We spoke to Elvira Barriga from Tales of Tomorrow – a design studio for conscious creativity with an academy for resilient creatives – about the idea of resilience and super practical ways to create more mental and emotional capacity in your life.

What are the first steps we need to take in order for us to become more resilient?

Rituals

When the pandemic hit, one of the things that we lost was our rituals. The rituals that helped separate our work life and our personal life. I’m not a big fan of the term work-life balance. It’s like, oh, you’re dead when you’re at work. I hope for everyone to be just as alive at work. But I think there’s still a very healthy way to move between these aspects of our life, work and with personal life, social life, family life and personal time. And how do we find rituals to separate those?

There’s something very nurturing about these rituals. So how do we bring those things back? Rituals we can create when we work from home, between how we switch our focus from our kids to our partner, making food, resting, to then really focusing on work.

One of the biggest energy depletion sources is the idea of switching constantly between tasks. Multitasking is just so unproductive, it’s horrible. We need to find rituals that guide us and cushion us between tasks.

Sleep

If you’re not sleeping properly, forget about everything else. If we don’t sleep enough, our mental capacity significantly goes down. Our emotional capacity to respond well to challenges shuts down. Our entire system is just depleted. And for many of us, that’s just sort of a state we’re constantly in, and we’re not even questioning it. starting with the basics, so check your sleep.

Hydration

So many of us are actually in this state of constant, mild dehydration. We’re not aware how much it affects our energy, our mood, our alertness, our memory, our ability to learn. It’s also critically connected to our sleep, as well as to our state of well-being. So it’s really sometimes it’s this very simple thing. Start with your body, drink more water, and start to treat it like a temple. And it will make everything else much easier.

Meditation

Meditation is the perfect example of when the smallest input actually has the biggest impact. There are so many amazing meditation apps out there. And there’s really so much out there for people to try, learn, and see. To decide which method works for them.

There’s nothing I can recommend higher than just spending five minutes every day, ideally in the morning, sitting back and just working with your mind. It’s not just about closing your eyes and not thinking of anything for the next five minutes. It’s about being still and immersing your mind in the present moment.

Listen to the full episode in the player below: