Recently I was trying on a few swimsuits and when the saleswoman knocked on the door and asked if I needed anything, I couldn’t resist saying, “Yes, two things-bigger boobs and a flatter stomach.” She laughed, walked away and came back with a “bust-enhancing suit.” As I wondered if I tore my rotator cuff getting this alternate suit on and off, I gave it another name, “Tourniquet.”

Yeah, I waited until July to find a new swimsuit. Not a good idea. They’re pretty picked over. Somehow it was May and then I turned around and it was nearly the end of July but actually, I think I can survive these last few weeks of summer wearing last year’s bust-enhancing-stomach-flattening-tourniquet swimsuit. Somehow, all of this has made me thinking about resilience.

To be honest, there’s been a lot going on in my life lately and I’m sure in yours too. I just finished completing a on-line certificate in Applied Positive Psychology  and the module on resilience just keeps turning over in my head. Studies show resilient people have three qualities: compassion, gratitude, and emotional intelligence.

This means in difficult times, you have to have compassion both for yourself and for others. Gratitude, science says, is like a circuit that once fired can flip your focus off your challenges and on to your blessings. Dr. Daniel Goleman explains in his book, Emotional Intelligence, that a person who is self-aware, socially adapt, and empathetic will be able to survive and thrive during a crisis because they have the social and relational skills to do so.

Resilience is defined in the dictionary as, the ability to recover quickly from difficulties. Why am I talking about and focusing on difficulties in a blog about joy, positivity and happiness? Because what we are finding over and over again through our research into positive psychology is that we can’t hope and wish that we won’t have difficulties. We can’t hide from them. We can’t think they will never happen to us. They will. We just have to be ready. We have to build the emotional landscape that can withstand some pummeling.

And I think when we work on getting ready, a small frustration, like a middle aged body trying to come off as ten years younger in a tourniquet swimsuit, becomes such a minuscule problem. I can talk to myself with compassion, be thankful for what I have, and rationally put everything in perspective. I can also learn to start swim suit shopping much earlier!

Dr. Amen, world renowned psychiatrist and brain disorder specialist, coined the term ANTs in the early 1990s. He defines ANTs as “the automatic negative thoughts that ruin your day, steal your happiness, and prolong grief.” As we often say at The Wisdom Coalition, it’s important to recognize that our thoughts are not facts, and oftentimes they are complete lies. It’s our job to investigate and question our thoughts so that they don’t steal our joy.

Dr. Amen says that with practice, we can learn to eliminate the ANTs and replace them with more helpful thoughts that give us a more accurate, fair assessment of any situation.

Here are the simple steps he outlines to eliminate the ANTs:

• Write down your automatic negative thoughts (ANTs). The act of writing down the ANTs helps to get the invaders out of your head.
• Identify the ANT species. There are 9 types of ANTs. ANT Types:

1. All-or-Nothing ANTs: Thinking that things are either all good or all bad
2. Less-Than ANTs: Comparing and seeing yourself as less than others
3. Just-the-Bad ANTs: Seeing only the bad in a situation
4. Guilt-Beating ANTs: Thinking in words like should, must, ought, or have to
5. Labeling ANTs: Attaching a negative label to yourself or someone else
6. Fortune-Telling ANTs: Predicting the worst possible outcome for a situation with little or no evidence for it
7. Mind-Reading ANTs: Believing you know what other people are thinking even though they haven’t told you
8. If-Only and I’ll-Be-Happy-When ANTs: Arguing with the past and longing for the future
9. Blaming ANTs: Blaming someone else for your problems

• Ask yourself if the thought is true. Are you 100% sure it’s true?
• Ask yourself how you feel when you have the thought. The ask how you would feel without the thought.
• Make ANT-killing a daily habit. Killing the ANTs takes practice. You can’t just do it once and think you’ve mastered your thinking patterns. When you make it a daily practice, you will feel freer, less anxious and depressed, and less trapped in past hurts or losses.