How to Build Resilience

Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulty. In our work, the term is used most often when describing the many reactions that people can have following experiencing or witnessing events that involve a life threat or a threat to bodily integrity. These types of traumatic or difficult events can include child sexual or physical abuse, rape, a car accident, fire, physical attack, combat, or many other types of experiences. Surviving such events can be physically difficult, and in addition to any physical problems, people vary in the impact these events have on them emotionally.

Roeckner and colleagues led a recent review of 20 years of research on brain mechanisms involved in resilience (Roeckner and colleagues). They concluded that individual differences in threat cue processing are related to resilience while higher-order executive functioning is less consistent and the relationship with resilience changes over time. This means that there are both stable factors in how your brain attends to threats that impact the likelihood of resilience and that there is variability over time.

The bad news is that most people will experience at least one if not many, traumas in their life. The good news is that even with high rates of exposure, most people will recover naturally with time. Most will be resilient. Some might even grow in some ways from the experience.

Based on research on resiliency and recovery following trauma, we know certain ways of coping following trauma can support or even build resiliency. These ways to build resiliency include:

• Gently let yourself think about the experience. You do not have to come to any conclusion about why it happened, but letting yourself think about it can help keep the trauma in the context of the event. It can prevent your brain from overgeneralizing—or taking what happened in the traumatic experience and applying it to other parts of your life. Our book, Making Meaning of Difficult Experiences provides a format for thinking about difficult experiences in a way that helps process the emotions associated with them.
• Reach out to trusted others for support. You may just spend time together enjoying a positive connection, or you may share your story with them to gain some more specific support. Either way, being with people you trust and value will improve your mood and increase resiliency following trauma or difficult experiences. If you can share what happened with them, that can be even more helpful. It is healing to say these things out loud to another person trying to be helpful.
• Engage in positive self-care. Stay active, eat healthy foods and in the right amounts, and get adequate sleep. All of these are important supporters of resilience. Our brains work better, and our anxiety and mood difficulties are improved when we are well-fed and rested. Take care of your mind and body.
• Avoid unhelpful patterns of alcohol or substance use. For many people, stress or trauma leads to trying to push the difficult feelings away by numbing with alcohol or substance misuse. While this may work temporarily, the problems tend to grow with time. Be vigilant about alcohol and substance use if you have been through difficult or stressful events to reduce the chance of unhelpful responses.
• Consider your core values and how to connect with those values during times of stress. This can include taking a few minutes to consider what you are grateful for or what means the most to you. For some people, this may include connecting with their family, community, spirituality, or religious practice. It can be as simple as spending time watching a movie with your spouse or maybe reading a book for fun. Taking time to do what matters to you is another way to build resilience. Living a life consistent with your values helps in many ways.

In sum, resiliency is not a given for anyone. It is a skill that we can practice and improve. Moving to the other side of difficult experiences takes time and effort. If we try to speed it along, we will most likely be frustrated. Be kind to yourself and reach out for help when you need it.

Copyright Sheila A.M. Rauch, Ph.D. and Barbara O. Rothbaum, Ph.D.