Resilience Isn’t What You Think

There are some words that are now in the cultural lexicon that, at their complex and nuanced heart, are important and timeless. Yet capitalism has a way of taking complex topics and reducing them to soundbites and clickbait: they arise into collective consciousness for a moment, resonating with people on a deep level, and then get overused and oversimplified until the word itself takes on a distorted meaning. They get appropriated, as it were. Commodified. And in the relentless way that our economic system works, once they’re in the zeitgeist we get hit over the head with them until we no longer trust the word itself.

Self-Care. Mindfulness. Resilience.  Anyone else tired of hearing these words?

Even though all three of these concepts are an integral part of my own work and the way that I operate in the world, there is a part of me that cringes when I hear them these days. 

And yet, all three of these concepts are SO IMPORTANT, and in their own ways, counter-cultural. Self-care is not (only) a trip to the spa or a nightly skincare routine, but a radical refusal to sacrifice one's own needs to the demands of productivity and the myth that our worth comes through relentless giving or doing. It is a recognition that we inhabit animal bodies that need sunlight, movement, nutritious food, and social connection, and that systems that minimize our needs and limit our ability to care for ourselves need to be critiqued and changed.

Mindfulness is not (only) a way to relax and stay grounded amidst the stressors of daily life, but a centuries-old embodied practice of deepening self-awareness that allows for a more responsive—rather than reactive—way of engaging with the world. When practiced regularly and with clear intention, it cultivates authentic compassion for ourselves and others and can help us to develop equanimity. It allows us to develop more connection to our inner experience, which fosters a healthier relationship with our thoughts, emotions, and impulses. In a world that moves faster than our nervous systems are built for, and a system increasingly built on distraction and stealing our attention, mindfulness is a way of reclaiming our own minds.

And resilience. Sigh.

When I ask folks in my trainings what their first thoughts are when they hear the word resilience, the theme that often emerges is some variation on our ability to "bounce back" after hard things happen, to withstand adversity, to endure, as it were. And, well, yes... and.

In recent forays into the wild world of ChatGPT, I asked the digital manifestation of modern human consciousness "what are some other words or phrases I can use to talk about resilience?" (because, of course, people are tired of hearing the word and I'm trying to craft different ways of describing my work). Tenacity. Grit. Determination. Perseverance. Fortitude. Toughness. Invincibility. These are the words offered as synonyms for resilience. Take a moment and sit with the energy of those words in your body, even just reading them. How do you feel? (Seriously: how do you feel?)

I realize why people are tired of hearing the word. It's because we are tired.

All of these words have the energy of enduring, of standing in the face of an oncoming storm and holding one's ground, gritting one's teeth and buckling down and digging deep and efforting into the void, pretending like I am a stone and not a squishy meatsack with feelings and needs. Sometimes this stance is necessary, but it’s damn sure not sustainable. 

What if resilience wasn't about efforting into the void? Withstanding and enduring and all that?

The way that I talk and think about resilience, the way that I've come to understand it based on what I know about stress and trauma and the biology of our brilliant nervous systems is that it is less about enduring and more about the ways that we cultivate our capacity to stay engaged with the world and regulated in the face of all of its many challenges. When I facilitated social-emotional learning classes with high schoolers, one of the things that I would tell them is that it's not that the load gets lighter but that our backs get stronger. That is resilience. 

Dr. Bruce Perry talks about the types of stressors that lead to tolerance versus those that lead to sensitization. That is, stressors that increase our capacity to withstand higher levels of challenge (resilience) versus stressors that impair our ability to engage in the world from a regulated state (vulnerability). Stress that is predictable, moderate, and controllable allows us to slowly strengthen our back to carry heavier loads. If you're familiar with the zones of awareness model that I and many others use, this type of stress is what we experience when we're in our growth or stretch zones (moderate) and have some agency or choice in engaging with (controllable).

When we encounter stressors in our lives that are unpredictable, severe, and/or prolonged, or that we don't have some influence or control over, something different happens. Rather than building our capacity, it depletes it over time and makes us more vulnerable to distress. For those times when these types of stressors define our reality, and especially for those of us who experienced them at a young age when our brains were in critical stages of development, we often have a lower threshold for challenge and get activated by situations and circumstances that “shouldn’t” seem to bother us. We find ourselves crying over spilled milk, as it were. It takes much less for us to find ourselves in our panic zone, with the resulting actions and behaviors that happen in this dysregulated state.  We act out, freak out, lash out, or shut down. And we often pile more stress on our own shoulders with self-critical stories and unrealistic expectations for ourselves in these moments, for our inability to keep enduring or to keep it together.

Tenacity. Grit. Determination. Perseverance. Fortitude. Toughness. Invincibility. There is a rigidity innate to these words, a hardness that evokes images of armored soldiers and exhausted mountaineers. To me, the message of these words is: work harder, try harder, keep going, do more. There is a time and a place for these qualities, but they are different from resilience.

If resilience isn’t these things, then what is it? How do we cultivate it? And how does that change our stories and expectations for ourselves and others?

For me, the easiest way to think about this is connecting it to how we build resilience in our physical bodies. If I have an intention to strengthen my body so that I can lift heavy things or run long distances or twist my body into intricate poses, my first move isn’t to lift the heaviest weight or put on my new shoes and run twenty-six miles. But here’s the thing: life often throws us into the emotional equivalent of running a marathon, when we least expect it or feel the least prepared for it.

So we train for it. Ugh.

We can cultivate resilience by creating regular and intentional experiences of predictable, moderate, and controllable stress, which is annoying because this means we are choosing to be uncomfortable on a regular basis. But many of us are doing this already, in ways we might not recognize. Physical training also builds mental and emotional resilience. Practices like meditation, breathwork, cold showers, build resilience. Having difficult conversations with my partner when I would rather just swallow my feelings and pretend everything is fine builds resilience. Leaning in and talking about race or class or gender when I feel confusion or shame, staying present, breathing: resilience. Staying with difficult emotions and offering myself self-compassion rather than distracting myself with sugar or TV or scrolling social media: resilience.

And here, permission: resilience is also RECOVERY. If I want to build physical strength and endurance, I must build time for rest and recovery into my practice, I must be aware of and attend to the physical limits of my body, and if I get injured I must slow down and scale back my expectations about what I can do. Sure, I can not do these things. I can push myself with tenacity, grit, and determination, for a time. But there will be consequences.

For me, one of the key takeaways of this refined definition of resilience is that it requires a discerning balance of stress and discomfort and rest and recovery. If we want to support our children and students and young people to build resilience, more capacity for challenge, removing all struggle and hardship is not the move. Nor is exposing them to severity or harsh rigidity, with the story that we are toughening them up for a tough world. As is the case with most things, the third path between extremes holds the most wisdom. The goldilocks factor writ large: not too hard, not too soft, but just right. 

We are benefited when we take this same tack with ourselves and our expectations: not too hard on ourselves, not too soft. This requires a more nuanced relationship with our inner experience, an attunement to the state of our nervous systems in any given moment, and a recognition that there’s no such thing as perfect balance. In the moments when we get knocked down, the resilience that we have cultivated allows us to pull from a deeper well of strength, one that is also compassionate in its honoring of boundaries and limits. In the moments when we lose our shit or get overwhelmed and shut down, resilience offers kindness and understanding: we are human, after all. 

You are not a stone, my friend, and neither am I. You are a squishy meatsack with feelings and needs, a human being with innate limits, but who also has the capacity to do hard things. The more that we acknowledge and honor this in ourselves and others, the more resilience we can build into this world.