The writer Joan Didion opines — “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”. When one is in the depths of a health crisis stories matter as a way to gain hope, healing, and understanding. Research has suggested that writing about our experiences, in the form of journaling, may be helpful in managing our stress and building resilience. In this epis…

Nurses are the largest sector of the healthcare professions — with over 4 million nurses in the United States and more than 20 million nurses worldwide. As the COVID-19 pandemic has swept into our lives over the past year, nurses have played an ever more important role in the health and wellness of our nation and the world. However, nurses are also…

In this episode of Raising Resilience, we are going to talk golf and resilience. It is a topic near and dear to my heart as a relatively new golfer, but one who has embraced the challenge and seen the similarities between my training in mindfulness and meditation the game of golf. Golf guru Jim Flick one said, “Golf is 90 percent mental, and the ot…

Kate Nicholson is a civil rights rights attorney, an arts activist, and, recently, a writer and speaker. She served in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice for more than twenty years and is a nationally-recognized expert on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). And then it changed…Kate was thrust into the personal lived exper…

We are now half a year into navigating a new (ab)normal in our lives due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The return to school and childcare is on the minds of parents, kids and teachers, along with the myriad of unknowns that coexist with the logistics of returning to group settings. How do we strengthen our resilience in times of increased stress and an…

A definition of resilience is the ability to bend, adapt and adjust to change. Our current global pandemic has necessitated a rapid adoption of different ways to deliver healthcare and the challenge of building resilience and sustainability in these new models. One of the areas that has been fast-tracked is telehealth or virtual visits with healthc…

How do we find ways to compassionately support and nourish ourselves while intensively caring for others? In Episode 6, Pam is joined by Ashley Newcomb, RN, MS, CNL, C-EFM, founder of Resilient Superhero, and a labor and delivery nurse at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover, New Hampshire. As a nurse leader, Ashley has been instrumental in promoti…

Yikes…the kids aren’t going back to school?! With most states canceling school through the rest of the school.year due to the coronavirus pandemic, how do kids and parents readjust and learn in this abnormal situation? While we think of frontline healthcare providers as those who are staffing our emergency rooms and intensive care units, there is a…

Pam Ressler and Brian Stork discuss how we can help mitigate the fall out from the stress healthcare workers and others are under, as well as how we can continue to socially connect while we are physically distancing ourselves. What lessons can we learn from this massive social experiment of navigating a pandemic together.…

Pam discusses our individual and collective increased stress, fear and worry surrounding the current global outbreak of COVID-19 with retired Harvard instructor and risk perception expert David Ropeik. Pam and David discuss what we can each do to reduce our fear and stress and maintain our resilience during challenging times.…

Imagine that “grit” is the backbone and “resilience” is the the set of muscles that help that backbone maintain its ability to bend and be flexible when confronted with adversity. In this episode Pam explains the synergistic relationship between grit, resilience and stress hardiness and how we can build them all.…

Raising Resilience is my new podcast. Expect short, focused podcasts, perfect for commuting, pick up time, over lunch, at the gym, running errands, anytime at all. I will keep all podcasts to less than 20 minutes to make them easy to listen to when your time is limited during the day. I will be interviewing guests, talking about current research in…