According to Dr. Curtis Cripe, a neuroengineer involved in developing advanced technology for brain and cognitive repair, the brain is the only organ in the body that has no capability of healing itself after sustaining an injury. On the other hand, the brain can adapt and relearn quickly. One of the reasons the brain has coping abilities is psychological resilience.
Psychological resilience is a multi-dimensional construct representing how a person can adapt and respond positively to adversity and sustain proper mental health. Another way to define it is the ability to psychologically handle a crisis and return to a pre-crisis condition in just a short while.
The American Psychological Association explains it as the process of good adaptation or coping in the event of hardship, trauma, tragedy, and other significant sources of stress. Various interacting factors contribute to an individual’s psychological resilience, including genetics, epigenetics, childhood developmental environment, cognitive abilities, and other psychosocial factors. Too much stress and adversity can also impact a person’s psychological resilience because of the lack of coping skills or neurophysiological strength.
Fortunately, there is a way to improve your psychological resilience, says Dr. Curtis Cripe.
One such way is to help one’s fluid intelligence continue to act amid stressful conditions. Fluid intelligence is a person’s ability to solve problems unrelated to the knowledge they have previously acquired.
Another way to boost psychological resilience is learning positive coping styles in the face of troubles. A study on Chinese students determined a correlation between positive coping style and three psychological resilience components: mood control, self-plasticity, and coping flexibility.
Dr. Curtis Cripe currently serves as the director of research and development of NTL Group, a firm that combines the various fields of neuroscience, engineering, neurology, psychology, and others with the intent of advancing methodologies for recording, scanning, imaging, and analyzing brain activity. Check out this website to learn more about their areas of expertise.
Dr. Curtis Cripe 