Resilience: the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.
Adversity: difficulties; misfortune.
Difficult: needing much effort or skill to accomplish, deal with, or understand.
Why Resilience is a Byproduct
I have always loved words, especially since learning that language is everything, all the time. Defining a term tells you what a thing is and how to use it. Resilience is a buzzword that gets thrown around. But how often do we actually slow down and sit with the meaning of what we read or say? We have not been conditioned to slow down and think. We are too busy getting to the next place to do the next thing.
The key word in that definition is capacity. The maximum amount something can hold. And the truth is, none of us are as tough as we think we are.
Disagree? Take an honest look in the mirror.
Think about how you drive in rush hour traffic. The urge you get when your food comes out cold or wrong or late. Your attitude when you roll out of bed in the morning, or when there is one cashier and one open lane at the grocery the day before Thanksgiving.
Resilience is like having callouses on your hands. It builds up with use, with friction, with exposure to hardship. A conditioned response to a specific stimulus. Funny how we work hard to build a life we can enjoy, then go soft inside the very comfort we worked so hard to create.
If you are not going through something hard right now, just wait. If you are not cultivating resilience, you will not handle ordinary life well. It is foolish to think pain and hard work are avoidable.
Playing football is not the fun part. Winning is fun. The camaraderie built through hardship is fun. Playing skillfully is fun. But the playing itself is a battle, and practice is harder than the game on purpose. Practice is long, boring, hot, cold, and meticulous. Game day is only a relief if I practiced hard for it. The fun exists in relation to the suffering.
What Builds Resilience?
A conditioned response to a specific stimulus, remember. Our bodies crave homeostasis, predictability, consistency. The irony is that those very things will kill us if we stay in them too long. Obesity. Diabetes. Neuropathy. Overwhelming adversity is traumatic, and that can kill us too. We are built to keep moving, and to use only just enough.
Want to get good at push-ups? Do form-perfect push-ups consistently over time. You will get strong, but only to a point. Your nervous system adapts and makes the movement efficient.
Want to become agoraphobic? Who does. Just stop going places. Remove every unpredictable stimulus. Your ears adapt to the silence, your mind starts expecting comfort all the time, and suddenly socializing feels impossible. Neuroplasticity gone the wrong direction.
The willingness to go to the gym, to leave the house, the skill of sitting in traffic calmly. These are cultivated through small exposures. The reason to grow my coping capacity is not to erase fear or anger. It is to sit with them skillfully and not make a fool of myself.
Another buzz phrase. Growth mindset. To me it means a decision to put effort toward progress. Most of us get discouraged fast, because effort feels pointless once we read it against our perceived failures. Usually we are aiming at the wrong focal point, the far-off objective that looks unreachable, or we quit because we have not built the capacity to sit in discomfort.
I prefer grit. Grit keeps the decision, then adds resolve and courage. The willingness to do the thing that frightens you. The Army calls it Embracing the Suck. Building resilience means willingly and deliberately doing the uncomfortable thing, and making that the goal. Not the comfort on the other side. The effort is the outcome I am after, because of who it forges me into. Unbothered, unless it actually matters.
Small doses of stress, on a consistent basis, in the right amount. Exercise is the clean example. Small doses of strain that spur muscle growth, cardiovascular capacity, mental clarity. Something hard that sometimes feels terrible is exactly what builds vitality. A cold-water plunge. A workout in an unheated garage in the dead of winter. Leaving your phone in the car while you stand in the long line with a full cart. Make it challenging, just enough. Challenge, not punishment.
Build those callouses and keep them, because the real, life-changing stress is coming. Job loss. Infidelity. The chronic or fatal illness of a child. Miscarriage. The stuff that truly breaks people. The game days of life. Not the ifs. The whens. Will you be ready? You need to be. They do not wait, and they do not discriminate.
How to Start Building Resilience
This is not exhaustive, and of course you account for disability and physical or neurological limits. But most of us are simply convinced we cannot do things. Personalize this at your leisure, or make it a priority and work at it. Your choice. Choice always comes at a price.
Build a social network. Do not want to? Good. Make that your first hard thing. They are called social skills, not social abilities, which means you can learn them. Get over yourself, read a few books, join Toastmasters, whatever it takes. Learn the techniques, be bad at them, get embarrassed, make a few friends, and let them be an inconvenience in your life. Relationships are pleasant inconveniences, and you will need the support eventually. Not convinced? Live long enough and you will find out.
Embrace self-respect. Self-compassion sounds too warm and fuzzy for some people. So call it this instead: clean up the language in your own head, and take responsibility for yourself the way you would for someone in your care. Because that is what you are. Set house rules in your own mind. No F-bombs aimed at yourself without stopping to ask why it got said. Earn your own respect by treating yourself with respect.
Learn better ways to cope. Mindfulness. Breathing. Ways to down-regulate your nervous system. Not so you can stay warm and comfortable with your little snacks. So you can go do hard things and meet the cold embrace of discomfort with a smile, because you can breathe through it. The goal is to manage the adrenaline and cortisol, not to avoid every situation that releases them.
Set realistic goals. About everything. Stop coasting. Take charge. Do something. Make a decision, break it into small bites, and start eating the elephant instead of staring at it and losing sleep over it. Keep moving.
As you move, you accumulate wins. You learn about yourself and about life. The only real mistake is the one you do not learn from. There is no single right direction, and no one actually knows what they are doing. Take a stab at it and adjust until you master it.
Keep making things hard. Embrace challenges. Create them. Make them the norm.
Next Steps
A therapist’s job, in my opinion, is not to make life easy. It is to reduce suffering. Not by removing the hardship, but by equipping people to carry it. Sometimes it is helping someone walk around a thing, because it turns out they were barking up the wrong tree.
Life does not get easier. We get stronger, and it feels easier as a result.
When life gets tough, get tougher. Injured? Get help, heal, then get tougher. Surround yourself with people walking the same path. We all stumble, and we all need a shoulder to lean on sometimes, so that later we can be the shoulder someone else leans on.
Go build those callouses.