Samantha Boardman: Building Resilience through Positive Psychology
Samantha Boardman, MD
Mom, Wife, Positive Psychiatrist, Author Everyday Vitality, Aspiring Nose breather, Failed Solid Gold Dancer
What makes you feel like a grown up?
Being able to change my mind; to be a well-meaning hypocrite at times. Letting go of being right all the time has been super liberating. It’s actually being happy about being wrong and seeing it as an opportunity to learn, rather than just wanting to double down on some assumption that I have.
What’s the weirdest thing in your bag?
Warning: It's really weird. It's mouth tape. I read James Nestor's book on breath and it really got me thinking. And so I'm really fixated on being a nose breather. I think we underestimate how important breathing is, not just for our physical bodies, but for our mental health, too. And being able to exhale a little bit longer and to nose breathe, not mouth breathe, I find to be quite valuable for everyday vitality.
What’s the best thing that happened to you in the 80s/90s?
I graduated from high school a year early and got to spend an entire year working and traveling. By the time I got to college, I was so grateful to start learning again. And I know a lot of people now do this gap year and it's become kind of popular, but I was really, really lucky to be able to have it. At the time I was sort of ambivalent about it, but it was eye-opening. I didn't realize how burned out I had been just being in high school then.
Your daily dose of vitality.
I really wanted to be a Solid Gold dancer when I grew up, to be honest, but my dancing skills weren't very good. That was a goal I had for quite some time, but it became clear that I have certain limitations. I really didn't know I would go to medical school; I've always envied people who have just been on that track. But in my old age, I've also recognized the value of the zigzag and really not knowing. I even ended up going back to school in 2012, receiving my master’s in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.
I had been a practicing psychiatrist for eight years or so, and thought I’d be addressing those bigger questions like what's the meaning of life? What makes people tick? I found out that quite quickly, you narrow your focus to how many milligrams should I prescribe? And dealing with the specifics of trying to triage how to get somebody back to their baseline and get them discharged from the hospital. It was a real wake-up call. I got fired by a patient who came into my office saying, "All we ever do is talk about what's wrong in my life. Sometimes I'm even having a good day and I have to come here and complain about something that's wrong." And she was right; that was all I was good at. I was trained to focus on symptoms and treatment, what's known as the patient's chief complaint, versus considering her strengths and how she could optimize those even within her stress. We should be asking, What's going well? How could she do more of that? What is she looking forward to? It reoriented me and forced me to recalibrate how I think about mental health—it’s not just the absence of illness.
Positive psychology is the science and study of mental health. It involves words I'd never heard in medical school. Resilience is not something that crossed my mind; now we hear it thrown around everywhere. I've got a shampoo that makes my hair more resilient, and my dog, Panda, apparently needs to be more resilient, but it was not a word I had learned before, along with post-traumatic growth, optimism—all these contributing factors to what makes life worth living. The way traditional psychiatry has looked at health is when there's a problem, we try to fix it. And positive psychology is from a community perspective, what are we doing to help young people be more resilient? Is there a way to put that into curricula, rather than waiting for problems to arise? Can we inoculate people with these skills to help them cope when things get challenging, but also in good times, to thrive? To use their strengths to find meaning and purpose in their own lives? We need to think about quality of life not just as physical health, but also mental health. Focusing on things like sleep and movement that you can do in your everyday life to not just feel less bad, but actually just to feel good.
When I think about what so many of us have been through in the last couple of years, the one thing that's worth pointing out—and we don't think about this enough—is that people by default are mostly resilient. We are able to bounce back even in the wake of loss or transitions or major life challenges. Some do get post-traumatic stress disorder and some just sort of wallow in that languishing place, but thank goodness that is the minority. Some of us even have this bounce forward, which is called post-traumatic growth. It's characterized by three major factors: a strengthening and deepening of personal relationships; a renewed sense of purpose and possibility; and an awareness of the use of strengths in new ways. We’re still in the middle of the pandemic and I've got a lot of patients who are saying, "Well, as soon as this is over. As soon as ..." something, and leading an “as soon as” life can actually paralyze us. It keeps us either looking backward or forward and not living in the present, not thinking what could we be doing right now to take this opportunity?
As we emerge from this pandemic, the question is, how can you cultivate vitality deliberately, in every-single-day ways? That's where I bring in the three Cs:
Connecting with others. Having meaningful, positive interactions with other people never happens when your phone is in your hand; if you're looking at your phone, you're basically unsharing an experience.
Contributing to something beyond yourself. This doesn't mean you have to go off and join the Peace Corps—it’s just adding value somehow. Maybe it’s giving some advice or offering to pick up something for your neighbor. It's little ways to feel like your experience is adding to someone else's life. Sometimes with the self-care industrial complex, we feel we've got to be so me- focused and self-centered in some way; that can be a slippery slope into an excuse for narcissism.
Feeling challenged in some way. It might be learning something new, and even bringing that mindset to anything that you're doing. It’s thinking, what does this person know that I don't (even someone you’ve always thought was boring—I guarantee you there's something you can learn from them).
My point is, we don't have to download something or eat, pray, love our way into wellbeing. We can boost our vitality in everyday ways, but we really have to prioritize them. Because studies show we are more resilient to major life events, but we have a lot of daily stress, and lacking that little r, resilience, can let the pebbles pummel you. Vitality is a way to reorient how we’re thinking about mental health in an everyday way. This is an essential component to wellbeing, that it is both physical and psychological and is that positive experience and feeling of aliveness and energy.
