Resilience
Also known as: Psychological resilience
The capacity to adapt and bounce back from adversity.
What it means
Resilience is the process and capacity to adapt successfully to significant adversity, trauma, or stress and to recover or even grow from it rather than being durably impaired. Far from a rare gift, longitudinal evidence shows resilience is common — the most frequent response to loss and potential trauma is a stable trajectory of healthy functioning. It arises from a combination of personal resources (emotional stability, optimism, flexible coping, self-efficacy, meaning-making) and external supports (relationships, community, resources), and is better understood as a dynamic outcome than a fixed trait. Related concepts include hardiness and post-traumatic growth. It matters because resilience underpins how people sustain well-being and effective decision-making through shocks, and because its determinants are partly modifiable through intervention.
Examples
After a sudden job loss, a resilient person grieves briefly, leans on friends, and redirects toward new opportunities within weeks.
Most people widowed in later life grieve deeply and still function; the common trajectory is not collapse but sadness running alongside work, friends and ordinary days that carry on.
Two years after a start-up folds, one founder is still fixated on the failure while the other has salvaged the lessons, kept the team's friendships, and started something new.
First described in Developmental work (Garmezy, Werner, Rutter); Bonanno (2004).
Where this comes up
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