Mindfulness and Mental Health
Create Grit and Resilience for a Joyful and Productive Life with Lifestyle Habits
Besides healing, we can increase our grit and resilience with mindfulness practices. Gamma waves create wonders in the brain.
Some people do physical exercises like parkour, long-distance running, kickboxing, and martial arts, which are excellent physical exercises for resilience and grit to some extent.
However, in my opinion, there are also other easy and effective ways to gain grit and resilience without perspiring and hurting our bodies. And this easy and less risky method can also improve the efficacy of those physical exercises.
I am talking about mindfulness and, more specifically, meditation as a tool to get gritty and resilient. I wrote several articles about the healing power of meditation which is valuable for our physical and mental health. But, notably, meditation itself is not magic.
Instead, it is an effective tool that allows us to create magic by tapping into the universe inside us.
When the brain is at a specific wavelength, it produces better connections with its other parts. The fast connections and their relationships create new perspectives. As a result, we see new ways to solve our problems and gain fresh insights. Innovation happens with this capability.
Interestingly while the body heals during meditation, the brain also gets stronger improving our cognitive abilities.
These mental skills allow us to process data faster, focus on tasks longer, and switch between them quicker and more effortlessly. Consequently, our self-confidence can increase, leading to mental capabilities of grit and resilience.
Self-confidence is key to experiencing grit. Even though scientific studies have proven grit as a success factor, science has not proven methods to become gritty yet.
However, based on my knowledge of cognitive science, personal experience, and intuition, I believe meditation is one of the tools for gaining grit and resilience for children and adults.
Hang on! What has grit got to do with meditation, and why does it matter? I am glad you asked this question, as it is my purpose to explain it in this article by comparing it with resilience. If people ask me one distinguishing trait for achieving dreams, I’d say grit with resilience.
Grit is the courage, persistence, and determination to solve problems in our lives. Our character can be empowered and enriched with grit and resilience. To survive and thrive, we need to show grit and be resilient to internal and external threats. Being resilient to failure and showing an unflappable attitude during difficult situations require the mental implementation of grit in our life.
Our internal emotions manifesting as negative feelings play a critical role in making right or wrong decisions. Our capacity to bear our sadness, grief, boredom, anxiety, stress, and pain determines our capacity and capability for grit.
Grit is both a cognitive and emotional construct. Therefore, the anatomy of grit includes both thoughts and emotions. The cornerstones are passion and perseverance to achieve meaningful and long-term goals despite adversity.
Even though intelligence, knowledge, and skills are essential for growth, only with grit and resilience can we distinguish ourselves from others in achieving the meaningful goals that we set?
Without grit, our IQ, accumulated knowledge, and acquired skills serve as unrealized potential. But, more interestingly, we can increase our IQ, knowledge, and abilities with grit.
I believe you want to understand how meditation can help us improve grit. I studied the effects of meditation on strengthening mental and emotional power. Meditation itself is a cognitive device. It does not improve anything unless we use the tool properly.
Improving our adversity quotient (AQ) is the skill to implement grit in our lives. Our IQ has genetic and epigenetic factors. So, we can improve certain aspects of IQ with effort. For example, it is possible to improve fluid intelligence with cognitive training.
Adversity quotient and fluid intelligence are closely related. When consciously and consistently exposed to adversities, the brain’s neuroplasticity allows us to adapt to internal and external conditions. BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor) protein is one of the mechanisms for this neural growth. BDNF also has an epigenetic effect on the brain.
This systemic review and meta-analysis, published in Frontiers in Psychology, investigating the effect of the mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) on BDNF, informs that these interventions (exercise-MBI and meditation-MBI) can increase peripheral BDNF.
There are studies on grit in psychology. For example, Project GRIT (Growth, Resilience, Insights, Thrive) was a pilot single-arm intervention study.
This study aimed to determine the feasibility and effect of a real-world group-based multidisciplinary intervention on cardiorespiratory fitness, diet quality, and self-concept in sedentary children and adolescents aged 9 to 15 years. Mindful eating was part of the study. As a result, participants improved their diet quality and self-concept.
There is a difference between grit and resilience, even though they are closely related. This study examined the relationship between grit and resilience. The study concludes that “grit and resilience are related concepts but are not synonymous. Being mindful of the difference in these two attributes may be important in the development of educational offerings in both Schools of Nursing and in new nurse residency programs to increase retention in nursing.”
Sustained and consistent effort towards our goal despite struggles and failures determines our grit. However, our ability to bounce back from defeat determines our resilience. While grit requires passion, resilience necessitates optimism. When resilient, we can also stay calm and composed in the face of struggles, challenges, and failures.
Let me get back to meditation. One of the most significant benefits of meditation is to increase our attention span. This capability is essential to become grittier and more resilient. Since the brain is plastic, we have the potential to improve our grit and resilience at any age.
When we are alert, focused, and deeply immersed in a complex project, most likely, our brain uses gamma waves. Some scientific studies such as this one measured these unique waves in the brains of long-term meditators. This electrical activity above 35 Hz in the brain can be measured using EEG (electroencephalogram).
By practicing meditation, we can consistently improve our attention and make neural connections more potent, robust, and denser in our pre-frontal cortex. In addition, by enhancing our mental engagement through awareness and focus, we can increase our grit and resilience, contributing to gaining a growth mindset. Our mindset is a critical success factor in achieving our goals.
Professor Angela Lee Duckworth is an academic, psychologist, and famous science author. After intensive research, she found out that grit was the only distinctive factor for successful kids at school and adults at work. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know how to make people gritty yet. However, she points out that we need to be gritty to make our kids grittier in a short and excellent video.
If you have children struggling with school, you might check this insightful and beautiful TED Talk by Dr. Shelley Ball, a research biologist and educator. “Her love of nature began at the age of two and turned into a life-long passion and career. But it was a career that seemed unattainable as a child who struggled with undiagnosed and untreated learning disabilities.”
Assia Grazioli Venier asserts never to underestimate the power of grit, even if we are dyslexic. With grit, we can turn each “No” into an “On” and write our names in the proper places that we desire. You can learn about a dyslexic woman now advising large organizations like Spotify and supporting many startup ventures at this enticing Ted Talk.
The power of grit and resilience is undeniable for achieving our dreams. Even though IQ, knowledge, and skills are essential, we can only make a distinctive contribution to achieving our goals with grit and resilience.
An easy and effective tool to increase grit and resilience is staying silent, closing our eyes, and observing our thoughts without judging them for at least 20 minutes each day. Your brain and body will thank you for this simple yet extraordinary behavior.
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