What is Resilience: Surprising Facts From Positive Psychology

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“Resilience” in positive psychology means more than what it means in ecology and engineering: resistance and recovery from distress. Resilience researchers have discovered many surprising insights.

Positive psychology is different from traditional psychology. Traditional psychology focuses on risks and problems of the human mind, often overlooking how people adapt and grow. While positive psychology focuses on human strengths and systems that help foster what makes life worth living.

The study of resilience has revitalized positive psychology, inspiring new research into what drives human flourishing. Resilience research helps us see what optimal functioning looks like, how it emerges from everyday experiences, and how social contexts support development throughout life.

What Is Resilience in Positive Psychology

Positive psychology defines resilience as the ability to recover and grow stronger after facing adverse life events. Resilient individuals adapt, keep functioning, and recover to their pre-crisis or even better state after overcoming tough times, often finding deeper meaning in their experience.

In positive psychology, resilience involves the ability to:

• keep functioning with courage through adversity and hardships,
• use the available strengths and resources to resist and cope,
• recover and find meaning from the event and experience.

Ledesma (2014) defines psychological resilience as “the ability to bounce back from adversity, frustration, and misfortune.”

Resilience has many common names: hardiness, toughness, spunk, tenacity, fortitude, mettle, grit, and strength.

Researchers reveal that resilience is not a special gift or talent that only some of us are born with. Rather, resilience is a common phenomenon that comes from our basic ability to adapt, which all of us have, albeit some more and others less (Masten, 2001).

Moreover, resilience is a skill that we can strengthen with practice. All of us can learn to be more resilient.

The ability to grow stronger and more capable after facing stressful and traumatic experiences is called post-traumatic growth, the opposite of PTSD (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004).

Meaning of Resilience In Positive Psychology

The German philosopher Nietzsche knew about it, and said:

What does not destroy me makes me stronger.

What Resilience Does Not Mean

Resilience does not mean we reject our negative and unpleasant emotions.

When we deny our negative emotions, we unconsciously yield to them. This downgrades our resilience. However, when we accept them and allow them to flow over us, we take back control and begin the process of recovering from the situation that caused them.

Feeling and expressing our negative emotions is a sign of our mental strength. And that grows our resilience against them.

Why It Is Important To Have Resilience

Resilience is important because it:

• allows us to stay strong during tough and stressful times.
• equips us to face challenges and rebuild our lives after setbacks.
• helps us create ways to protect ourselves from difficult experiences.
• protects us from serious mental health challenges like depression and self-harm.

Strong resilience allows us to process and overcome hardships without giving up easily. Those with weakened resilience can buckle under pressure and turn to unhealthy ways to cope with stress.

“Your resilience can help you live up to 10 years more,” says Jane McGonigal, gamer scientist (TEDx, 2012).

Resilience is also one of the most essential traits of happy people. And we humans are good at ultimately finding our way to happiness.

Without resilience, the human species couldn’t have survived 200,000 years of disasters and adversities, and grown into the most intelligent beings on this earth.

Resilience is a natural part of the human survival experience after any major stressful event, such as the global virus outbreak.

How One Maverick Psychologist, Bonanno, Changed Our Views On Resilience

George A. Bonanno, a psychology professor at Columbia University, transformed our understanding of resilience in the face of loss and trauma.

Previously, psychologists widely believed resilience was a rare event soon after a traumatic experience. Bonanno showed that most people actually have an innate ability to recover, and that humans have a tendency toward resilience in difficult times.

Bonanno bust the myth that humans must mope before they could cope.

Bonanno and colleagues did a study involving 2,752 New Yorkers after the 9/11 WTC tragedy. They found that 65% of participants had 0 to 1 symptom of PTSD after six months, and more than 50% of those who were at the disaster site or helped with the rescue had few or no PTSD symptoms.

Bonanno concluded:

1. Resilience is different from recovery.
2. Resilience is a common, not rare, trait.
3. There are multiple pathways to resilience.

He said most people are resilient while dealing with trauma or loss. They are not waiting for the event to be over first and then starting their coping process.

Bonanno’s study also shook the world of psychology. He claimed that grief therapy does not offer any overall positive benefit. He said it may do more harm than good, with about one-third of the people becoming worse after grief therapy.

“When the worst possible news breaks, you will almost certainly get through it unscathed. Almost everyone does.” — George A. Bonanno (The Other Side of Sadness)

Bonanno found that while most can figure out effective ways to handle life’s challenges, some do so in messy ways. He coined the phrase “coping ugly” for such processes.

In “coping ugly,” resilient people often develop characteristics that are quite different from their earlier selves. For example, people recovering from a calamity may suddenly start to behave as narcissists.

2 Limitations of Resilience

Positive psychologists share two key limiting aspects of resilience:

1. Resilience capacity varies: While we all have resilience, we do not have it in equal amounts. Some people are more resilient than others.
2. Less harsh challenges help: We recover more effectively when stressful events are less harsh and less frequent, especially with support from others.

3 P’s That Block Resilience

These are the 3 P’s that hinder our growth after an adverse situation:

1. Permanence, the thought that this tough time will last forever.
2. Pervasiveness, the thought that this will affect all areas of our lives.
3. Personalization, the thought that it affects us the most, like no one else.

Those were laid out by Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology. He observed that pessimists often think that negative events will last a very long time, undermine all other things in their life, and make them suffer much more than others with a similar problem.

4 Types of Resilience

Jane McGonigal, a gamer scientist, in her TEDx talk, tells us that there are four types of resilience:

1. Physical resilience. Boosted by not sitting still; even standing or taking steps helps. You’re physically resilient if you don’t sit still longer than an hour at a time.
2. Mental resilience. Improved by tackling tiny challenges (e.g., snapping fingers 50 times) to complex ones (like puzzles, board games, new hobbies, reading books, or gardening).
3. Emotional resilience. Enhanced by experiencing three positive emotions for every negative one (e.g., viewing baby animal photos). Regularly exercise your ability to imagine, dream, plan, and create.
4. Social resilience. Increased through gratitude, hugs, or handshakes. Invite some friends over to stay socially engaged.

McGonigal says people who regularly boost those four habits can add up to 10 years to their lives. With an average US/UK life expectancy of 78.1 years, this translates to adding about 7.5 extra minutes per hour spent building resilience. 

5 Skills of Resilience

According to Glyn Blackett of Stress Resilient Mind, the five key resilience skills are:

1. Self-awareness
2. Attention – flexibility & stability of focus
3. Letting go (1) – physical
4. Letting go (2) – mental
5. Accessing & sustaining positive emotion

According to Leonie Hurrell, however, there are seven key skills of resilience:

1. Being adaptable
2. Being optimistic
3. Being pragmatic
4. Being autonomous
5. Having self-compassion
6. Being socially connected
7. Having realistic self-awareness

6 Competencies of Resilience

Master Resilience Training (MRT) is a 10-day resilience training program offered by the United States Army. It is a joint effort between the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania and the United States Army.

The goal of this training is to build resilience in non-commissioned army officers. Its curriculum helps build the following six core competencies of resilience: Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, Optimism, Mental Agility, Strengths of Character, and Connection.

6 R’s of Resilience

1. Responsibility
2. Reflection
3. Relaxation
4. Relationships
5. Refueling
6. Recreation

7 C’s of Resilience

Pediatrician Kenneth Ginsburg specializes in building resilience in kids. He developed the 7 C’s model to offer a practical approach for parents and communities to prepare children to thrive.

If you are a parent, then find time to read his award-winning book Building Resilience in Children and Teens: Giving Kids Roots and Wings to help build resilience in kids from the age of 18 months to 18 years.

Here’s a brief introduction to Ginsburg’s 7 C’s (competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping, and control):

1. Competence. The ability to handle challenging situations well. Let children make some safe mistakes so they can correct themselves.
2. Confidence. A strong belief in one’s own abilities. Encourage fairness, integrity, persistence, and kindness. Praise children honestly and specifically.
3. Connection. Give your child unconditional love. Empathize with their emotions. Allow them to freely express all emotions, not suppress the unpleasant ones.
4. Character. The fundamental sense of right and wrong, so that the child is prepared to contribute to the world positively. Encourage children to consider right versus wrong when making their choices. Parents should always be a role model to the child, as actions speak louder than words.
5. Contribution. Children get a sense of purpose when they see how important their contributions are to the world, and this motivates them to take similar positive actions in the future. Teach children the value of serving others who lack the good things in life.
6. Coping. Children who learn to cope with stress well become better at overcoming life’s challenges. Parents can avoid reacting emotionally when they feel overwhelmed. They can teach the children the importance of exercise, nutrition, sleep, and relaxation.
7. Control. Children who get some control over the decisions that affect their lives become more resilient as they know they have internal control. Parents can encourage their children to recognize and celebrate their successes, small or big. They can reward the carrying out of responsibility with more freedom.

How To Measure Resilience

There are about 20 validated resilience scales. We mention only three here.

1. RSA: This resilience scale was developed by Friborg & Hjemdal in 2003 to measure individuals’ protective resilience elements. It is applauded for its validity and reliability.

2. BRS: There’s also The Brief Resilience Scale. The BRS assesses resilience and provides information about people coping with health-related stress.

3. CD-RISC: The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) was developed in 2003, consisting of 25 items:

• Read 23 Brilliant Quotes On Resilient Leadership

Final Words

Humans are not just capable of handling the fall, but also of rising and coming back stronger after the fall.

(Resilience is) the ability to see yourself in the dark abyss of failure, humiliation or depression and bounce back not only to where you were before but to even greater height of success, happiness, and inner strength. — Stronger: Develop the Resilience You Need to Succeed

When the future seems uncertain, let’s turn to our past for inspiration. We often find that we have overcome challenges before. These experiences remind us of our strength and assure us that we can rise again.

√ Also Read: Resilience vs. Optimism: How Psychology Separates Them

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