We believe in functional mental wellness, a holistic approach to mental health. We know that there's hope for those of us who have experienced trauma, even profound trauma and that's why we created the universe is your therapist podcast, we believe whether you call it God, the universe, source, unity or love that there is something much greater than us that conspires for our good, we envision a world of healing and connection, and we teach you simple but powerful practices that integrate your mind, body and spirit so that you can come home to your highest self and your truest identity. You are not broken, you are loved, and you can heal. My name is Amy Hoyt, and together with my sister, Lena, we will take you on a journey of healing and self discovery. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode, we are really excited for our last episode of this month's theme, which is movement and mental health. And specifically this week, we're going to be talking about resilience, and how we can build resilience through micro movement challenges. So this builds on some of our other episodes this month, as well as goes into the new and upcoming evidence based on resilience and how we can basically inoculate ourselves from feeling the full weight of some of the hardships that we go through. But before we get into the episode, we want to check in about our movement challenge that we issued, and 30 days of moving our bodies for one mile every day. So how's it going? Lena? It is going slowly. But surely. And I'm hanging on to the thing that I said in the last episode, which is consistency is more important than length of time. So I am now practicing doing some walking outside either in the evening when it's not as hot or in the morning when it's not as hot. And I found a couple of benefits to that. One is that just being in nature, and being outside and living in this small town in Missouri that we live in, there's so much greenery and shrubbery and so many trees. And so walking outside is beneficial for me in a couple of ways, just getting my movement in being consistent in my habit or pattern, and then also enjoying the beauty that I see as I'm walking. How about you? I did better this week more consistent, going a little bit more than just the one mile which is the goal for me is to just get over that resistance and keep going. So I am feeling like this is helping me form a habit. And it's going to continue, which I'm really excited about. That's great. Good job. Thank you. Thanks, mister. Okay, so today's topic is really fun. And we've been researching this quite a bit the last year, because that this is one of the core tenants of our program. The whole health lab, we talk a lot about building resilience because one we're humans and as humans, hard things happen to us. And two, we know for a fact that hard things will continue to happen in our lives, that's just inevitable. And so resilience is actually the ability to recover from stress quickly and efficiently. And secondly, resilience helps increase our threshold for stress so that we can deal with it more effectively. And so, obviously, resilience is kind of like a superpower. And I feel really excited to dive in. Me too. I'm excited about talking about some of the concepts that will go into this podcast, I think they're great. Okay, so what do we know about resilience? Besides the basic definition? How does moving our body actually help us build resilience? The things
that we know about resilience is that, as you mentioned, life is consistently full of challenges. So building resilience is an internal process. And one thing that can be helpful in not understanding and acknowledging resilience is that we do have a locus of control and internal locus of control, and that if we understand that resilience is a protective factor for challenging times, we can be intentional and purposeful about some of the behaviors we engage in, that are going to contribute to our resilience. And I'm wondering what you think about protective factors, because we talked about it a second ago, and that may not be easily understood by some of our listeners.
So protective factors,
my first thought is always about my children, because that's the stage of life. I'm in where I'm raising humans. And so when I think of protective factors, I think of the inability to control the external, and what happens to myself or my children from other people, right, we don't have that control. But if I can instill in them some protective factors and help them develop those, they will be able to kind of weather those storms more easily. I love Amy, how you explain that protective factors are things that we build internally, are things that we build internally to help us weather difficult times and difficult events. And the emphasis on what we can control. And what we can't control is really powerful as well, when we understand that our effectiveness in life can't be judged only on outcome, but it can be judged on action, that can really help us in overcoming resistance that the brain has to changes. And when we talk about building resilience through movement challenges, I think one important thing to consider is that we want to build a sense of competence, essence of a wellness, as we engage in these movement challenges. And so it's very important that we have accurate expectations, and that we also have a way for our brain to notice progress. And as we are able to focus on those two things, we can feel more effective in our life. If we're focused on controlling the external things in our lives, it is very hard to feel a sense of competence or a sense of self efficacy, we don't have the same experience because we're trying to control something we can't control. Yeah, so it's inherently frustrated constantly. Yes. I think one of the things that strikes me about resilience is something our sister in law Dr. Gina Hoyt taught us earlier this year. And I loved when she said this, I think about this all the time. She said, resilience is not a character trait. It is not something you're born with, it is a skill you develop. And in that sense, that again, gives me so much hope that I know I can develop a skill. I mean, if it's if it's just a skill we have to develop. Okay, give me the steps. How do I do it? Right. So I think I'm excited to teach our listeners how do they develop resilience specifically through moving their body?
Um, do I think it's wonderful. I love what Gina had taught us too. I think that so many times in our world today, there's a very predominant way of thinking that's all or nothing. And, and if we understand that, we can develop skills through action, I find that extremely hopeful, and really reassuring. The other thing that I find really interesting about building resilience and increasing our amount of stress that we can effectively handle is it reminds me of old research that thought, heart, heart rates should be constant in order to have a healthy heart. And then new research came onto the scene that talked about heart rate variability, and how actually the most healthy hearts have variability in their heart rates. Well, then we have the nervous system, which is what we talk a lot about in terms of helping us regulate and getting our nervous system regulated. And one of the pieces of research that I find so interesting is much like heart rate variability, nervous system variability, and flexibility is the the optimal way of developing a nervous system. And so when I think of resilience, I think of this really handy tool that helps us when we are not in a stasis with our nervous system. Our nervous system is being fed flexible because we have stress, and then we don't have stress. And we have stress and we don't have stress. And so when we have that resilience tool, we are able to essentially support the development of a flexible nervous system does such a great point. I never really thought of it that way. But but that's a great point. And I love your mentioning that heart rate variability kids. That is what the latest research indicates is that a heart that's a stasis is not as healthy as a heart that has periods of increased heart rate and periods of decreased heart rate.
When I think about building resilience through movement challenges, a couple of things sprang to mind. One is, is that, as I mentioned before, if we don't have reasonable expectations, then the action or the movement challenge that we're trying to meet, can be very stressful. But that is about the way we're thinking or conceptualizing or perceiving the outcome A lot of times or how something should be done with rigid thinking, thinking, I have to do exactly 10 minutes a day, or I have to do exactly one mile, whatever it is, that rigid thinking gets in the way of a sense of competence and a sense that we can be effective in our lives. Because our brain is so rigid around the idea of doing it, that it becomes much more about doing it a certain way, instead of doing it with expectation of improvements. And when we engage in a new skill, so in this case, movement challenges, we want to be able to track our our benefits or gains, because the brain is really poor at noticing positive change, it just is. So when we can track our gains when we can be intentionally aware, that can be very helpful when we're learning a new movement skill. Another thing that is really tied into this is the ability to be consistent. I know that in several podcasts, we've talked about keeping promises to yourself. And that enhances a sense of competency and self efficacy, I can keep promises to myself, the thing, the biggest thing that gets in the way of this is unreasonable expectations. So making a promise to yourself that you're going to do something so gargantuan. So it has to be reasonable and has to be practical. And it has to be noticeable, you have to be able to notice when you are making improvements.
I appreciate that. And just to review for our listeners, we want to lower expectations. We want to be reasonable with our expectations. So they're not too low. We want to track our progress by writing it down. And then the final piece that I want to make sure we drive home is in order to build resilience, you do have to challenge yourself. Yes. But the challenge doesn't need to be gargantuan. As Lena said, the challenge can be a micro challenge that you build on. And so that's why we wanted this episode to be about micro movements helping us and challenging us is because we do want it to be a stretch. But we don't want it to be such a stretch that we end up giving up or breaking something right? In thinking of physical fitness, you wouldn't go and automatically start a resistance training protocol where you literally, you know, have no experience with weights or knowing your body's limits. So it does need to challenge us but not topple us. And the best way we know is to do those micro steps with movement. The other thing you touched on Lena that I want to reiterate is that trusting in our own ability is one way to build resilience. And the way we trust in ourselves is by following through with something we've told ourselves we would do. Now that can be really difficult for most of us and that's when I think accountability partners are super helpful. As well as having that self reporting mechanism we talked about in another episode where you're just jotting down each day what you're doing so you can accurately look at your progress.
When you were talking about weight training it it really struck me how Weight training and the build up of muscles is very similar to what we're talking about with resilience. So the challenge has to be enough. When you're learning how to lift weights, the challenge has to be enough so that there's resistance to the movement. And the idea is that as we continue to do that work and lift the weight, we will continue to increase our ability to lift more weight. And it is really striking how our ability to be resilient is based on skills and specific actions that we can take that help us resist some of the overwhelmingness of challenging experiences.
Well, thank you so much for diving into resilience. And if you have any comments or questions, we would love to hear from you. Don't forget to tag us in your movement challenge this month, either on Instagram or Facebook, or just message us on any of the social platforms. We would love to hear from you. And we're so excited to have these small but doable challenges that we are going to be doing together as a community. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If you want to go deeper on this subject or any other subjects we've covered in the podcast. We are so excited to be launching our signature membership program at mending trauma.com This is a trauma informed mental health membership where we combine clinically effective practices courses and mentoring while putting you in the driver's seat. We teach you how to heal your trauma with the latest research combining mind body and spirit we want to walk you through a healing journey while also empowering you if you have felt this episode is helpful. We would absolutely love if you would go to Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your pods and give us a review. We'd also love it if you would share it with someone you think it might help tag us on social media at mending trauma.com Or at Amy Hoyt PhD, we would love to reshare and also if there's anything we can do to help we would love to hear from you email info at mending trauma.com Give us your suggestions or topics you want to hear about. We would absolutely love to be of more service to you. We're so excited because we have so many good episodes coming up in season two, and we can't wait to go on this journey with you
