Resilience Badge: Strengthening Resolve and Balance in Response to Stressors

The Resilience Badge is earned by components of the building that support and strengthen resilience.

Resilience can be thought of as grit or tenacity - the ability to withstand and adapt under pressure. Though it may be easier to think of resilience as a character trait, there is also a way to track resilience more objectively, through heart rate variability (HRV) - the variation in tempo and timing between individual heart beats. Whereas the heart rate is the average amount of heartbeats per minute, heart rate variability refers to the change in time between successive heart beats. In more meaningful terms, it reflects your body's ability to react and adapt to stressors within the span of a single heartbeat. A heart that is able to make quick adjustments to stressors has high-functioning HRV. High-functioning HRV is important because it manifests as resilience. A lack of resilience means that you have trouble calming yourself when you’re stressed, and that you’re not easily adaptable to changes in your personal life and environment.

Fortunately, there are habits and practices that are shown to improve HRV, meaning that you can reliably improve your own resilience. The equation for raising resilience comes down to three simple elements: occupying healthy spaces, caring for your basic needs, and training your stress response. Additionally, lifestyle habits like exercise stress your body in a manageable way and will, over time, strengthen your ability to bounce back quickly. Chronic stress can be negative, but measured and intentional periods of safe stress are great ways to grow resilience and raise HRV. HRV is also responsive to good practices in your mental, emotional, and spiritual life. Research shows that good emotional practices like gratitude journaling and mindfulness practices like meditation and intentional breathing are also linked to increases in HRV. Frequency aims to help strengthen resilience by removing barriers to your ability to occupy a healthy space, care for your basic needs, and train your stress response.

Amenities with this badge

Cold Plunge

Acute cold exposure activates your parasympathetic nervous system. Your sympathetic system (fight or flight) is triggered when your body adjusts to cold, training your parasympathetic system (rest and digest) to perform in response to greater levels of stress (16). Planned, continual exposure to acute cold will allow your body to grow accustomed to making the necessary changes to bring your body back from a fight or flight response to a relaxed state, which will prepare your body to cope with unplanned stressors.

Sauna

Studies have demonstrated that during the cooling down period after a sauna session, HRV increased. This shows that sauna bathing improves the body’s ability to switch from the activation of the sympathetic system (fight or flight) to the parasympathetic system (rest and digest), improving overall resilience after periods of physical stress (17).

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