RESILIENT BY DESIGN

Building our capacity to tolerate frustration is critical work, not a personal indulgence.

By Tracy Swyst

Dissent is not a one-time event. It’s a long game. Many of us, both individually and in collectives, are doing the hard work of questioning the standards we inherit, designing interventions that redistribute power or visibility, and adapting to change and then maintaining performance during adversity. But even if you’re not explicitly working towards change, the news cycles, political threats, and economic pressures keep mounting, and it’s affecting all of us, taxing the nervous system beyond what it can rebound from on its own.

What happens when our champions on the front lines of systematic dissent devolve into feeling ineffective and too reactive to lead effectively? What happens to us when we live in this state for prolonged periods of time? Left here long enough, we risk becoming part of the problem. 

“At its best, activism is a form of healing. It is about what we do and how we show up in the world.” — From Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands

There’s never been more need to build capacity to tolerate frustration. Our minds and bodies are exhausted from injustice, from fighting, from erasure. Exposure to so many broken systems has left us outraged, restless, and numb. And that is by design and intention. The system wants to exhaust you, to push you to opt out of the fight and out of the game. Tricia Hersey, in her book Rest is Resistance, calls it out: “They want us unwell, fearful, exhausted, and without deep self-love because you are easier to manipulate.”

That’s why resilience is critical – it’s not strength, it’s stamina. The bounce back. And to get there, you need skills, and you need to develop these and keep them sharp through practice.

So, how do you build these skills? There’s no magic pill or silver bullet. A few small, deliberate choices can shape how you move through the world, determine how you’ll serve, and what you’ll build.

What follows is a handful of practices to help you get into your body and build the stamina for what comes next.

“What if this difficult time signifies not the beginning of the end but a profound opportunity for a new beginning? What if, through the pain of seeing the way things are, we now have a new chance to get it right?” — Rhonda V. Magee, The Inner Work of Racial Justice

There’s never been more need to build capacity to tolerate frustration. Our minds and bodies are exhausted from injustice, from fighting, from erasure. Exposure to so many broken systems has left us outraged, restless, and numb. And that is by design and intention. The system wants to exhaust you, to push you to opt out of the fight and out of the game. Tricia Hersey, in her book Rest is Resistance, calls it out: “They want us unwell, fearful, exhausted, and without deep self-love because you are easier to manipulate.”

That’s why resilience is critical – it’s not strength, it’s stamina. The bounce back. And to get there, you need skills, and you need to develop these and keep them sharp through practice.

On Acceptance

Accept that you cannot (fill in the blank); I cannot sleep….I cannot relax…I cannot concentrate. Accepting will feel like a type of softening in you. Once you perceive that, you can begin to practice. Acceptance is a profound shift in mindset to what our reality is, rather than fighting for a return to what used to be, or what we wish it to be. Acknowledging the unpleasant feelings that come with being forced to adapt is part of the process. This is not acceptance of what is wrong. It’s acceptance of where you are, so you can move from truth rather than from panic.

On Rest

Think back to your experience at the height of COVID. For most of us, the world stopped. It was brief, but it did, and so did we. Nobody was producing at full speed. Nobody was hustling. In fact, we were invited not to, but to rest and look after ourselves and the people around us. And most of us did it, and somehow, we were still here. That pause was taken from us the moment it became inconvenient. The relentless pressure to produce, to perform and to push through is a system of extraction. It needs you tired, on your toes, anxious to perform, and fearful of the consequences. Rest is not laziness. It is reclamation.

A quick way to come back to yourself is literally to catch your breath. Breathing is a powerful, often-overlooked exercise done with intention that can help shift your whole being.

Try this simple breathing technique when you need to slow down, dropping your breath and awareness from your chest into your belly, where it can circulate through the body and synchronize your heart rate, calming the nervous system.

• Slowly inhale and exhale through the nose, five seconds in, five seconds out. Place your hands on your abdomen if you need a physical cue to help you focus.
• Drop your breath down towards the belly by relaxing your abdominal muscles.
• Don’t focus on breathing in more air, just try to drop it down.
• Repeat

Other quick exercises include the practice of being present by listening to your body. The act of focusing, even just for a moment, on what your hands feel, your nose smells, your eyes see, or your ears hear, reduces activity in the parts of your brain while simultaneously supporting regulation of your emotions.

Meditation gets a bad rap, but as little as three minutes a day can help increase your capacity to respond intentionally rather than reactively.

Do less for five minutes a day. Put your phone down and practice NOT multitasking. Give your mind an opportunity to settle down to become aware of how much you are asking your brain and nervous system to keep up with.

Sleep is where your nervous system does its deepest repair. Even one small change can shift how you wake up: reduce screen time in the evening, commit to ten minutes of reading, put your legs up the wall.

Practice: Search “belly breathing” or “somatic breathwork” on platforms like Insight Timer, which just happens to be free.

On Community

Don’t go it alone! Audre Lorde wrote, “Without community there is no liberation.” When we were still tribal, community was a tenet of survival. Our systems have made individualization incredibly attractive, pushing us further and further apart. And the irony is that we now have a loneliness epidemic, and a culture that sells us the appearance of community without any of its power, so we can never actually come together and galvanize (the metaverse dying is sweet revenge). The system wants you alone; it’s harder to stand back up, and it’s easier to get swallowed by fear.

Find your people. A lot of times community looks less like a movement and more like a Tuesday night. Volunteer, clean your block, show up for a neighbor, sign up for something outside of your comfort zone, host, and invite people both new and familiar.

“Focus on critical connections more than critical mass – build the resilience by building the relationships.” – adrienne maree brown

The work is never finished, but neither is the resistance. Every time you rest, breathe, show up for someone, or simply refuse to be ground down, you are building the infrastructure that the long game runs on. Take care of yourself like the movement depends on it. Because it does.