How to cultivate resilience and get through tough times (with Lucy Hone) (re-release)

0:28You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. are still ongoing today, but I do just want to give you the context so you know when this interview took place. And I also want to say that over the years of hosting this show, this conversation with Lucy Hone, an expert on well-being and resilience, this is the single episode that listeners have brought up to me the most. I know that what Lucy has to say here has really spoken to people, and it's stuck with me too. Because Lucy's research and her work, they're all about how do you get through tough times? How do you survive when it feels like your world is falling apart.

1:01And those are questions that we're all going to have to face at some point in our lives. They're some of the biggest challenges that come with being human. In Lucy's talk, which was recorded at TEDx Christchurch, she shares her research on coping with sorrow and tragedy, and also her own journey back to hope and strength and life after the unthinkable happened to her. Here's a clip. I finished my studies in America and I returned home here to Christchurch to start my doctoral research. I'd just begun that study when the Christchurch earthquakes hit. So I put my research on hold and I started working with my home community to help them through that terrible post-quake period.

1:46I worked with all sorts of organizations from government departments to building companies and all sorts of community groups, teaching them the ways of thinking and acting that we know boost resilience. I thought that was my calling, my moment to put all of that research to good use. But sadly, I was wrong. For my own true test came in 2014 on Queen's birthday weekend. We and two other families had decided to go down to Lake Ohau and bike the Alps to Ocean. At the last minute, my beautiful 12-year-old daughter, Abby, decided to hop in the car with her best friend, Ella, also 12, and Ella's mum, Sally, a dear, dear friend of mine.

2:40On the way down, as they traveled through Rakaia on Thompson's track, a car sped through a stop sign, crashing into them and killing all three of them instantly. In the blink of an eye, I find myself flung to the other side of the equation, waking up with a whole new identity. Instead of being the resilience expert, suddenly I'm the grieving mother, waking up not knowing who I am, trying to wrap my head around unthinkable news. My world smashed to smithereens. If you're listening and you are struggling, I hear you. I feel you. Lucy hears you and she feels you, too. You are not alone. And as Lucy is about to tell us, there is a path through.

3:29I'm Chris Duffy, and this is How to Be a Better Human. We'll be right back.

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5:41We're back. Today we're talking with Dr. Lucy Hone, an expert on resilience and well-being. Kia ora, as we say down here in Aotearoa, New Zealand. I am Dr. Lucy Hone. I'm a co-founder and co-director at the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing and Resilience. I think maybe we should start by just talking about the word resilience for a moment. You study it both academically, but also you do a lot of work with the practical implications of resilience. But I think it's also one of those words that people really throw around a lot and mean a lot of different things with. So when you say resilience, what do you mean by that?

6:19Such a good point. And it drives me nuts that people just band this word around without really understanding that there are some real kind of myths here. So we define resilience as a person or an organisation's ability to adapt and flex and steer through some form of adversity and challenge so that they can continue to function reasonably well or get back to functioning reasonably well and also learning from it. I think those are all the important parts of it. You've got to have adversity. And it's about managing to kind of, you know, keep the show on the road despite what's happening to you so that you continue to function in a, you know, pretty reasonable fashion despite what's going on.

7:20But I also truly believe that it is about adaptation. It's about a process of learning and flexing and changing and growing as we go. Personally, I have been, I think many, many people have been dealing with these ways in which life has thrown us unexpected curveballs. And I think that the way that you talk about practical ways in which we can make ourselves more resilient rather than just feeling like we either are or not, it really resonates with me. And I think it will really resonate with many people right now, if not every single person. So can we talk about that for a second? I mean, resilient people, it almost seems to me like some people just handle bad things better, like they're able to do them.

8:02But you really don't feel like that. You feel like it's a learned skill. Well, yes and no. That is true that some people have a greater inbuilt capacity to cope with whatever seems to happen to them. Not quite whatever happens to them, because there is research that shows that if you continually bombarded with adverse events, then of course, that is more likely to erode your capacity to get back. So I do think that, yeah, adversity doesn't discriminate. Happens to us all. Shit things happen to us all. And yet we do have an incredible inherent ability to cope using very ordinary processes. And my job and my absolute mission is to get more people to understand.

8:57And firstly, to give them some hope that they can get through tough times and then give them some practical ways of thinking and acting to help them navigate those tough times. You know, to give them some choices and to give them what we would call in psychology some agency, you know, some active ingredients rather than just being passive recipients. And I feel so strongly about this work, Chris, because I don't think, particularly when it comes to grief, there isn't sufficient knowledge about our ability just to be able to cope. Even grief has been pathologized. You know, it's been made kind of like, you know, there's something wrong with you.

9:50Yeah, I'm on a new mission now to help people understand a bit more about coping with loss. And I feel like one of the hard parts of dealing with the things that you would need to be resilient about, whether it's illness or injury or loss or heartbreak or assault, anything that is one of these really big, challenging things. It feels like as a society, we often don't address them. And so we don't really have the context for what is normal and how and what is not normal and what is OK and what is not OK. It's just like these are things that we'd rather not think about at all. Yeah, and I think this is a really important point to make that we need to step away from the happyology and the Instagram world that life's all kind of la-la and pretty and beautiful and happiness is all that counts.

10:35And we're pretty much, I think COVID has taught us that no one's immune to, you know, bad things happening. And so it is really important that we enter a much more open dialogue about what that feels like and to not brush our negative emotions aside, but to learn how to sit with them and live in that uncomfortableness alongside starting to piece our lives back together. That has been the most incredible discovery for me, is that you can grieve and live at the same time. People have got out of the habit of talking about death. There's a lot of euphemisms used in passing on. You know, my daughter was killed.

11:31She died. And, you know, I'm happy to talk about that. It's a fact of life. And sugarcoating it doesn't make it any better. But being able to talk about it does. You know, it's interesting thinking about how you were just saying how we are so uncomfortable. As a North American, I do feel I feel like it's challenging to talk about this stuff. And even knowing that I'm going to be interviewing you about this, it feels almost rude or unacceptable to bring up things that have happened in your life, like losing your daughter because it feels so personal. But I hear what you're saying, which is that like not talking about it doesn't change it and creating space to talk about it and allowing you to to be acknowledged and to be for that to be real.

12:20That actually can be much more helpful than than this polite, quote unquote, politeness that I and I think a lot of people feel when we talk about difficult things. Yeah, totally. So actually, you'll be amused to hear that I almost trump you with the North American not wanting to talk about it because I actually was born in London. So I've got the British stiff upper lip thing going on in my jeans. And actually moving to New Zealand 20 years ago has made a difference to my experience of grief, which began when I was still in England in the year 2000 and my dear mom died. It feels like in a traumatic time, we have to not rush past it or ignore it or try to feel better right away, but actually acknowledge it and sit with it and be OK with it not being OK.

13:09But then we have to also figure out how to not drown in that and still be able to anchor ourselves to something outside of pain and sadness. And that is a really hard balance to strike. Yeah, so true. So actually what you're speaking to theoretically there are those two things of a bit about trauma and a bit about grief. So on the grief side, one of the things I've learned most about bereavement since Abby died is that you know how people, when they've lost someone, they do sometimes really want to tell their story. and have you ever come across someone Chris who's gone into it in in really kind of you know tiny detail and you kind of get to the point where you're almost embarrassed because they're telling it so much yeah and what that is about this is Bob Neumeyer's work about meaning making through loss and that when our life path splits and we are forced to go down a completely different unanticipated unwanted road it means that what happens is that our life schema this kind of grand plan that we had for ourselves is smashed to smithereens and so what we are doing by talking to people and talking it out and telling our stories is we are slowly managing to start to piece together again the new life story and make a new kind of meaningful concept come from what has happened to integrate it into your life.

14:46So this is really important because it means that if you are, if you've got a friend or a family member or a colleague who has lost someone, one of the best, most supportive things that you can do to help them is to ask them about the bereaved, to ask them and give them time and space, endless time and space to tell their story and even retell their story. Because every time we do so, we are doing that really important processing of creating the new life narrative. One of the other great advancements in bereavement research is that when someone dies, you don't have to sever your connection with the dead.

15:34And actually what we are doing in the bereavement process is creating and cultivating a new ongoing relationship with those who we've lost. So in doing this work for me, I am I'm kind of keeping Abby's place in the world alive. You know, I'm building a legacy. I'm making even her short life of just 12 years count for something more. I'm kind of perpetuating her contribution to the world. And that's really, you know, warming. Yeah, I love that. I love the idea of continuing the relationship. I think it's a really important part of learning to relive in the, you know, relearning to live in the world, to learn to live without those that we've lost, is to work out how we can continue a relationship with them, to continue to talk about them in our lives, to talk about them to other people, to have aspects of them, build those into your life.

16:42So in my workshops, I often talk to people about what is the legacy of the deceased? You know, what did they teach you and how have you changed because of them? When you live in a way that recognizes the impact that the deceased has on you, then you are keeping them and their legacy alive. We're going to hear Dr. Lucy Hohn's strategies to tap into your resilience and get through tough times. And we have so much more right after this. So don't go anywhere.

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19:30And you gave that in August of 2019, which is not that far ago. And yet, I think at the time that you were giving it, most people would have only felt like this was relevant to them if they themselves had personally experienced loss or bereavement. And yet now it kind of feels like this is the default state for the world. Like so many people right now are just grieving a loss of what we thought our lives were going to be, or someone that we have lost, or even if we haven't directly lost a person, we almost certainly know someone who has lost someone or who has lost a job or a relationship. There's been this huge global trauma in so many ways.

20:06Let's listen to what you had to say in your talk back in 2019. These are my go-to strategies that I relied upon and saved me in my darkest days. They're three strategies that underpin all of my work, and they're pretty readily available to us all. Anyone can learn them. You can learn them right here today. So number one, resilient people get that shit happens. They know that suffering is part of life. This doesn't mean they actually welcome it in. They're not actually delusional. Just that when the tough times come, they seem to know that suffering is part of every human existence. And knowing this stops you from feeling discriminated against when the tough times come.

20:58The real tragedy is that not enough of us seem to know this any longer. We seem to live in an age where we're entitled to a perfect life, where shiny happy photos on Instagram are the norm, when actually, as you all demonstrated at the start of my talk, the very opposite is true. Number two, resilient people are really good at choosing carefully where they select their attention. They have a habit of realistically appraising situations and typically managing to focus on the things that they can change and somehow accept the things that they can't. This is a vital, learnable skill for resilience.

21:53As humans, we are really good at noticing threats and weaknesses. Being wired in this way is actually really good for us and served us well from an evolutionary perspective. The problem is we now live in an era where we are constantly bombarded by threats all day long. And our poor brains treat every single one of those threats as though they were a tiger. Our threat focus, our stress response is permanently dialed up. Resilient people don't diminish the negative, but they also have worked out a way of tuning into the good. Number three, resilient people ask themselves, is what I'm doing helping or harming me?

22:49This is a question that's used a lot in good therapy. And boy, is it powerful. This was my go-to question in the days after the girls died. I would ask it again and again. Should I go to the trial and see the driver? Would that help me or would it harm me? Well, that was a no-brainer for me. I chose to stay away. But Trevor, my husband, decided to meet with the driver at a later time. Late at night, I'd find myself sometimes poring over old photos of Abby, getting more and more upset. I'd ask myself, really, is this helping you or is it harming you? Put away the photos. Go to bed for the night.

23:35Be kind to yourself. This question can be applied to so many different contexts. Next, is the way I'm thinking and acting helping or harming you in your bid to get that promotion, to pass that exam, to recover from a heart attack? Asking yourself whether what you're doing, the way you're thinking, the way you're acting is helping or harming you puts you back in the driver's seat. It gives you some control over your decision making. I wonder if there have been any new resilience strategies that you have seen or that you've experienced personally or in your work during this time that have come about.

24:20It's such a good question. And you're right that, you know, I've been in this field for 11 years now. And Dr. Denise Quinlan, who's my co-director at the Institute, she and I always kind of laugh about the fact that we've been in this field for, you know, her 13 years, me 11 years, and that for most of that time, no one was ever interested in our work. And then because I live here in Christchurch, we had some terrible earthquakes. So that kind of woke up my local region to the fact that the ways that we think and act as individuals, as communities and as societies have a huge impact on our resilience.

25:07And then we also had that awful mosque shooting. Do you remember in March 2000? and 19. And so that's, you know, that's woken us up to it again. And now it feels like the world has also, you know, sadly gone through the same experience of just realising how important it is to understand more about the way you think and act and how that helps or harms you. And I think, to be honest, for me, the same strategies seem to work, whatever the disaster. You know, we've had a couple of earthquakes. We had that mosque shooting. We've had COVID. I've lost my daughter and my mother. And, you know, the same kind of strategies seem to work for me.

25:57But what COVID has really taught and reminded me is how much our resilience comes from our internal resources and our external environments. And unless you are lucky enough to live in a supportive society and community and workplace, then it is so much more of a challenge to dig for your resilience and get through. That makes me think too, whether there's a link between trauma and resilience. I've always thought that one of the strangest expressions that we have, it's a common knowledge, but I don't think it's true, is that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. Because at least in my experience, and also I think you can just observe plenty of things that don't kill you don't make you stronger.

26:49They can often leave you like weaker and vulnerable and broken. So I think there's kind of in some ways this like valorization of it's great to be injured. It's great to have trauma. It's great to have bad things happen because that makes you stronger. And I'm not sure that that's really true at all. No, I don't think it's true. And it's certainly not true when you've got a lot of layers of hardship, you know, with poverty, if you've got no job, nowhere to go, you know, you can't get out of the house. Certainly, it's much, much harder to be resilient. And it's just it's possible. But boy, is it hard work?

27:29You know, every day to get up and try and make the best of what you've got. That's tough. You said that the kind of three crucial things that regardless of what you're what you're going through, that you've really found work for you and work in general. And I use it all the time. You know, I'm in back in March when the world was truly spinning on its axis. I remember thinking to myself, OK, quickly, I need to get out of all my news notifications because it felt like we all had that moment, didn't we, where it was all just way too massive for our poor brains to cope with. So, you know, are they helping or harming me?

28:07That's a no brainer. I've actually recently taken myself off Instagram because my 29 year old niece said she had. And I thought, oh, that's so good. She kind of gave me permission because she's young and cool. And I thought, OK, if she has, then I can. It's been so good because I know that trawling through Instagram while watching Netflix at night isn't really helping me. And it's been good. So whether it is, you know, the extra glass of wine, not patching up an argument with a friend, whatever it is, it's a great question to really put yourself in the driver's seat to say, is this helping or harming me in my quest to get through this?

28:47Yeah, it's so interesting because I think there's so much, especially with social media, right? There's so many people who are like, oh, it's all good, it's all bad. Or, you know, is it helpful? Should I be on? Should I not be on at all? And I feel like you've actually framed it in a way that makes so much more sense, which is just like, well, is it helping you? Or is it harming you? And if it's harming, how can you not do it in that way? And if there's not a way that you can use it and help you, then don't do it at all. And you don't have to, I didn't actually have to take myself off Instagram.

29:13I just took it off my phone. So if I really want to go and look at Instagram, if I want to post something, I still can use my laptop to do that, but it has to be much more determined and intentional. So that, yeah, in that way, that's worked for me. I've actually done the exact same thing, which I will say is probably not what anyone would recommend for my entertainment and comedy career, but certainly has been good for my mental health and for just not feeling this constant draw of having to do something that I know doesn't make me feel good. OK, so you you've kind of referenced some of these a little bit in this interview and you've referenced them in several other interviews and talks that I've heard you give.

29:53What are some of the pieces of advice that you had heard before or that people often believe about resilience or getting through tough things that you've heard and you want to debunk or that you felt like, oh, this was totally not useful for me? In fact, it was the opposite. Yeah. So the fact that when our daughter was killed, we were told that we were prime candidates for divorce, mental illness and family estrangement. I was like, wow, seriously, thanks for that. You know, life was already pretty gloomy and dim. Thanks. It's almost like they were trying to sell them to you. Yeah. And I can laugh about it now.

30:27You're a prime candidate for our new products. Yeah. Great. Yeah. And I can laugh about it now. But at the time I was pretty furious because and I've subsequently discovered that that is not true. Most of us just do get through somehow and we actually get back to pretty normal functioning surprisingly quickly. And that's OK. So I want people to know that that is normal and that's OK. and don't let anybody feel, make you feel like you're somehow not grieving properly because you want to go back to work or you want to go out socially. That's okay. That's normal. I'm curious with, you're obviously an expert, you're a professional in this, but you've also done a lot of research on how resilience and the strength to get through these moments can be taught.

31:14So what are some ways in which we can pass techniques or mindsets on to others who are in a bad place if we're the support system right now? Such a good question. So number one is to give them hope that they will get through it and belief that they will get through it. So just saying to them, hey, we're here for you. You're going to be okay. We're going to get through this together. Take all the time you need and I'm here to talk to you anytime you want. you know tell me what you need because I'm really here and I think it's really important that we offer more than just emotional help or listening help but also instrumental help so that's another way you can help with with anything from you know cutting the grass to picking the kids up to anything any practical help sorting out their IT all of those things and there are all such lots of different ways that you can offer what we would call instrumental help.

32:21Yeah. I just know in my personal life, one of the things that has been so helpful is that, you know, in the worst of times being like, okay, we just need to get through one hour. Can we just get like one good hour? And then when you have one good hour, then like the next day, it's like, can we get three good hours? Can we get two good hours? And then amazingly, at a certain point, I'm like, oh, it's been two good weeks. And also grief doesn't go away, you know, to understand that at some point this COVID lockdown pandemic will end and other people are going to require help once it's ended, you know, going back to normal life without those that they have loved.

33:04And so developing any kind of rituals and habits, there's really great research around the importance of rituals, of kind of, what do we call them, sort of unofficial ways of remembering and memorialising those that have died. So whether it's lighting a candle or wearing the color nail varnish that your mother wore, or whether it's in one of my workshops, I once came across a man who went to the same barbers to have his hair cut every month that his father had always been to. So, you know, just nice ways of drawing them into your life and bumping into them in your life. Well, you know, I'm curious.

33:48So you seem to me like a very optimistic and fun person. Is that how you self-identify as well? I think, yes, I am basically what we would call realistically optimistic. So I hope for the best and I plan for the worst. Okay. I like that. That's like, I want the glass to be half full, but I also know exactly how full this glass is. Well, how do you cope then when optimism doesn't always seem realistic? And actually the research, maybe I am like this because the research suggests that it's really important to be pragmatic and really ruthlessly realistic about what we're up against. And that the people who have kind of runaway optimism, that kind of Pollyanna optimism of just going, everything will be fine we'll all be out of it just does set you up for disappointment so um i do definitely operate as i say and i kind of i know we'll get through this i know it's going to take time um and i know that five or six years from now and 20 years from now we're going to look back on this and just go wow what a crazy experience that was um so i try and put things in perspective.

35:01And I try really hard to focus my attention on the here and now and what I can control. You know, I know that I'm a little bit guilty of, oh, well, I'm more than a little bit guilty of this. I'm totally guilty of this. And I think that there's a real generosity in the fact that you're willing to do it. But it must also be tough that so much of what people want to talk to you about and what people want to focus on is the hardest things that have happened in your life. Um, it is. Like I said to you earlier on, Chris, it does make something good come out of the bad. And that works for me. I guess I just have to moderate it.

35:42And I'm pretty careful to look after myself, too. So when we have someone on like you who's such an expert in how to be a better human, I'm also always curious, like, what are you doing? How are you trying to be a better human? Well, thank you for asking me that. My husband and I have been to stay overnight on a Maori Marai, on a traditional meeting house, because in all of our work at the Institute and with another group I work for called Leadership Lab, We are intentionally, deliberately striving to increase our cultural competency to understand more about the indigenous people of New Zealand, the Maori, and working with them and understanding their tikanga, their practices, their history, the intergenerational impact of colonization on them.

36:40And what we as Pākehā, which is their word for outsiders, white people, what we can do to dismantle the impact of colonization. So we're working really hard on our tereo, our language, and our practices. And that's going to be the rest of my lifelong journey, I think. Well, thank you so much, Lucy Hohn. This is an absolute pleasure. No, mihi. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of How to Be a Better Human. That is our show for today. Thank you so much to our guest, Dr. Lucy Hall. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. This show is produced by Abhimanyu Das, Daniela Balarezo, Frederica Elizabeth Yosefov and Karen Newman at TED, and Jocelyn Gonzalez, Pedro Rafael Rosado, and Sandra Lopez-Monsalve from PRX Productions.

37:33For more on How to Be a Better Human, visit ideas.ted.com. We'll see you next week.

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