Resilience refers to an individuals’ capacity to successfully adapt to change and stressful events in healthy and constructive ways. Building resilience is important if we are to strengthen our capacity and our skills in order to reduce emotional and mental health problems, and to cope with crises and illness. It is a skill worth developing as it allows you to overcome obstacles of your past and future. Resilience will help you recover from health, career or relationship setbacks and reach your full potential. To empower ourselves, and enable a greater resilience, it is important to accept more and question less.  Making a choice to live life with passion and reason, and to live every day as if it is your very last, just in case it is,as this also helps harness the positive power of resilience. It is also very important for people diagnosed with dementia to tap into resilience, and to use humour; to try and laugh at the symptoms of dementia as they come into our lives. I’d have to say I’ve had to work hard on that one this week, and blogging is one thing that has helped me achieve it!

Treating the symptoms of dementia as disabilities, rather than a death sentence, as you would if you lost your legs in an accident (where you would either get fitted with artificial limbs or a wheelchair and then go through rehabilitation, and get on with your life accommodating the disabilities) can help with resilience and humour. Attitude is the one very small thing that can make the biggest difference, and if you are not happy, then you need to change something. Groucho Marx once said; I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members! Most people diagnosed with dementia feel that way about dementia too, but as we have no choice, the best way to survive and live life as well as possible is to laugh as much as possible, to ignore the negatives when we can, and try to see the funny side of things.