Psychological Resilience

Hi,

This week’s email is about psychological resilience, and what’s needed to develop it in yourself and others.

The information here comes from a research article on the topic (open-access PDF).

Here are the key practical points you should know:

• Psychological resilience represents people’s ability to mentally withstand—and even thrive on—pressure that they experience in life.

• People develop resilience when they deal with adversity in a constructive way.

• For example, a person can develop resilience when they manage to calmly handle an intimidating social situation at work.

• Adversity is harmful to resilience if it’s more than a person can handle when they encounter it.

• Adversity can also be harmful if the way that it’s dealt with is non-constructive, like when a person never makes efforts to overcome it, or is always criticized for the efforts that they put into overcoming it.

There’s no single right way to respond to adversity, since there are many situational and personal factors at play. For example, one person might benefit from having a mentor support them while they face a certain challenge, while someone else might prefer to face the same challenge alone. The important things to understand are that how we respond to adversity determines whether we benefit from it, and that we must face some adversity in order to build resilience.

As always, I'm happy to hear your thoughts.

Have a great week,
Itamar