The Psychology Of Resilience And How To Cultivate It

No matter what life throws at some people, they seem to roll with the punches and come through the other side stronger than ever. With 2020 being a time, for many, of bereavement, illness, job loss and insecurity, what can we learn from these resilient individuals, and how can we be more like them in 2021?

- Christian Jarrett

We hear a lot about the psychological toll that traumatic experiences can have on people. Flashbacks, nightmares, lives ruined. Yet, there is something about the personality and mindset of others that means they can endure awful adversity, somehow come through relatively unscathed, and in some cases even emerge strengthened by it. Joh Foster is one of these people. Even before being diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer when she was 31, she’d already suffered a serious sexual assault, an abusive relationship, physical health challenges, including a late diagnosis of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and various mental health issues. Yet she always bounces back. She somehow managed to complete her psychology degree while undergoing chemo and radiotherapy, and raise her son, who was aged four at the time. “Partly, it makes me feel sad that I seem to unwittingly attract these kinds of experience,” she says, “but in the main I choose to believe that I am a stronger, more resilient, open, empathetic person because of them.”

“Psychological flexibility gives us the ability to shift perspectives.”

Psychologists call this ability to walk through bad experiences ‘resilience’. “It generally means adapting well in the face of chronic or acute adversity,” says neuroscientist Dr Golnaz Tabibnia, who studies the neurological basis of resilience at the University of California, Irvine.