. Connection during crisis is real and valuable. It doesn’t erase the real cost crisis exacts at the same time.

Normalise Your Emotional Responses

Grief, fear, and frustration are all genuinely normal during a crisis. You might cycle through emotions like denial, anger, or sadness, a pattern popularly described by the Kübler-Ross grief model. Current understanding treats these less as a fixed, linear sequence and more as a set of genuine emotional states people move through in their own order, sometimes revisiting earlier ones, which is worth knowing so you don’t judge your own process against an artificially rigid timeline. Recognising these feelings as a normal part of the process, whatever order they arrive in, helps you actually process them rather than fight them.

Build Genuine Cognitive Flexibility

Cognitive flexibility, the ability to genuinely adapt your thinking to new situations, is central to resilience. Instead of rigidly clinging to an old plan that no longer fits reality, keep asking “what’s my next best move?” This mindset supports navigating real uncertainty with clarity rather than forcing a plan that’s already stopped working.

Maintain Rhythms That Genuinely Support You

When routines are disrupted, sleep, nutrition, and movement are often the first things neglected. These small rhythms anchor you through real chaos, and sleep in particular is genuinely vital for mental clarity and emotional regulation, exactly the resources a crisis demands most.

Reframe Challenges as Genuine Opportunities

Crisis is genuinely painful, and it often reveals strengths you didn’t know you had. It can deepen relationships, test real adaptability, and teach lessons no comfortable period would have offered. Reframing adversity honestly as a chance to grow, without denying the real difficulty involved, is what builds the capacity to thrive through future challenges rather than merely survive them.

Plan for the Future

Resilience is about more than surviving today. It’s building a genuine foundation for whatever comes next. Reflect honestly on what actually helped you through this crisis, and consider how to fold those specific tools into everyday life well before the next one arrives.

Practical Steps for Each Stage

Sometimes you’re directly affected by a crisis; sometimes you watch it unfold from a genuine distance, which brings its own distinct challenges, survivor’s guilt among them, alongside more indirect, practical effects.