How to Improve Your Resilience to Adversity

One of the most popular topics in positive psychology is resilience. For some, resilience looks like a miracle-drug personality trait: something that can heal every wound and correct every mistake. While resilience may not be the single most important personality trait, it is a hot topic for good reason: it is a wonderful quality, it is linked to a wide range of positive outcomes, and, perhaps most important of all, it can be improved.

Today psychology describes resilience this way:

“Resilience is that ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever. Rather than letting failure overcome them and drain their resolve, they find a way to rise from the ashes.”

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Resilience and Mental Toughness: What Is the Difference?

Mental toughness is a personality trait that largely determines how people handle stress, pressure, and challenge, regardless of the circumstances. It is part hardiness (optimism and a predisposition toward challenge and risk), part confidence, and it is what allows people to take whatever comes with calm, focusing on what they can learn and gain from the experience.

While the association with resilience is understandable, the difference is also clear: resilience is what helps people bounce back after a fall, but mental toughness can help people avoid that fall in the first place.

All mentally tough people are resilient, but not all resilient people are mentally tough.
Those who are mentally tough are not only able to recover; they are more likely to see difficulties as a welcome challenge and greet them with a smile.

Why Is Being Resilient So Important?

You hear a lot about growing and developing resilience, both in ourselves and in children, for good reason. Here is a list of some of the many reasons resilience is such a valuable trait:

• Greater resilience leads to better learning and academic achievement.
• Resilience is linked to fewer absences from work or school due to illness.
• It contributes to lower risk behaviors, including heavy drinking, smoking, and drug use.
• People with higher resilience tend to be more involved in community and/or family activities.
• Higher resilience is linked to a lower mortality rate and better physical health.
• Experience of more positive emotions and better regulation of negative emotions.
• Fewer depressive symptoms.
• Greater resistance to stress.
• Better stress management through improved problem solving, a positive orientation, and reappraisal of stressors.
• Successful aging and a stronger sense of well-being despite age-related challenges.

How Self-Taught Resilience Works

Self-taught resilience, as the name suggests, is the resilience you build in yourself through deliberate effort. It is the result of noticing opportunities for self-development and having the courage to take them.

There are many ways to build your own reserve of self-taught resilience. Below are several approaches drawn from three different sources:

1- Using a loss or stressful event to grow:

• Allow yourself to feel a wide range of emotions.
• Identify your support system and let them be there for you.
• Process your emotions with the help of a therapist.
• Pay attention to your well-being and self-care.
• Rest a little or try to get enough sleep.
• Do your best to maintain a routine.
• Write about your experience and share it with others.

2- Introspection

• Find a sense of purpose in your life that will help you get up on hard days.
• Develop positive beliefs in your abilities to help raise your self-esteem.
• Build a strong social network of people who support you and whom you can trust.
• Embrace change as the inevitable thing it is, and prepare for it.
• Be optimistic: you do not need to ignore your problems; simply understand that everything is temporary and that you have what it takes to get through it.
• Take care of yourself with healthy, positive self-care: get enough sleep, eat well, and exercise.
• Develop your problem-solving skills through strategies such as listing possible ways to solve your current problem.
• Set reasonable goals by brainstorming solutions and breaking them into manageable steps.
• Take action to solve problems instead of waiting for the problem to solve itself.

3- The Spiritual Step

• Change the narrative by free-writing about the issue or by deciding to focus on the positive aspects.
• Face your fears and challenge yourself; expose yourself to things that scare you in gradually larger doses.
• Practice self-compassion; try to be mindful, remember you are not alone, and be kind to yourself.
• Meditate and practice mindfulness; Body Scan is a good way to work on your meditation and mindfulness skills.
• Cultivate forgiveness by letting go of grudges and freeing yourself from the hook.

“It is your reaction to adversity, not the adversity itself, that determines how your life story will unfold.”
— D. F. Uchtdorf