Resilience: it’s adapting and responding positively to stress and adversity. The adversity you face may be long-term, like having an alcoholic parent or growing up in poverty. Or it may be a single lightning strike of tragedy—a car accident that claims a limb, an assault that claims your dignity. Even first-world problems require a shot of micro-resilience, like when the person ahead of you snags the last blueberry scone (I’m talking to you, red beanie). No matter the scale of your tragedy, resilience is all in how you respond.
Resilience has gotten some pushback recently. By encouraging “resilience,” detractors say, we imply that setbacks are exclusively individual, when in fact they often come from systemic barriers, like racism, sexism, economic inequality, or other injustices.
The answer? As with many things, it’s complicated. The solution to systemic injustice shouldn’t be to expect each individual to pull themselves out despite tractor-beam-like forces pulling them back. At the same time, resilience isn’t an empty idea: individuals can and do respond differently to the problems life dishes up.
Importantly, resilience is a skill, not a you-have-it-or-you-don’t trait, which means whether you sink or swim is a skill that can be taught. So what can you do? Here are 6 ways to make like a rubber band and bounce back.
Tip #1: Give yourself permission to feel lousy. You heard that right. We’ve all heard the cheerful encouragement of: “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade!” or “Hey, when one door closes, another one opens!” But rah-rah motivational slogans often feel useless, like a new lid for already-spilled coffee.
True resilience doesn’t mean you never get discouraged. In fact, pain is almost universal among the resilient—after all, if you never encounter painful struggle, you never get to discover your resilience.
Therefore, resilience isn’t about hiding your pain and pretending everything is peachy, nor is it unfeeling stoicism—you’re human, not a machine, and getting knocked down hurts. In short, what matters isn’t how you feel; it’s that you get up again. That’s resilience.
Tip #2: Trust that you control your fate, not the other way around. In 1955, the psychologist Dr. Emmy Werner and her colleagues began to follow every child—almost 700 of them—born that year on the Hawai’ian island of Kaua’i. It marked the beginning of a study that would last more than 40 years.
Kauai in the 1950’s was not a privileged place. Many of the kids were raised in poverty, had unstable, chaotic families, and had mothers who never went to high school. But despite all this, by the time they reached age 40, one-third of the group was, as the study said, “competent, confident, and caring.” They defied the odds—none of that one-third was unemployed, had been in trouble with the law, or relied on social services. Their accomplishments equaled or surpassed many of the kids who grew up in more stable environments. The researchers itched to know: how did they beat the odds? What was the secret ingredient in such resilience?
Again, it’s complicated. Some of it was luck, some of it was having at least one emotionally stable and loving family member to look out for them, and some of it was finding an emotional home in a civic organization, at school, or at church.
But the most important thing the resilient kids had was something called an internal locus of control, meaning that these kids believed that they, not their circumstances, were in the driver’s seat. They believed they could control their life, as opposed to being controlled by whatever life dished out. For example, the researchers noted that resilient kids with a dysfunctional family were good at “recruiting” surrogate parents, whether a youth minister, a trusted teacher, or even a friend’s parent.
How can you apply this to you? In short, act. Do. Take decisive action. It’s tempting to put the future in the hands of fate, but take control as best you can.
Tip #3: If you don’t know what to do, look to your values. It’s all fine and good to make executive decisions, you might say, but what if the way isn’t clear? A handful of studies have found that having a moral compass—an internal system of values and ethics—goes along with higher resilience. A belief in human ethics and morality gives rise to purpose, which in turn gives rise to resilience. So maybe in the bigger picture that blueberry scone was nothing to get worked up about?
Tip #4: Recharge with some exercise. Dealing with setbacks can be exhausting, so it’s important not just to push, push, push your way back, but to rest and recharge along the way. How to do this? You have full permission to recharge in any way you wish [re: on the couch with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a New Girl marathon], but consider, between episodes, some exercise (regular listeners, you knew that one was coming).
When going through rough times, exercise is often a mini metaphor for life’s larger challenges: We set short-term goals that build mental momentum to reach larger goals in the long term. Getting ourselves off our butts on both good days and bad is resilience in action.
Plus, exercise improves mood and motivation, which directly impact how we perceive our ability to face obstacles, and it plain old relieves stress and gives us a break. It’s the ultimate recharge, plus you can feel better about the aforementioned Ben & Jerry’s.
Tip #5: Set realistic goals. You may want to get rich, get famous, and look fabulous doing it, but part of resilience involves not setting ourselves up for failure. Indeed, in the Kaua’i study, one of the characteristics of the resilient adults was that they set realistic educational and career goals for themselves. If we set too many, too lofty goals, we may see not achieving them as a personal failure on our part. So keep the scale of your goals reasonable. Challenge yourself and aim high, of course, but be fair to yourself.
Tip #6: Tell your friends how you’re feeling. It’s cliche, but it works. According to a study of student nurses doing emotionally exhausting work in a literal life-or-death environment, those who were able to do two things were less prone to burnout. Those two things were 1) to draw on support from friends and colleagues, and 2) to genuinely express their emotions—from sorrow to frustration to joy. Those students were better able to muster the wherewithal to continue the tough emotional work their job required. So tell people you trust how you feel. Be honest and authentic rather than trying to put on a good face, and you’ll come out the other side able to keep calm and carry on.
It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles that your resilience skills are honed. Even Barry Manilow made it through the rain. And so can you, with a secret weapon called resilience.
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