Life Hacks: How do you measure resilience?
Resilience is a word thrown around a lot, we are told we need it, but how do we know if we have enough of it? Are we building or depleting our reserves and how can we tell? Read on to find out.
What is resilience?
Resilience is defined as the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties. I like the analogy of riding life’s waves while maintaining well-being. Well-being can be defined as feeling good and functioning well.
What resilience looks like will be unique to you. What builds and depletes your capacity is unique to you, as is what you experience as difficulties. This makes resilience slippery - you can’t follow a prescribed set of actions, you need to become the expert in your own resilience.
Why should you measure it?
With something as personal and slippery as resilience, measurement becomes increasingly important. When you can measure your resilience you can learn what restores it, what depletes it and what action you need to take if you want to build it or have a greater capacity to face difficulties.
How do I measure my resilience?
I use an Oura ring for my physical measurements. I find a ring easier to wear than a watch, especially for sleeping. The ring collects data on my movement, heart rate, body temperature and oxygen and from this it can calculate sleep and exercise. Oura has developed measurements for stress, readiness and resilience as well.
A snapshot of my Oura data
This is a great data set and I have enjoyed exploring how I can influence my resilience rating, but it has limitations. It doesn’t measure the emotional component of resilience - how I feel about myself and my interactions with others. I’ve recently started collecting this data as well. I’ve chosen 5 important components to me and each night I rate them out of five. The components I’ve chosen are as follows:
Connection - How connected do I feel to others
Energy - How much energy do I have
Productivity - Have I achieved the things I wanted to achieve
Choice - How much choice did I have over what happened today
Recovery - Did I build in time for recovery or will I need to do that in the future (eg will I need the weekend to recover from my busy work week?)
This gives me a rating out of 25 each day, as a score of my resilience. I’m building up the story this data is telling me and I’m curious to see what I can learn from it. It is a starting point. I’ve already learned that sleep is a crucial component of my resilience and the one with the biggest impact.
What should you measure?
If you would like to start measuring your resilience, here are my suggestions:
You need to measure both the physical and emotional components of resilience to get the complete picture.
Physical components:
What are the things you are doing to keep your body functioning well?
You don’t need to track the data with a monitoring device, asking yourself simple questions about your sleep, your movement and how you have nourished your body is a great starting point.
Emotional components:
Pick three to five components and rate them. You can use the reflective questions and list of components below if you need help landing on your own. Remember the more personal and meaningful you can this the better understanding you will have of your resilience.
You need to be consistent.
Each day record your ratings along with a comment or note regarding things of interest. These could include stressors you did or didn’t react to; things you notice relevant to your overall resilience
Review the data
Pick a time period, I’m going to start with weekly, to review the data you have collected and see if you can tease out the story it is trying to tell you. What are you noticing?
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