What Makes One Resilient?

Prof. Sannidhya Missal,
School of Sciences, PCU. 

As a psychologist, I’ve come across numerous stories of people surviving through pain and leading meaningful lives, and I wonder how people continue to live through the tribulationsand tempests of life. Psychology recognizes this ability to bounce back from hardships or adversities as resilience. The American Psychological Association defines resilience as the process and outcome of successfully adapting to challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional, and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external andinternal demands.

Resilience in simple terms is an act of surviving and even thriving against all odds. We might be familiar with the picture of weeds growing out of cement or non-fertile ground. That is the picture of resilience. Take Malala Yousafzai for example, the fifteen-year-old who was shot by the Taliban in the head on October 09, 2012, and yet by March 2013 she joined a school in England and continued her activism for the education of the girl child. In the same year, she delivered a speech addressing world leaders at the United Nations, New York, and went on to publish her autobiography. Malala is a true example of grit and resilience. I am also surrounded by friends and family members who have endured excruciating physical and emotional turmoil with great fortitude.  Maybe you have pondered on what makes themresilient. How are they different? Researchers of construct resilience have narrowed down many personal attributes that contribute to resilience. Some of these are having an internal locus of control, having a tolerance for negative affect, self-efficacy, and hopefulness.

An internal locus of control is interpreted as the degree to which a person believes that they can exert control over the outcomes of events in their lives as opposed to the external forces of their environment, fate or destiny. It’s believing that you are not merely what happens to you, but rather, you are an active agent that can direct or create change in your life by choosing how to respond to adversities. With this sense of agency, one actively attempts to cope with stressful life events.The by-product of an internal locus of control is self-efficacy – defined as an individual's belief in their capacity to act in the ways necessary to reach specific goals. In the context of resilience, self-efficacy refers to the belief that one is capable or competent to cope with adversities. And with such beliefs, one unimpeachably acts to gather tangible psychological resources and the bravery to overcome hardships. A way to inculcate an internal locus of control is to consciously remind ourselves that we hold the reigns of our life and bring to our awareness those past experiences where you were able to cope with a negative event. If you could effectively cope with a past negative event, it is possible that you could overcome your present hardship.

Another personal attribute that contributes to resilience is the ability to tolerate negative effects. In a psychologist’s terminology, that’s distress tolerance – the capacity to withstandand endure any negative or aversive state. Those with a high distress tolerance have been found to have greater impulse control, greater emotional awareness, and an effective emotional regulation. How may one cultivate such tolerance? It’s only with practice and an attitude of acceptance of the array of experiences, both positive and negative, that life brings to us! Positive experiences or happiness itself must not be the end goal. Happiness too is merely a temporary state of the mind. The human range of emotion is vast and vivid and one must learn or be open to accept each emotion as and when it comes while deciphering its meaning. As we learn to accept the day-to-day stressful negative events, with time and practice, we may be able to increase our distress tolerance.

Dear readers, resilience is part of human nature. You need only recognize it and nurture it within you. Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, and a Holocaust survivor, in his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, wrote “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” And I hope you choose yours.