What Is Resilience Theory?
People face all kinds of adversity in life. There are personal crises, such as illness, loss of a loved one, abuse, bullying, job loss, and financial instability. There is the shared reality of tragic events in the news, such as terrorist attacks, mass shootings, natural disasters, a global pandemic, and war. People have to learn to cope with and work through very challenging life experiences.
Resilience theory refers to the ideas surrounding how people are affected by and adapt to challenging things like adversity, change, loss, and risk. Researchers have studied resilience theory across different fields, including psychiatry, human development, and change management.
Resilience theory highlights that resilience is not a fixed quality; instead, it can be nurtured and developed over time. Your ability to demonstrate resilience can increase, and it varies across different challenges you encounter. While you may display high levels of resilience in one scenario, you may find it more challenging in another. Flexibility, adaptability, and perseverance are crucial in strengthening resilience by shaping your thoughts and actions. Research suggests that students who adopt a growth mindset, believing that both cognitive skills and interpersonal qualities can be developed, are inclined to enhance their resilience. This mindset results in decreased stress reactions and enhanced performance when facing difficulties. Resilience is supported by five fundamental principles: gratitude, compassion, acceptance, finding meaning, and forgiveness.
Building resilience is a multifaceted and individualized process that combines internal strengths and external support. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to becoming more resilient. The American Psychological Association highlights several key factors that contribute to personal resilience, including your worldview, social connections, and coping mechanisms. Developing resilience is a gradual journey that involves various factors, and there is no definitive checklist for navigating challenges. Over time, resilience can be nurtured and strengthened. Longitudinal research has shown that factors like family cohesion, positive self-assessments, and healthy relationships, which protect adolescents at risk of depression, also foster resilience in young adulthood.
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Resilience theory suggests that additional factors contributing to resilience encompass:
Evidence shows that a robust social support network, comprising family, friends, community, and organizations, significantly bolsters your resilience in the face of difficult circumstances or traumatic occurrences.
· Self-Esteem A positive sense of self and confidence in your strengths can stave off feelings of helplessness in the face of adversity. A study in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that self-esteem and resilience were closely related.
· Coping Skills Coping and problem-solving skills help empower a person who has to work through adversity and overcome hardship. Research has found that using positive coping skills (like optimism and sharing) can help bolster resilience more than nonproductive coping skills.
· Communication Skills Being able to communicate clearly and effectively helps people seek support, mobilize resources, and take action. Research has shown that people who are able to interact with, show empathy toward, and inspire confidence and trust in others tend to be more resilient.
· Emotional Regulation The capacity to manage potentially overwhelming emotions (or seek assistance to work through them) helps people maintain focus when overcoming a challenge, and this trait has been linked to improved resilience, a study showed.
Resilience isn’t something people tap into only during overwhelming moments of adversity, according to research on resilience theory. It builds as people encounter all kinds of stressors every day.
What Does the Research Say About Why Resilience Is Important?
Resilience is what gives people the emotional strength to cope with trauma, adversity, and hardship. Resilient people utilize their resources, strengths, and skills to overcome challenges and work through setbacks.
People who lack resilience are more likely to feel overwhelmed or helpless and rely on unhealthy coping strategies (such as avoidance, isolation, and self-medication).
A study published in 2022 suggested that people with resilience, coping capabilities, and emotional intelligence are more likely to have better overall well-being and life satisfaction than those with lower resilience.
Another study from 2022, which surveyed 1,032 college students, showed that emotional resilience was linked to reduced stress and a more positive life satisfaction overall during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
One study showed that people who had attempted suicide had significantly lower resilience scale scores than people who had never attempted suicide.
Resilient people do experience stress, setbacks, and difficult emotions, but they tap into their strengths and seek help from support systems to overcome challenges and work through problems. Resilience empowers them to accept and adapt to a situation and move forward, Sood says. “[It’s] the core strength you use to lift the load of life.”
What Are the 7 Cs of Resilience?
Ken Ginsburg, MD, an adolescent medicine specialist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and cofounder of the Center for Parent and Teen Communication, created the 7 Cs model of resilience. This model is designed to assist children and teenagers in developing the skills necessary for increased happiness and resilience.
The 7 Cs model is centered on two key points:
· Young people live up or down to the expectations that are set for them, and they need adults who love them unconditionally and hold them to high expectations.
· How we model resilience for young people is far more important than what we say about it.
Reaching Teens, a book edited by Dr. Ginsburg and published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, summarizes the 7 Cs as follows:
· Competence This is the ability to know how to handle situations effectively. To build competence, individuals develop a set of skills to help them trust their judgments and make responsible choices.
· Confidence Ginsburg says that true self-confidence is rooted in competence. Individuals gain confidence by demonstrating competence in real-life situations.
· Connection Close ties to family, friends, and community provide a sense of security and belonging.
· Character Individuals need a fundamental sense of right and wrong to make responsible choices, contribute to society, and experience self-worth.
· Contribution Ginsburg says that having a sense of purpose is a powerful motivator. Contributing to your community reinforces positive reciprocal relationships.
· Coping When people learn to cope with stress effectively, they are better prepared to handle adversity and setbacks.
· Control Developing an understanding of internal control helps individuals act as problem-solvers instead of victims of circumstance. When individuals learn that they can control the outcomes of their decisions, they are more likely to view themselves as capable and confident.
The 7 Cs of resilience illustrate the interplay between personal strengths and outside resources, regardless of age.
Types of Resilience: Psychological, Emotional, Physical, and Community
The word resilience is often used on its own to represent overall adaptability and coping, but it can be broken down into categories or types:
· Psychological resilience
· Emotional resilience
· Physical resilience
· Community resilience
What Is Psychological Resilience?
Researchers define psychological resilience as the ability to cope with or adapt to uncertainty, challenges, and adversity. It is sometimes referred to as “mental fortitude.”
People who exhibit psychological resilience develop coping strategies and skills that enable them to remain calm and focused during a crisis and move on without long-term negative consequences, including distress and anxiety.
What Is Emotional Resilience?
How people cope emotionally with stress and adversity varies from person to person, according to the Children’s Society. Some people are, by nature, more or less sensitive to change. A situation can trigger a flood of emotions in some people and not in others.
Emotionally resilient people understand what they’re feeling and why. They tap into realistic optimism, even when dealing with a crisis, and are proactive in using both internal and external resources to get through. They are able to manage external stressors and their own emotions in a healthy, positive way.
What Is Physical Resilience?
Physical resilience refers to the body’s ability to adapt to challenges, maintain stamina and strength, and recover quickly and efficiently. It’s a person’s ability to function and recover when faced with illness, accidents, or other physical demands.
Research shows that physical resilience plays an important role in healthy aging, as people encounter medical issues and physical stressors.
Healthy lifestyle choices, connections with friends and neighbors, deep breathing, time well spent to rest and recover, and engagement in enjoyable activities all play a role in physical resilience.
What Is Community Resilience?
Community resilience refers to the ability of groups of people to respond to and recover from adverse situations, such as natural disasters, acts of violence, economic hardship, and other challenges to the group as a whole.
Real-life examples of community resilience include New York City after the 9/11 terrorist attacks; Newtown, Connecticut, after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting; New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina; and the communities of Gilroy, California, El Paso, Texas, Dayton, Ohio, and Uvalde, Texas, in the wake of mass shootings.
For many Americans, the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic tested their resilience like never before.
Research and Statistics on Resilience
Research suggests that certain protective resources, rather than the absence of risk factors, play a significant role in your capacity to confront and work through stressors.
Things like social support, adaptive coping skills, and the ability to tap into your inner strengths can help develop and strengthen resiliency. When it comes to the idea of “natural resilience,” or a person’s innate ability to recover from adversity, the research is mixed.
Some studies suggest human resilience in the face of adversity is fairly common. To support this, one study reported that even though 50 to 60 percent of the U.S. population is exposed to traumatic events, only 5 to 10 percent of those people develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
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Nevertheless, other research highlights the difficulty in studying resilience. A study that examined spousal loss, divorce, and unemployment found that the statistical model used to interpret the resilience scores greatly influenced the results. The authors concluded that prior research may have overestimated how common resilience is, and suggested that resilience may be more difficult to quantify and study than previously thought.
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WAYS TO BUILD YOUR RESILIENCE
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