Why seeing green is building resilience

Staying sane, building resilience, call it what you will, we all need strategies to keep ourselves whole and healthy. How else can we push the boundaries and get the most out of life?  Being resilient is a have to have, not a nice to have.  This blog explores some of the things that work, and suggests using colour as a prompt for four ways to build these activities into your daily routine. 

How to remember?

I love colour and use it often to remind myself of things that matter.  One of the biggest challenges that my coaching clients face is building resilience and recharging strategies into their busy lives.  Here, I suggest that a colour wheel contains all the reminders we need to keep strong – in mind and body – ready to face what life throws at us.  I’ve only picked four colours – green, red, orange and blue – because that’s all you need. 

Simply find some postcards or pictures with these colours on.  Spend a few minutes working through what each colour means for you in terms of building resilience.  Undoubtedly some of my suggestions will hit home more readily than others. Maybe the Red and the Orange are already a regular feature in your life? If so, pause and think about the benefits of the Green and the Blue. Pin your cards and pictures somewhere that you’ll see them regularly.  Stick one inside your purse or wallet.  Pop one on the door of the fridge, or next to the kettle at work.  And read on to find out how those four colours can prompt you to prioritise building resilience.

Green

Some people save the best til last but not everyone makes it to the end of a long read.  So, I put the important stuff near the top.  Green is the important stuff, for me.  Our busy lives often squeeze out the green.  So we have to build it back in.

Let’s start with a bit of science. It is less of a strain for the eyes to see green than red or blue (which sit at opposite ends of the colour spectrum).  Green lies in the centre of the visible spectrum of the eye and is therefore an easy colour for us to tune into.  You know what’s going to follow – a plug for nature, for immersing ourselves in green.  But the good news is that even looking at green things, or putting a leafy plant on your desk, can have a beneficial effect.

Building resilience doesn’t have to be hard but I’m going to push you a bit further.  Countless studies have now shown that we can reduce the level of stress hormones in our system simply by being out and about in the natural world. We’ll benefit from a lower heart rate and blood pressure, and experience less muscle tension.  With our lives becoming ever more complex, it’s getting more and more important to recognise this.  As Richard Louv, author and journalist puts it, “Nature is not only nice to have, but it’s a have-to-have for physical health and cognitive functioning.”

If you need more convincing, try this article from Jim Robbins in 2020 or if you’re hard core, immerse yourself in this academic read from researchers at the University of Exeter, published in 2019.  Their work quantifies the amount of time we need to spend, per week, to get the fix.  And it’s staggeringly small.  Just two hours a week.  That’s less time than most of us spend washing (clothes, hands, dishes…).  And it doesn’t have to be done in one chunk; 20 minutes a day will do just fine!

Research is clear about the kinds of benefits you can enjoy, over and above those medical ones I’ve already listed.  If you favour building resilience by spending regular time in a natural environment, expect to experience positive changes in your mood and attitude. You’ll also be open to a deepening of significant human relationships, feelings of satisfaction, and even a transcendental or spiritual quality to life.  That’s how effective it is to be “seeing green”. 

What is also becoming clearer is how easy it is to sabotage the precious time you’ve carved out.  Doing one thing at a time – walking in the great outdoors – allows your over-stretched brain, particularly the prefrontal cortex, to recover from multi-tasking and problem-solving.  The pay-off for leaving your phone at home or on your desk, is a surge of more creative thinking and feelings of well-being.  For goodness sake, when you’re building resilience, don’t take your phone for a walk!

Red

If, like me, the word homophone has you reaching for the dictionary, I’ll put you out of your misery and share my newfound knowledge.  Homophones are words which sound the same but have different meanings.  Like Red and Read.  So I’m using the colour Red as a reminder about something which sounds the same but has a completely different meaning.

With that bit of erudition out of the way, let me ask you, what have you read (red/read, geddit?) recently which didn’t relate to work?  Or to daycare for children or to care for elderly relatives?  Nor to environmental disaster, nor to poor leadership resulting in global crises, famine and warfare?  If the answer is nothing, then it’s not surprising if your resilience is low.  Whilst reading the news is important, it rarely restores energy, creates healthy perspective or allows you to recharge.  For daily inspiration as part of building resilience, we need to choose our reading matter deliberately and with care.

Options include something from the pen of a favourite author, even if it was never intended for such a purpose.  My “go to” of this kind is something with lavish and complex description which I have to really concentrate on, say Dickens or Hardy.  The effort required to get into their world, which is both so different and yet so reminiscent of my own, pays off. Both authors specialise in creating a mood which requires me to immerse myself fully. And if I’m pressed for time, a poem may be easier to digest than a chapter of a book, since it’s often been written to be consumed in one sitting.

An alternative to a novel or poem by your favourite writer is a “daily reader”. This is a volume of really short pieces, written expressly for consumption first thing in the morning, before your day has started.  We are wired for growth, as well as for doing things and ticking them off a list.  A daily reader is the perfect stimulus for stretching your mind and the topic may well stay with you throughout the day.  A daily reader which has been recommended to me for its mix of history, literature, philosophy, mathematics and science, religion, fine arts, and music is The Intellectual Devotional. Don’t be put off by the title – the mind stretch is highly rewarding!

Orange

For me, the colour orange is a reminder that I need to “eat well to be well”.  That’s the kind of mantra which I disregarded very easily when I was younger. But as I grow (older) I am more aware that if this bundle of muscles, skeleton and organs of mine starts to suffer a lack of maintenance, my joyful days will be numbered. 

This is intentionally the shortest section of this blog as I have no intention of telling you what to eat.  But wholesome foods do come in orange! Think carrots, satsumas, clementines, pumpkin, sweet potato and bell peppers. And those coloured comestibles contain a wealth of vitamins – especially vitamin A – all of which are vital to building resilience.

Each of us has to work out for ourselves what the best balanced diet consists of.  What I can share from my personal experience is that the balance changes as we change.  As with so many things, what got us cheerfully through our twenties, thirties and forties may not be as effective in our fifties, sixties, seventies and beyond.

Blue

For me, blue – the colour of the sky, of horizon scanning, of limitlessness – is a visual reminder that daydreaming does us a world of good.  But building resilience through thinking for pleasure isn’t easy.  Too often we end up bogged down in ruminating, instead of allowing the mind to flow freely.  Dr Erin Westgate has published research recently about how to tap into the positive effects of daydreaming. She suggests a four-pronged strategy: