Resilience

Dr Beverly Yahnke is a clinical psychologist who, over 20 years, has helped church workers cope with the struggles and stresses they encounter as they serve the Lord.

Beverley is the executive director for Christian counselling at ‘Doxology’ and also serves as a department chair and professor at Concordia University, Wisconsin USA. Dr Yahnkee recently visited Australia, and many pastors and other church workers attended one or more of the several sessions she presented. One of those sessions focused on resilience strategies.

Resilience is the ability to adapt to stressors, to be able to rebound back from adversity, disappointments, and other stressful circumstances. It was helpful to be reminded that resilience is not the ability to avoid or ward off such stressors or distressing situations. It is not some idealised version of the world in which we never experience sad or difficult times. It was good to hear that we can learn skills and strategies to enhance our resilience.

Paying attention to our physical and emotional energy can be one place to start practicing some strategies to improve our resilience. Making sure we get sufficient sleep is a step we can take pretty quickly to help ourselves. A Harvard Medical School report suggests that just one sleepless night can impair performance as much as a blood alcohol level on 0.10%, twice the legal limit to be safe on our roads when driving. It’s hard to concentrate on anything when you are exhausted.

If you want to try to improve your sleep here are basic strategies for getting a goodnight’s sleep, again from the Harvard Medical School.

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