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Build mental resilience with some simple tricks.

Wellbeing
12 December 2019 | clock 5 min read 


Stress can become chronic both at home and in the workplace, so it’s important to build resilience, says mental health ambassador Chelsea Pottenger.

Mental health 

Ms Pottenger, also a keynote speaker who is an ambassador for mental health charities including R U OK? and the Gidget Foundation, said it was important to keep your mental health in peak shape.

And there are simple ways, based on the latest brain science, to do so.

How to be more resilient in 90 seconds

Ms Pottenger said building resilience was helpful at work and in life. It just takes a little discipline.

“Emotions only last for 90 seconds. If you get triggered by something that’s negative, that triggers 90 seconds of cortisol and adrenaline and then it moves on out,” Ms Pottenger said.

However, thinking or talking about the incident set the 90 seconds off again, which was called a ruminating feedback loop, she said.

Ms Pottenger said the brain could get addicted to these loops, but it wasn’t only your own mental health to consider.

“In the work environment things can derail us and we can get into these loops, but be careful about downloading on someone as it can bring their mood and energy down by 40%. If you have to talk it out, don’t keep nailing the same person.”

How to break the loop:

  1. Derail that feedback loop with a more positive emotion. Called juxtaposition, allow yourself to feel angry or sad for 90 seconds, but then distract yourself with another emotion. One way to adopt a new emotion and derail the feedback loop is to say something that you are grateful for.
  2. Count backwards from five to one -- a distraction technique that allows you to choose to focus on something else when you hit number one.
  3. Parasympathetic breathing helps to decrease stress and give you a focus point that is not the negative story of your loop.

Adopt a growth mindset for your finances

Financial wellbeing is one of the main pillars of a healthy life, along with sleep, nutrition, physical exercise and mental fitness, Ms Pottenger said.

Adopting a growth mindset about your finances, she said, may be as simple as adding a simple word to your inner voice when you think about money: “Yet.”

Financial stress is prevalent in Australia with almost three in five people worried about their financial situation.1

Financial concerns can also have a productivity impact, with almost half (47%) of all workers spending up to three hours per week worrying about their finances at work, according to a survey commissioned by QSuper and conducted in August this year.2

Ms Pottenger said adopting a growth mindset, a learning theory developed by Dr Carol Dweck,3 meant changing your language and adopting an attitude that helped you move forward.

She said it was about being curious and seeing your finances as an interesting challenge, rather than your finances, or ability to deal with money, being set in stone.

“If you say, ‘I don’t have’, or ‘I can’t’, but then cap that sentence with the word ‘yet’, what happens is it enables a person to move from a fixed to a growth mindset,” Ms Pottenger said.

“Instead of saying, ‘I don’t have a budget’, or ‘I don’t have the education or nous around finances’, add the word ‘yet’. The next magical word is ‘however’ and you will find the end of that sentence is ‘I will’.”


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Personal view disclaimer
The opinions expressed and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the QSuper Board. No responsibility is taken for the accuracy of any of the information supplied and you should seek advice for your circumstances.

1. CoreData and Mortgage Choice, April 2019, Financial Fitness Whitepaper, accessed 2 December 2019at www.mortgagechoice.com.au/about-us/insights/financial-fitness-whitepaper-2019/
2. Survey of 3,554 Queensland-based workers conducted in July and August 2019 by Ipsos, commissioned by QSuper.
3. Dweck, C, December 2007, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Random House