Resilience helps us to overcome negative life events. We explain why this skill is important and how to acquire it.
What is resilience?
Resilience (from the Latin resilire = jump back or rebound) means the ability to cope well with blows of fate such as death or separation, without harming the soul in the long run. Resilient people process crises faster than others and are usually less susceptible to mental illness due to their resilience. In general, the ability can be developed – but this process takes time.
Is resilience a special ability of children?
The foundation for good resilience is laid in childhood – A positive environment with parental support and other reliable caregivers ensure the development of the ability. In the past, the term resilience was actually primarily related to children who, for example, despite poor living conditions or hard blows of fate as adults, were mentally and criminally normal and pursued a regular job.
This thinking only changed when it became clear that psychological resilience is an advantage at every stage of life. Today, the term resilience is broader and refers to all people who have a certain resistance to the blows of fate and possible trauma.
Resilience and vulnerability (high sensitivity)
The opposite of resilience is the so-called vulnerability (also known as high sensitivity). Affected people are very sensitive to negative influences and emotionally vulnerable. Vulnerability cannot be completely eliminated, although it can also be contained with psychological help. It is estimated that around 15 percent of all Germans suffer from vulnerability.
The 7 pillars of resilience
In psychology, it is assumed that seven specific personality traits influence how high one’s own resilience is. The following personality traits and character traits influence resilience:
- Self-consciousness: Resilient people know who they are and what they can do. They know their strengths and actively try to change things they don’t like. Their self-confidence helps them to find new solutions, which gives them great confidence.
- Action control: This quality enables you not to react uncontrollably and impulsively to stimuli, but to react thoughtfully and deliberately. For those who have action control, the so-called waiver of gratuities is not a problem. This means that one can forego an immediate reward in favor of future goal achievement.
- emotional stability: One basis of resilience is being able to influence one’s own emotional world and to be able to reflect on emotions. For example, stress and pressure can be viewed less as a burden and more as a challenge. You can also replace the term with emotional maturity.
- Realism: Setting goals is good – as long as those goals are realistic. Resilient people have a knack for thinking long-term and setting realistic goals. They can deal more constructively with negative life events, such as the death of a close family member, because while they allow themselves to feel their pain, they also deal with it.
- Optimism: It’s all good in the end – and if it’s not, it’s not the end yet. Such optimistic approaches help resilient people to accept a current negative situation and at the same time look positively into the future. This keeps them both from victimhood and from blaming themselves solely for something.
- sociability: Those who like to communicate a lot are more willing to get help if they have difficulties – and they rely on empathetic and trustworthy partners. This characteristic characterizes resilient people. They also find it easy to empathize with other people and to interpret their behavior, which makes them good relationship partners with high resilience.
- Analysis strength: Those who are resilient can research the causes of crises and strokes of fate, analyze them and draw conclusions for their own further behavior. Finding alternative solutions and not focusing on well-known thought patterns is easier for these people.
The more of these character traits a person combines, the more likely they are to have good resilience.
What other resilience factors are there?
Apart from the personality traits, there are still other factors affecting resilience. These include:
environmental factors of resilience
- family support
- Cultural background
- Sense of community (e.g. through religious practice)
- Social environment (private and school)
Process factors of resilience
- use of perspectives
- Acceptance of unchangeable circumstances and/or facts (e.g. death of a loved one)
- Concentration on the strategy with which a realistic goal can and should be achieved
Environmental factors in particular are of particular importance for resilience. Studies show, for example, that children from poor families are exposed to more risks and difficulties than children from middle-class or rich families. According to this, around two-thirds of all children from poor families are more likely to struggle with problems as adults than children who are better off economically. In addition, their school performance is often worse on average, they have more behavioral problems and are more likely to slip into criminal circles.
Resilience research has meanwhile found out what a major role parents play. Accordingly, the parents of resilient children are often characterized by the following:
- higher level of education
- There is a higher probability of employment
- They are considered friendly, sensitive to the child, support it and take an interest in its life
The children often grow up with fewer siblings on average than non-resilient children and also tend to be in families with father and mother. If one parent is missing, this can have a negative impact on the development of resilience. If a child with a high level of resilience lacks the support and support at home, they will be more likely to look for other attachment figures and leave the negative family environment when they are old enough.
Can resilience be learned?
In principle, resilience can be trained, because our personality can be changed – even in relation to essential characteristics, such as a community work from the Universities of Münster, Mainz and Leipzig. According to this, the personality itself is stable, but up to the age of 30 and then again from the age of 70 it can also change in certain points. Especially through life events like:
- Marriage,
- the birth of the first child
- strokes of fate
- or retirement.
For example, young adults entering the workforce become more conscientious, but conscientiousness falls again after retirement. The openness to new experiences, on the other hand, tends to decrease in marriage, especially among men, and increase again after a separation. Scientists assume that it also works the other way around – and personality influences how we perceive negative life events. That is why two people with different characters can react differently to the same event.
From all of this it can be concluded that resilience is acquired in childhood and influenced and developed by various factors. In order to be able to strengthen your own resilience, it is also important to have positive experiences in dealing with crises and negative life experiences – here again the parents are responsible. A child has to learn that after a difficult time, good times can come again and that it is up to everyone to contribute something.
This is how you strengthen your resilience
In fact, a species exists from the American Psychological Association Guide to learning resilience. Among other things, it contains the following tips:
- Do not see crises as an insurmountable obstacle.
- Set realistic goals and believe that you can achieve them.
- Believe in your own strengths and abilities.
- Try to look at things from a long-term perspective.
- Accept that change is part of life.
- Maintain a positive self-image – and take care of yourself.
- Don’t fall into a victim role, instead make active decisions.
- Build yourself a social network.
Strengthening resilience: What everyone can do themselves
Since life is a constant up and down, we have the opportunity to work on our resilience almost every day. From the tips of the American Association of Psychologists, small to-dos for everyday life can be derived, to strengthen our psychological resilience. These include, for example, the following tips:
- Writing a diary: Not for nothing is it often recommended in psychology to write down experiences. This not only sorts out your own thoughts and feelings, just writing them down also helps to process negative experiences. This is how you build resilience.
- Reflecting on crises: It helps to reflect on past difficult times and how you deal with them in order to develop a good strategy for future strokes of fate. In this way you also keep in mind that you are actually able to survive crises and which strengths have helped.
- Maintain relationships: Everyone needs reference persons whom they trust – that is a basis of resilience. For many people this is their own family or partner, but a good friend can also be a reference person. The important thing is that you have the feeling that you can always rely on this person.
- Accept defeats: No matter how much we plan, sometimes things just happen that throw us off track. We have to accept that we cannot influence everything. It is better to see a defeat as an opportunity and to learn from it.
- Working solution-oriented: If you are faced with a mountain of problems, you should try to break them down piece by piece and work through them one after the other. The focus is best on possible solutions and goals, not on the causes of the problems.
Resilience doesn’t always save – no one can completely avoid disaster
However, the resilience can be so high – no person is completely immune to every misfortune. Many Philosophers assume, for example, that suffering is part of life and that every person has to work on their resilience until they die. Accepting this should help to deal better with crises and strokes of fate. Critics complain about this approach that it could ensure that emotions are denied or even suppressed and that negative events are only viewed with the mind. In the worst case, this could lead to indifference (“indolence”), which is also regarded as questionable in psychology.
Resilience versus indifference
Ultimately, it is probably important to find a good middle ground here as well. Our feelings, like our lives, are known to be like a roller coaster ride and sometimes go up and sometimes down. The benefit of resilience is that it allows us to overcome the negative feelings of “shutting down” faster.
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