What does resilience actually mean?

"Resilient" has become one of those words that gets pinned on people like a medal. The colleague who never seems rattled. The friend who ran a marathon a month after a breakup. The grandmother who lived through things we only read about. We admire it, and quietly assume it is a personality type: some people have it, some don't.

The more careful definitions are kinder and more useful than that.

The definition, without the poster

The American Psychological Association's definition, as quoted in the Wikipedia overview of psychological resilience, describes resilience as the ability to cope mentally and emotionally with a crisis, or to return to how things were before it, reasonably quickly. The same overview notes that researchers tend to treat it either as a process that develops over time or as a fairly stable trait, and that the process view is the common one.

Harvard's Center on the Developing Child puts it even more plainly: resilience is the ability to overcome serious hardship, and the capabilities that underlie it can be strengthened at any age. The centre links it to two things in particular: supportive relationships and actively building skills.

Put those together and resilience stops being a medal and becomes something closer to a toolkit. Not a thing you are, but a thing you do, and get better at.

What resilience isn't

• It isn't feeling nothing. Adapting to something hard assumes it was hard. A resilient person can be upset, tired and fed up, and still keep adjusting.
• It isn't going it alone. The research framing keeps pointing back to other people. Leaning on friends, family or colleagues is part of the process, not a failure of it.
• It isn't "bouncing back" to exactly where you were. Sometimes you come back to a slightly different place: a new route to work, a changed plan, a smaller version of the old routine. That still counts.
• It isn't endless endurance. Putting up with something that should be changed is not resilience. Sometimes the adaptive move is to leave, quit, or ask for things to be different.

The everyday version

Most of us practise resilience in small, unglamorous ways long before anything dramatic happens. It looks like:

• A plan B that is genuinely fine. The swim is cancelled, so it's a long walk instead. The dinner party guest drops out, so it's a better conversation with the ones who came.
• Routines that bend. A habit with a bad-day version survives a bad week. We wrote about this in all-or-nothing thinking.
• Telling someone. A short message to a friend after a rotten day is a very ordinary piece of resilience.
• A sense of proportion. Asking "will this matter in a month?" doesn't make something stop mattering, but it puts it in a frame.
• Getting back to the next small thing. After a setback, you don't need to repair everything. You need to do the next meal, the next walk, the next email reasonably well.

Where it comes from

If capabilities can be strengthened at any age, the obvious question is how. The honest answer is: mostly through practice with manageable difficulty. Learning a new sport as an adult, travelling somewhere you don't speak the language, cooking for people when the oven is unreliable. Each of these offers small, survivable problems, and every time you solve one you have a little more evidence that you can.

The other source is people. Knowing who you would call, and actually calling them now and then when things are fine, is part of the same toolkit.