Your Guide to Life’s Most Important Skill: Resilience (Part One of Two!)
The New Happy is a community for all people who wants to be happy and change the world at the same time.
I have some news for us:
If you want to change the world, you need to be resilient.
If you want to be happy, you need to be resilient.
Balancing and integrating the two? Resilience!
So, my friends, since these are two of our most dearly held goals, we must choose to cultivate resilience; and I’d prefer to do it alongside you than on my own!
It’s inevitable that our future happy lives will include challenges that we cannot even imagine tackling right now. It’s also inevitable that to make positive changes in the world, we’ll have to push ourselves in ways that will be uncomfortable, as tackling hitherto-unsolved problems is far from easy.
That’s why resilience is the most important skill (yes, a skill!) that you can learn. And that’s why I want you to start practicing it and building it now. Don’t wait for a storm.
I know it’s a hard truth to swallow, that there is a future that includes challenges, setbacks, and tough moments that will test us beyond what we think we can handle.
One strategy for dealing with this truth is to bury our head in the sand and pretend that it won’t happen.
Another strategy is to choose to disengage from the world to limit our potential suffering as much as possible. (This one is a particularly bad idea, as research has found that it is our ability to be vulnerable to suffering that also enables our ability to experience positive emotions like joy and love; in our attempt to turn down the temperature of the water, we end up turning off the whole tap.)
Finally, there’s the path I recommend: choosing to cultivate resilience in our daily lives now, building it as a muscle that we can use in the future when we need it. For resilience is not something you are born with: it is something that you choose to build, cultivate, and pay attention to.
Today’s newsletter provides an overview of resilience, why it matters, and what you need to know to start building it as a muscle.
When I originally wrote this article, it was over 6,000 words, so I’ve split it into two! Next week, we’ll cover the skills you’ll use to build your own resilience.
Resilience 101
Resilience has been defined in many ways by many different academics. All of us probably have our own definitions or examples. Here are just a few definitions from the psychologists:
Resistance to the psychological strain associated with negative experiences
Good developmental outcomes despite high risk status, sustained competence under stress, and recovery from trauma
Good outcomes in spite of serious threats to adaptation or development
Dynamic process encompassing positive adaptation within the context of significant adversity, with two critical conditions: (1) exposure to significant threat or severe adversity; and (2) the achievement of positive adaptation despite major assaults on the developmental process
Ability to bounce back from negative events by using positive emotions to cope
Maintaining psychological stability and experiencing fewer mental health problems following highly negative events
What these definitions share is a focus on how we respond to the challenges that we face as we pursue goals and live our lives.
What the definitions don’t articulate is that resilience is so very hard precisely because it requires us to dig deep and muster strength in the very hardest moments, when we are suffering or facing something that is seemingly insurmountable.
Most of us can rally a great deal of fortitude and courage when things are going well, but when things are harder-than-imagined-too-hard-make-it-stop-please, that’s the exact moment when you have to bring this power from within you. It’s not fair, is it?!
That’s why I want you to start building your resilience muscle now, so that you can access it more easily when it is called for.
We use resilience in four key ways: overcoming our childhood obstacles, the everyday adversities of life, major setbacks in adulthood, and most interestingly, as we reach out to look for more in life such as meaning, purpose, or new experience (hence, why we need resilience to change the world for the better!)
Please indulge me in a few more studies to bring its importance home - being more resilient predicts:
Less depression
Psychological well-being/mental health
Academic success
Post-traumatic growth
Successful life transitions (e.g., from childhood into adulthood)
Better recovery from heart disease
Positive social interactions
How to Think About Resilience
This quote exemplifies resilience to me, the very pinnacle of its expression.
The scientific study of resilience is based upon cognitive-behavior therapy, which transformed the world of mental health when it was discovered that thoughts drive your behavior, emotions, and reactions. Therefore, the biggest barrier to being resilient is the way that we think.
The way that you think - and the downstream impact on your behavior, emotions, and reactions - determines to a huge extent your experience in daily life. Whenever we process information (which is happening constantly), we use mental shortcuts that we have learned over time. These, having been worn into such deep grooves, feel like they are the only way to think. In fact, part of learning resilience is actively re-examining our mental shortcuts, pruning the ones that no longer serve our goal of well-being and impact. It isn’t easy, given that we’re trying to overhaul years of habit, but it is absolutely possible, as you’ll see below.
One of the most important lessons (top five of all time!) that I have ever learned about happiness was that the struggle to live without distress is the problem, not the distress itself. The happiest humans are those who learn to be aware of, manage, and understand their distress and pain.
I find it so fascinating that we absolutely revere those individuals who are emblematic of resilience, and yet, it is something that we don’t think about embodying proactively. We call these individuals the best of humanity, but don’t seek to cultivate it within ourselves proactively. Of course, most of the life events that call for resilience are the things that we wouldn’t wish to occur in our lives. None of us want to suffer. But if you are in a place right now where deep resilience is required to continue getting up and moving forward, please remember those who we revere, who you are in the company of:
Viktor Frankl, quoted above, who survived the Holocaust and established a new sub-field of psychology related to meaning
Nelson Mandela, who spent 28 years in prison and then transformed his home nation of South Africa
JK Rowling, who was on welfare and could barely afford to feed her child while trying to get Harry Potter published, which took twelve tries
Oprah Winfrey, who was repeatedly sexually assaulted as a child, and gave birth at age fourteen to a baby who passed away two weeks later
Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by the Taliban due to her determination to attend school
James Dyson, who spent 15 years (and made 5,126 attempts) to create his first vacuum
Stephen Hawking, who persisted in setting out his theory of cosmology and work as a physicist while navigating the impact of ALS
None of these people would probably wish for their experiences that required this noteworthy resilience. Just like you and I do not wish for the experiences that are require resilience in our life.
But we are here together, facing our challenges, and resilience will be what helps us to get through it, and to rise above it, and to flourish in our lives.
Cultivating Resilience Works
This research has been rigorously tested and applied: it is clear that we can learn these skills and transform our lives.
My professors at Penn developed a program for the US Army called the Master Resilience Training program, a ten day course that has trained tens of thousands of individuals. Their goal was to elevate performance, well-being, and to curb the rise of mental illness among the corps. For the first six days, soldiers are taught resilience skills; for the final four days, they learn how to teach the skills to their units.
Where the program excels is in helping the soldiers to learn how to operationalize resilience by finding ways to integrate it into their day to day, and in teaching new habits that become ingrained over time: because as soldiers themselves often say, in moments of stress, you ‘fall to the level of your training’. The high stress situations that require resilience will revert us back to our standard habits of thinking, because those habits are ingrained and thus, easier to take. It takes conscious effort and training to be prepared for challenging situations.
The program has been extremely successful. 97% of surveyed respondents say they have used the skills in their civilian or military life. Soldiers had measurable changes when the psychologists measured their resilience competencies. But what really brings the impact home for me are the quotes from the participants:
“This was the best Army course that I have ever taken. The skills I learned will help me improve my personal life and professional life. These resilience skills and MRT training should be mandatory for all ranks, families, and civilians.”
“I truly believe this is the best and most useful training I have received in the 16 years of my service. These skills are a foundation for all other skills, and I can use these skills forever.”
“This was no doubt the best class I’ve ever been taught.”
“This course has changed my life. Giving me the knowledge that I can control my thoughts and reactions is crucial to having changed me.”
“This will be an invaluable asset to my soldiers, family members, and me. A life changer—must be given to all leaders.”
Building Our Resilience Foundation
Taking a page out of the Master Resilience Training, we’ll start by discussing the foundations of resilience.
Self-Efficacy
The essential skill in navigating constant stress is something called self-efficacy, which is your perceived ability to be the master of your environment and solve any problems that you are facing.
Self-efficacy is absolutely not the same as self-esteem. A lot of well-meaning people believe that the best way to help those who are facing challenges is to direct many platitudes their way. (Interestingly, these platitudes can actually undermine people’s resilience and effective coping skills. Not what we want!)
If you are trying to help yourself or someone else to be resilient by building self-efficacy, give them a series of small problems to solve, growing in complexity and size over time, which will build their self-efficacy.
Agency
Related to self-efficacy is agency, which is your actual ability to be the master of your self and your environment. Agency is the feeling of being a cause rather than an effect, a sense of active ownership rather than passive acceptance.
Unfortunately, one of the tough things about challenging situations is that these are most likely the ones where we have little to no control. Getting laid off, suffering an illness, being dumped: these are all situations which tend to blindside us and leave us feeling bereft of control. In these moments, it’s so normal to feel that we have no control over the situation, and no ability to influence the outcome in our direction. Correspondingly, a lack of control (whether it is perceived or real) is a core feature of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
There are some times in our life when our agency is extremely limited. In these moments, research and my personal experience have taught me that it’s best to focus on the smallest possible choices we can make to slowly reclaim as much agency as we can. Often times, the only agency we have is choosing the way that we think about our challenge and the way that we respond to it; we have to go inside of the mind and exercise our power there.
Optimism
Something we can do in our mind is to cultivate optimism. Importantly, optimism is not positive thinking or chanting affirmations to yourself.
Optimism is a thinking orientation, what psychologists call an ‘explanatory style’. This is how you describe the things that happen to you in your life.
There are three P’s of explanatory styles: Personalization, Permanence, and Pervasiveness. These three P’s have an enormous impact on the way that you deal with and recover from challenges in life. Don’t be fooled by their simplicity, as this is one of the most profound discoveries in the history of psychology.
Personalizing: believing that I am at fault for whatever happened
Pervasiveness: believing that this will affect all of the areas of my life
Permanence: believing that the challenge will last forever
Study upon study has found that if your beliefs are personalized, pervasive, and permanent, it will be much harder for you to recover from adversity. The opposite is true, too: if you describe negative events as not being your fault, contained to one area of your life, and with an end in sight, then you will recover more quickly.
When you say things like, “I will never be happy again” or “This has ruined the rest of my life”, you are exhibiting a pessimistic explanatory style. Selecting less extreme statements, like “This is impacting me so much right now, but it will pass” or “It’s not that I have no control, just that I can’t do anything in this moment”, will help you to move towards a more optimistic explanatory style.
One interesting research tidbit: we tend to believe that people who are pessimistic have a better view of reality. In fact, this isn’t always true. More optimistic people do a much better job of seeing what is their control (which leads to self-efficacy and agency), compared to more pessimistic people.
The Hope Circuit
One of the most famous studies of all time was conducted by my professor Martin Seligman, who coined the concept of learned helplessness. He discovered that when an animal is repeatedly subjected to a negative stimulus, like an electric shock, and can’t seem to escape it, eventually, the animal will give up on trying to avoid the stimuli and just accept it. The animal learns helplessness.
Even when the animal is given an obvious chance to escape, they don’t try to take advantage of it: they have come to believe that these electric shocks are their reality, and that nothing they do matters.
While I was an assistant instructor at Penn working for Dr. Seligman, I had the opportunity to learn that this research was being revisited. What they discovered will blow your mind.
He discovered that they got it wrong: helplessness is not actually learned at all, but it is the default response to aversive experiences. Instead, it is control that must be learned.
This has profound implications for the way we face our life’s challenges. We learn control through overcoming challenges - through self-efficacy and agency, which are amplified by the way that we think about those challenges, whether optimistic or pessimistic.
Actively solving problems, even if they are tiny problems, activates the parts of your brain that undermine your default helplessness. While we cannot get rid of our default helplessness, what we can do is create what Marty calls ‘the hope circuit’: neural pathways founded on our sense of self-efficacy, agency, and mastery that serve to suppress our default helpless response.
In short, the way to creating a hope circuit is to cultivate resilience.