How to Take a Beating

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Outside of the unpopular sport of boxing, where participants learn to parry and roll with the punches, we get little instruction on how to take a beating. Children are taught what they must do to be successful, yet absorbing setbacks is critical to any kind of meaningful success.

The Biology of Defeat

To some degree, coping with setbacks is part of our biology. When an animal is defeated in a contest over food or territory, it backs away and avoids further damaging contact.

This psychological shift is partly mediated by a decline in testosterone output for the loser (whereas testosterone increases in the winner, making it more confident and belligerent). A similar change occurs in humans in response to winning or losing. Analysis of sporting competitions, such as tennis matches, finds exactly the same testosterone shifts for winners and losers of each gender.¹

An appreciation of such psychological shifts in other species as a consequence of winning and losing helps us understand why a pattern of repeated failures threatens a person's health well-being.

The Psychological Toll of Repeated Failures

Most of the world's psychological problems are either caused or aggravated by stressful life events. There is no great mystery about this phenomenon: It is illustrated by what happened to American prisoners held by the Chinese during the Korean War. Many were subjected to psychological abuse—a brainwashing exercise in which they were encouraged to criticize their own country for propaganda purposes.² Many buckled under the strain and experienced something like clinical depression. The victims would remain in their beds incapable of exertion. Fellow prisoners referred to this condition as "give-up-itis." Many sufferers died within days, without obvious physiological causes such as starvation.

Researchers subsequently found that animals exposed to unpredictable and uncontrollable electric shocks developed a condition resembling clinical depression, known as learned helplessness. The impact of repeated, unpleasant outcomes over which the animal had no control taught it that it was helpless in the situation. It essentially gave up on the possibility that anything it did could relieve its suffering.

Very traumatic experiences, such as being violently mugged, can create a crippling fear of leaving the house. Most people overcome such fears as they learn that they can go out again without being attacked. For some, though, such fear does not fade. This is true in the case of intense traumatic events, such as combat soldiers seeing their friends killed. They may develop post-traumatic stress in which even their sleep is full of horrific images.

Everyday problems such as difficulty paying bills or recurrent health problems can foster free-floating anxiety and an inability to feel hopeful about the future. For that reason, people who grow up in poverty, with a stream of uncontrollable unpleasant experiences such as the electricity being turned off, may suffer more from anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia, all of which are aggravated by negative life events.

Insensitive parenting is also a prevalent source of childhood stress that alters the brain, making people more vulnerable to psychological blows later in life. Not everyone succumbs, of course, and psychologists have studied resilient individuals for clues about what makes a difference.

The Secrets of Bouncing Back from Defeats

At least two traits help individuals bounce back from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, as Shakespeare termed them—temperamental optimism, or being hard to push down in the first place, and sociability.³ Resilient children are good at eliciting social support from adults such as neighbors or teachers who can help them through difficult times at home. They are also more likely to participate in community activities.

Not everyone has the temperament and positive formative experiences that make them relatively impervious to life's blows. But there is a lot that one can do to lessen adversity. Most of these six common-sense techniques are well known and actually precede scientific psychology.

1. Keep the problem in correct proportion. A failed job interview is a lot less bad than getting fired. As Shakespeare said, "Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so."
2. Nothing fortifies our resistance to problems like a good night's sleep. Shakespeare also noted that “sleep knits up the raveled sleeve of care.”
3. Live in the present and enjoy what is available now, whether a delicious meal or frost etching a windowpane. If there were only the present, no one would suffer from the dread of impending doom that is the essence of clinical anxiety.
4. Help others. When you do so, your focus of attention is shifted from yourself and your current problems to the needs of others.
5. Breathing exercises and other formal relaxation techniques slow down bodily respiration and minimize anxiety and distress. Of course, such approaches do not solve stressful practical problems but merely control bodily reactions to them. Mastering some relaxation methods is one way of being prepared to meet misfortune.
6. Improving physical fitness via moderate exercise improves psychological robustness. Exercise elevates mood so that those who are physically fit have an advantage in coping with adversity.

Resilience Essential Reads

Harnessing the "Love Hormone" for Resilience in Tough Times

Hurricane Helene: Psychological Impacts and Resilience

Like skilled pugilists, we cannot stop the blows from coming, but we can deploy many effective techniques to minimize the punches.

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