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Writer's pictureAnu Kiruthika

How Powerful is Resilience?

Has resilience been significant? What makes some people resilient? What are the sources of resilience? Let us know what you feel about resilience.


Resilience generally refers to the positive adaptation or the ability to maintain or regain mental health, despite experiencing adversity. Resilience is that you are bouncing back after the difficulty. Resilience is defined as the process of adapting to face adversity, traumatic situations, tragedy, threats in everyday life, and even significant sources of stress. Resilience is complex, dynamic, and multi-dimensional.


Resilience is the calibre to handle stress and adversity in an individual life. Stressful life events, traumatic experiences, and adversity impact brain function and its structure, resulting in the development of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other psychiatric disorders in the individual. But most individuals do not develop such illnesses after experiencing stressful life events, as they are resilient. Resilience emphasises effective responses to the challenges in life and is resistant to the terrible effects of stress.


The sources of resilience are personal factors, biological factors, and environmentally systemic factors. Your personality factors include openness, extraversion, agreeableness, internal locus of control, and mastery. It also involves self-efficacy, self-esteem, cognitive appraisal, optimism, intellectual functioning, cognitive flexibility, social attachment, positive self-concept, emotions, coping, hope are associated with personal factors to resilience. The environmental, social support, relationship with peers, and family are invariably about resilience. The community factors like schoolings, services, sports, artistic ability, culture, spirituality, religion, and lack of exposure to violence also contribute to the individual’s resilience.


You can follow these strategies or methods to develop your resilience:

  1. Increase your network: Connecting with empathetic and understanding people can remind you’re not alone amid difficulties. Try to focus on the relationship with trustworthy and compassionate people, which will develop resilience. Along with individual relationships, participating in civic groups, faith-based communities, or other local organisations provides social support and can help you reclaim hope and resilience.

  2. Focus on your health: Self-care may be a legitimate practice for mental health and building resilience. That’s because stress is both physical and emotional. Increasing a positive lifestyle can strengthen your body to cope with stress and reduce negative emotions like anxiety or depression, which improves resilience.

  3. Train yourself with mindfulness: Mindfulness, like prayer or meditation, can also help people build connections with others and build hope, helping you deal with situations that require resilience.

  4. Give your helping hands to others: Helping individuals during the need, you can garner a sense of purpose, foster self-worth, connect with other people, and tangibly help others, all of which can empower you to grow resilience.

  5. Travel along with your goals: Develop some realistic goals, do something regularly to replace some disturbing thoughts, and develop resilience.

  6. Discover yourself: People often find that they have grown in some respect due to a struggle they had. This can increase the sense of self-worth and heighten their appreciation for life which in turn embraces resilience.

  7. Encounter healthy thoughts: Healthy thoughts like keeping things from a positive perspective, accepting change, maintaining a hopeful outlook, learning from the past helps to develop resilience in an individual.

  8. Getting help from others: Getting help when you need it is crucial in building your resilience.


How important is resilience? Resilience gives people the emotional strength to cope with trauma, adversity, and hardship in life. People with resilience use their resources, strengths, and skills to overcome challenges. People lacking resilience feel overwhelmed and helpless and follow unhealthy coping strategies such as avoidance, isolation, and self-medication. Studies showed that patients with suicide attempt had significantly lower resilience than those who had never attempted suicide. People with resilience do experience stress, setbacks, and difficult emotions. Still, they look into their strengths and seek help from support systems to overcome challenges and work through problems. Resilience empowers you to accept and adapt to a situation and move forward.


So let us know what you feel or understand by resilience.

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