-Sheersha Roy
Intern, Mind Splatters, May-July 2024
Often, we come across conversations on building resilience to deal with life’s challenges. This trait is inexplicably crucial in adverse circumstances but focuses more on our capacity to endure stress in less frequent situations. A study conducted by Almeida et al. (2002) found that the accumulation of daily stressors had a more significant impact on people's emotional well-being than infrequent major life events. In this case, we can perhaps reconsider our focus, from sudden to daily times and identify our capacities regularly.
Like our internet’s bandwidth, stress can be managed by understanding how we express ourselves daily. Emotional bandwidth is the range and intensity of emotions one can experience and manage effectively. Limited emotional bandwidth can make it difficult for us to articulate how we feel about something and find ways to deal with it. Recognizing such limits is important, not only for us to push them but also to set boundaries as endurance can sometimes be counter-productive. A simple way to illustrate this is to imagine a rubber band, whose elasticity is its resilience and the limit to how far it can be stretched is its emotional bandwidth. In known or unknown scenarios, this overstretching can reduce our power to bounce back.
Emotional Bandwidth for Long-term resilience
Another way to conceptualize is to understand emotional bandwidth as our capacity to support the people around us emotionally. This is especially relevant today, where we see burnout as a common phenomenon in jobs of almost any profile. As much as this problem is systemic in imposing ideals of perfectionism, it is also the lack of self-awareness that has made us ignorant towards the ordinariness of fatigue, disinterest and injury. Resilience requires restoration to occur and if we are not able to provide ourselves the time to recover, emotional attunement becomes hard to achieve. Adding to the stress, we see here a vicious cycle created, where one keeps ignoring signs of emotional exhaustion and fails to sense its signs.
Feelings on a spectrum
Compartmentalizing ourselves as introverts or extroverts is another common scenario which looks at social engagement as a binary. The presence of an emotional bandwidth allows people to go beyond this categorisation and respond to their social needs. If I must consider myself, setting personal boundaries for engagement has been helpful here in knowing when I might be over-exerting. There can be other ways in which we look at seeing this bandwidth in our lives such as :
Working with a Mental health practitioner to identify the sources of stress and overexertion. Talk therapy can particularly, not just be helpful in special scenarios, rather it is important regularly in vocalizing stressors.
Prioritizing self-care to keep our basic needs in check. A part of this includes the practice of assertive communication too.
Have realistic expectations and goals to start with to avoid cognitive and emotional overload later.
Listening to your gut instinct is crucial, as, at times, our body keeps a record of exhaustion.
Slowing down from time to time to make time for rest. One way to do this might include breathwork.
Protect your bandwidth by providing safety and acceptance to yourself in times of low bandwidth.
There can be many more such strategies in realizing that what we have is an exhaustive resource and we can work optimally with them. Social media has had a considerable impact in stretching such bandwidths with a barrage of information, opinions, and emotional cues from countless sources. The connectivity, comparisons and less downtime can be overwhelming, leading to emotional fatigue. This makes it important for us to regulate, and curate our digital consumption and take it one day at a time. So, the next time you feel overwhelmed by the constant stream of notifications, know that your resources to engage might have been depleted for that day and try taking a step back.
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