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These days I think of resilience as the capacity to absorb threat upon illness upon horror upon moral injury, and continue to think clearly.
This post is about taking care of your ability to think well, with the hope that the basics can carry you forward in any conditions, with any information. These are basic skills with which your human brain is hardwired. They are the tools on the mental bench and can be kept bright and ready, or left disused and unfamiliar. I offer three really straightforward steps to keep your thinking skills sharp. Nothing fancy, but they work. Use tools, read books, minimize online time.
Sometimes resilience is described as growth, but I do not mean taking the ideas we already have and making them bigger or more complex. I am suggesting here some practical ways to keep the underlying cognitive skills in good shape. This builds the capacity to consider new ways of understanding the things we experience. This is not about an added layer of subtlety or nuance, it is about using our inborn cognitive abilities with greater skill and effectiveness.
Complexity in thinking is more than thinking the same thing, in greater depth and greater detail. Resilience is different. It is understanding that life does not always line up perfectly with one’s ideas, political positions or sympathies. The world challenges us repeatedly. Resilience is about knowing how to think better and understand more. It is not about getting more comfortable with what is happening, it is about being better prepared to accurately grasp a situation and deal with it.
The cognitive skills I think are key here are sustained attention, working memory, mental flexibility, organization, planning and task execution. We all have them, to varying degrees and skill levels. You can sharpen the skills you already have. It is your brain, and your ability to pay attention, plan, remember and execute. You can give the job over to someone else, or you can do it for yourself.
Here are three steps to improving mental resilience. The first is getting used to, and better at, the mental aspects of real world useful work. The second is exercising cognitive skills involved in good quality thinking, such as sustained attention and working memory. The third is to stop draining your mental resources online. Time spent online means allowing someone else to think for you. This all may sound simplistic, but bear with me.
First Part: Tools
The first part of getting better at doing your own thinking is to pick up a tool and use it. It sounds simple, but what this does is oblige you to have a plan and carry it out. To do that, you need to focus on what needs doing, how you are going to do it, what tool to use, what other steps are involved. If these feels like too much effort, stay with it. Do not go to wikihow, just stay with it. This engages the mechanisms of sustained, goal oriented activity: making a plan, thinking about each step, what you will need and how you will do it. It then means carrying out a task to completion. All of these skills are innate to humans.
I started exactly this process and was shocked at the effort involved in just planning, organizing and carrying out tasks. I did not go online. I worked it out for myself. It took more energy and time than I thought it would. These are very basic cognitive functions and it was hard to engage them. Knowing a lot about these cognitive functions was my profession for decades. I earned a PhD and practiced clinically. I wrote two books and started a substack after retirement. None of my current efforts should have been an effort. Yet, several years into retirement and such abilities were wasting away. What happened?
It isn’t covid; I have stayed healthy. It isn’t laziness; I am really busy with activities I know well. What happened to me was spending hours a day online. Reading about things in fast little bites. Reading what other people thought about things. Getting lost in simple, easy places like food columns and cat videos and sudoku. I stopped getting things done. It took me a year to organize painting the bathroom. One year. It is done now, and it was in truth not hard, it just took some planning and organization. That turned out to be quite the hurdle.
The trouble lay in initiation of goal oriented activity. I was not getting past the threshold of thinking about something to actually doing it. I was doing only enough to manage routine chores. I was not using the cognitive skills routinely and they were going dormant. What I was doing was spending time online. Indulging in cheap thrills, the mental equivalent of junk food. I began to lose the capacity to shift gears and initiate a new activity.
When I finally mentally organized the steps I had to solve a few problems, like removing the towel bar from the wall. It is not hard, it is just different, and if someone can put the damn thing on the wall, I can figure out how to take it off. I did. Buy paint, gather brush, rag, drop cloth, tape and go. The whole task was done in an afternoon.
The same cognitive skills that go into planning a task, and executing it, are the same ones you need for any other cognitive task, like making sense of the news. Attention, sustained attention, to absorb information and hold it in mind. Working memory, to think about something without wandering off. Flexibility, to consider different ideas about the same topic. Self monitoring, to consider the results of each step and modify your actions as you go.
Second Part: Books
Well, why, when you can go online? It is because the discipline of reading an entire book covers the basics of thinking well. It is the easiest way to get better at keeping attention focussed, thinking about something over the time it takes to read, learning as you go and keeping yourself on task until it is done. These are very basic cognitive functions and you will need to be able to use them in order to think well. If it feels like an effort, stay with it. It won’t hurt you.
Perhaps, if this seems daunting, start with rereading old favourites. Pick up an actual book and get used to the weight of it, the differences of text on a physical page, the length of chapters, the amount of information provided. Like going to the gym, it is an effort, and it pays off.
Third Part: Offline
Last year the internet went down in my region for eight hours. No weather, news, random social media. What a great loud wakeup call.
This part is about the process of disconnecting from anything that thinks for you. If you rely on anythingelse for analysis, your own cognitive skills are disengaged. It gets harder to work those mental muscles again if left unused. If the internet goes down, do you have other means to stay in contact with others, check the weather, decide what to do next?
Again, Why?
What if these basics of mental activity are not serving you well? What if you are bewildered and stuck? What do the mental aspects of resilience have to offer?
These steps (use tools; read a book; get offline) should improve your cognitive functions in the following ways. Basic and then sustained attention means considering one thing and keeping it in mind. Working memory is the skill of holding some information in attention while you do something with it. What is your phone number, in reverse order? That’s working memory. As you hold information in mind, you can two a couple of things. One is to organize information into meaningful groups. Another is to line up steps into a sequence, which becomes a plan. Then execute the plan.
A friend told me the story of a person our age (65+) handing off their old but useful car to someone much younger. Cars are harder to come by, and the second hand market is hot. The new owner could not back it up because there was no rear camera for guidance. The answer is that there is a way to back it up; lots of people have done it; we are all equipped with the mental capacity to work it out.
You may have some ideas or habitual ways of thinking that just do not work for you any longer. You may not have acquired concepts that will help you to understand what is going on in the world. Mental resilience is the process of dealing with those things by engaging your own basic skills of thinking for yourself. Spending time online listening to what other people think or tell you is just handing your autonomy over to someone or something else.
Keep busy with something productive. Read a book, the whole book. Minimize the online time. If someone is always offering to do your thinking for you, or provide you with an easy answer to the things you need, how long before you realize what you have given up?
Lorraine, Thank you for this. I enjoyed it. I looked you up because I ran into Pauline S. Glad I did. She tells me you and B. are well. I am still working but only about 6 times a month. Hoping to keep my my mind robust by bolstering the mind-body connection, outside of work I continually challenge myself with new things - new art techniques (you can see many of my works at Art by Doris Sweeney on Facebook), ballroom dancing, line dancing, removing popcorn ceiling (I have always tackled home repair projects, knowing that someone else will never be as particular as I am), complex jigsaw puzzles, leather work, new classes at the gym, etc. I would love to catch up.
Thanks also for the opportunity to reflect on and recognize the ways in which I am building resistance. Who knew that getting out to the community garden to do the tasks required and reading books contributed to this. Having semi-retired, I get lots of opportunities through work projects to keep my keep resilient. Thanks for pointing to the need to keep it up as I move closer to full retirement.