High Resilience: Bouncing Back Reasonably Fast From Adversity

High resilience: adapting without getting stuck in the difficulty

High resilience describes a notable current capacity to hold steady and bounce back from adversity: you adapt reasonably fast to setbacks and, often, find some kind of meaning even in difficult situations.

Put simply: when something hits you, you feel it and it hurts, but it doesn’t leave you stuck for long.

You can check your own current level with our resilience test.

What research discovered: resilience is the norm

For decades, psychology assumed that after a loss or a serious event the normal course was a long phase of intense distress, and that anyone who didn’t show it was repressing something. George Bonanno’s longitudinal studies (2004) changed that picture. Following people for months or years after a bereavement or a trauma, he found several distinct trajectories:

• Resilience: brief, moderate distress, with functioning that stays stable.
• Recovery: marked distress for months, followed by a gradual return to the previous level.
• Chronic distress: intense symptoms that last for years.
• Delayed distress: little impact at first, with difficulties that appear later.

The meta-analysis by Galatzer-Levy, Huang and Bonanno (2018), covering 54 studies, quantified the split: the resilient trajectory was the most common, averaging close to 66%, followed by recovery (21%) and chronic distress (11%).

Psychologist Ann Masten (2001) summed up the finding in a phrase that has become famous, “ordinary magic”: resilience doesn’t depend on extraordinary qualities, but on the healthy functioning of ordinary adaptive systems, such as close bonds, the ability to regulate emotions and the sense of being able to influence what happens.

What sustains high resilience

A consistent finding is that it doesn’t work like a fixed personality trait some people are born with and others aren’t. It rests on concrete resources that can be cultivated:

• Real social support networks: people you actually turn to, not just contacts.
• The capacity to find meaning even in adverse experiences.
• Active coping: taking concrete steps in the face of a difficulty (looking for information, asking for help, making a plan) rather than waiting for the situation to change on its own.
• Flexibility: Bonanno and Burton (2013) showed that the best predictor of good adaptation isn’t any one strategy, but the ability to switch strategies to suit the situation. Sometimes it’s best to act, sometimes to accept what can’t be changed, and sometimes to express what you feel.

How it shows up day to day

• Relatively fast recovery: after losing an important opportunity, it’s normal to feel bad for a few days, but the usual rhythm returns without the slump dragging on for weeks.
• Flexibility with change: new circumstances need little adjustment time.
• Search for meaning: some lesson or meaning emerges even from hard experiences, without denying how difficult they were.
• Active support: when it’s needed, you call or reach out to those people instead of keeping everything to yourself.

An example: two coworkers learn that their project has been canceled. Both feel frustrated that afternoon. One spends the week going over what they did wrong; the other talks it through with someone they trust, separates what depended on them from what didn’t, and by the following Monday is already proposing something new. The second pattern is the one this result describes.

A snapshot, not a ceiling

This result doesn’t describe a permanent state immune to everything. Resilience fluctuates with circumstances: a pile-up of difficulties, a significant loss or an especially hard period can reduce it temporarily in anyone, bringing it closer for a while to what this same test describes as developing resilience.

It also helps to remember what a self-report measures. Scales such as the Brief Resilience Scale (Smith et al., 2008), which focuses precisely on the ability to “bounce back,” or Connor and Davidson’s CD-RISC (2003), capture how each person perceives their own way of facing adversity. A high score is a good sign, but not a guarantee in an exceptional situation.

That’s why keeping the resources that sustain it active (social support, meaning, active and flexible coping) remains relevant even when the result is already high.

The last human freedom, according to Viktor Frankl

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a survivor of several Nazi concentration camps, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946) what may be the most radical formulation of this idea: even when stripped of everything else, a person retains one last freedom, the freedom to choose their attitude toward the circumstances they’re given.

He wasn’t describing a self-help technique, but something he observed in the most extreme context imaginable: those who managed to find some meaning, however tiny, in the midst of suffering held on better to their psychological balance. Years later, psychologist Susan Folkman (1997) backed that intuition with data when she described meaning-focused coping in caregivers of seriously ill people: even in situations that couldn’t be changed, finding meaning was associated with positive emotional states alongside the distress.

High resilience operates, on a far more everyday scale, on that same principle: finding some room for choice and meaning when outside circumstances can’t be changed.

This article is for informational purposes and does not replace an evaluation by a mental health professional.

Sources

• Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? American Psychologist, 59(1), 20-28.
• Galatzer-Levy, I. R., Huang, S. H., and Bonanno, G. A. (2018). Trajectories of resilience and dysfunction following potential trauma: A review and statistical evaluation. Clinical Psychology Review, 63, 41-55.
• Masten, A. S. (2001). Ordinary magic: Resilience processes in development. American Psychologist, 56(3), 227-238.
• Bonanno, G. A., and Burton, C. L. (2013). Regulatory flexibility: An individual differences perspective on coping and emotion regulation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(6), 591-612.
• Smith, B. W., Dalen, J., Wiggins, K., Tooley, E., Christopher, P., and Bernard, J. (2008). The Brief Resilience Scale: Assessing the ability to bounce back. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 15(3), 194-200.
• Connor, K. M., and Davidson, J. R. T. (2003). Development of a new resilience scale: The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). Depression and Anxiety, 18(2), 76-82.
• Folkman, S. (1997). Positive psychological states and coping with severe stress. Social Science & Medicine, 45(8), 1207-1221.
• Frankl, V. E. (1946). Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager. Verlag für Jugend und Volk.