Why Resilience is Real, and How You Can Build Yours
Any phrase heard more and more each year can edge towards dangerous ‘buzzword’ territory. Buzzwords annoy people. They can seem like glib, over-simplified explanations of nuanced realities. They get overused and feel meaningless. ‘Resilience’ is no different; I’ve seen articles discounting it because the author thinks it’s a ‘magical superpower’, or a stick used to beat millennials as snowflakes who lack ‘grit’.
But resilience research is a well-respected area of psychology, social science and neuroscience. Resilience isn’t a single characteristic, or the province of any generation. Resilience is anything that helps us better respond to adversity in life. That adversity is different for different people, objectively and subjectively.
So, what works for Gwyneth or Oprah won’t necessarily work for Geoff or Olive. Or vice versa. But looking at what works for large numbers of people, and considering whether it might work for us, is self-evidently worthwhile. the problem comes if we claim that there are easy, one-size-fits-all solutions, or that we can measure and rate resilience. Now that would be glib.
Once we get past the reductiveness, we find there are patterns of behaviour, attitudes and techniques that a lot of people use successfully to cope with the stresses of trauma, everyday life, and everything inbetween. Looking in detail at how to develop each is the work of more than a single article (more on that later), but step this way for a heads-up on the five key themes of resilience.
- Expectations
The more we expect glasses to be half-empty, the more half-empty glasses we’ll see. But optimistic expectations have been shown to help people reframe challenges, prioritise solutions-finding over helplessness, and find meaning in life. This isn’t a call for rose-tinted glasses: blind optimism can also be damaging. But we can and should take an honest look at when our expectations cause us problems.
Expectations affect what we focus on and how we explain it. So, negative expectations often lead us to notice the bad things around us and discount the good. Our cognitive biases then assure us that what we noticed is representative of everything we didn’t. They can also make us frame negative events as more our fault than they were, or more likely to reoccur. As an everyday outlook, this builds up, and makes it hard to stay resilient.
Changing this isn’t as simple as naming it (that way lies motivational poster land). Cognitive habits are notoriously difficult to unpick. But a great first step is remembering that what we notice, and how we interpret it, is not the world around us. It’s just one view of it, and there are others, some of which may be more helpful.
2. Compass
Many case studies of resilience find that people of faith can show incredible resilience. But so can atheists and agnostics of strong beliefs. The linking factor is having a strong belief system or moral code, and living by it. You can take more knocks if you believe they’re in the service of a higher cause or greater good.
The interesting thing here is, for resilience purposes, it doesn’t matter which cause. You just need to really believe in it (sorry, Pascal). It could be a major religion followed by millions, or your own personal set of values. The important thing is taking the time to think about what your moral compass is and why it’s important.
Of course, you then need to live by it, too. Talking to others about it, being honest when you struggle with it, and making it part of your everyday decision-making are key to making it matter. We’ve all seen companies with ‘our values’ posters up everywhere, which achieve nothing if they’re not part of the conversation and have no impact on decisions.
3. Responses
We are biology. Our brains cope with complex social situations every day using systems that evolved for far more basic survival purposes. And so we use things like the animal fight-flight-freeze response in situations where a more measured, logical response is called for.
We can work on ways to get out of survival mode, and engage the rational, conscious systems in our brain, but we have to work on them. If we leave the brain to its own devices, it’ll make us behave irrationally and then rationalise it so we end up as the hero, more often than we care to admit.
This is probably the most diverse area of resilience, with a wide range of behaviours that work differently across individuals. But examples of good responses many develop include:
- bypassing the threat response by getting more information
- setting intentions for each day, to stay on target amid emotions
- recognising the body’s response to threat and calming it physically
4. Habits
Exercise. Sleep. Hydration. Better diet. More breaks and shorter working hours. We all kind of know that these are important, in various ways. But they are all tools for better resilience, among other things. Imagine two people: one well-rested, hydrated, fed, not overworked — the other the opposite. Now imagine how each responds to a difficult event.
We often use the existence of conflicting advice in these areas to justify inaction. But you don’t need to know exactly how many glasses of water, or exactly which foods, to start taking steps to improve. Take sleep advice from your health service. Drink more. Eat food that releases energy through the day. Take those breaks — you’ll work better in total.
And while mindfulness is another buzzword that some people glaze over at, it’s used by serious people like Google and the US military. Taking a moment to step away from the pressures of life is a habit that most people who try it find resilience-building.
5. Relations
Strong social connections are linked to better mental and physical health, lower mortality, better recovery from trauma, better decision-making and more positive outlook. We’ve all experienced the difficulty of making new connections, and keeping in touch with those we’ve already made. But making the effort pays back in resilience terms.
It’s also about the quality of those connections and using them well. Three thousand facebook friends are probably less important than three people you can say, ‘I’m struggling’ to. One of the best ways to get and keep this kind of quality in your connections is to make sure you help others out when they need it, and offer support yourself.
And being around people who behave in ways you admire and want to emulate can be great for resilience. People who bring out the best in you, rather than the worst.
But there’s much more to it
The evidence suggests that just adopting some of the ideas suggested above can improve resilience. But there’s so much more to it. Doing the topic justice in a blog-article is an impossible challenge.
If you’d like to know more, I’ve gone into much more detail in my ebook, ‘Developing Emotional Resilience’, published via BookBoon. You can read it for free by signing up with them for a free trial.
