Resilience is a central psychological concept. It describes the ability to remain strong and determined despite stress and negative influences.
Table of contents
1. What is resilience?
Resilience roughly translates as psychological resilience . The term comes from the Latin resilire, which translates as "to bounce back" and "to rebound." Resilience is thus the ability to survive difficult life situations without lasting impairment [1].
From a developmental perspective, resilience is often the result of a constructive adaptation to stressors . Thus, the topic of resilience also borders on another very important psychological discourse: exhaustion depression or burnout.
The theory is that resilient people are significantly less at risk in this regard. A hallmark of this is their ability to remain confident even in crises.
Resilient people consciously take responsibility for their own circumstances and act with self-efficacy and determination.
You can think of resilience as something like your soul's immune system : Only if you actively work on it, consume the right things, and take care of yourself will it remain intact in the long term. And an intact mental immune system protects your psyche from being overwhelmed by external influences.
2. The 7 pillars of resilience
Resilience can be divided into seven segments. Therefore, it is often referred to as the seven pillars of resilience. Together, they form the ideal foundation for your mental strength .
1.Acceptance
Acceptance is central to dealing with limitations or hurdles in a stress-relieving way. The key is recognizing that there are things we can't change —and that that's perfectly okay .
Acceptance helps us to accept the second-best solution to a problem and to break away from perfection or obsessive control. On the other hand, it naturally also promotes self- acceptance on a cognitive-emotional level .
2. Binding
From an evolutionary perspective, we humans are absolute herd animals. Therefore, secure and resilient relationships also play an important role in resilience.
This includes groups , collectives, and systems , as well as your relationship with yourself . Empathy, the recognition and understanding of feelings, plays a particularly important role in the context of attachment.
3. Solution orientation
Especially when dealing with challenges, a solution-oriented approach is an absolute success factor. Solution ideas should always meet certain criteria. They must be positively formulated , concrete , manageable , and achievable through your personal actions.
It's also ideal if you can reach your final solution in small steps . It's also important to always consider your personal values .
4. Confidence
Confidence or a healthy optimism also strengthens your resilience . But be careful: This is by no means a sign of naivety or even ignorance. Rather, the principle of confidence is more about a positive , yet realistic, outlook on things .
This also includes the ability to acknowledge the negative or even painful aspects of a situation. It's less about blind optimism and more about maintaining a constructive balance between negative and positive focus .
5. Self-perception
Good self-awareness is the first step toward a solid relationship with one's self. This includes, not least, the ability to perceive and correctly classify emotional and physical signals .
Only with good self-awareness can you know what you need and how you can best help yourself. Therefore, consciously sharpening your senses is particularly important here.
6. Self-reflection
The concept of self-reflection is based on self-awareness, but goes a few steps further. It involves observing yourself, your surroundings , and your sensory impressions from a kind of bird's-eye view .
You see yourself as if from the outside and can objectively observe your reactions , thought patterns , and emotional patterns . As a result, your ability to recognize stress reactions and initiate change processes improves significantly.
7. Self-efficacy
Self-efficacy is the awareness that all your actions have effects and consequences . This includes, among other things , the unshakable belief that you are capable of improving your situation .
If you ever feel particularly powerless, you can ask yourself in terms of self-efficacy: What are my competencies? What can I do to solve this problem? How can I acquire the missing elements?
3. Resilience training: 5 exercises
Internalizing the 7 pillars is the first step to strengthening your resilience. The second is actively fostering resilience. Various exercises that help you remain mindful, calm, and constructive even in difficult times are very effective in this regard.
1. Meditation
When you meditate, you practice radical presence, acceptance and letting go, but you also practice consciously perceiving and accepting your body, thoughts and feelings.
Regular meditation therefore also helps you strengthen your self-awareness. Furthermore, meditation is, of course, a reliable aid in the fight against stress and inner restlessness .
If you meditate for about 10 to 20 minutes a day , you can effectively prevent stress and better handle challenges [2].
2. Positive affirmations
Positive affirmations help strengthen your confidence and self-love . Affirmations also make you much more self-confident in the long run. Over time, it becomes easier for you not to become reactive or passive, even in times of crisis.
To specifically work on your confidence, you can, for example, tell yourself three things that you want to be, experience or live that day after you wake up in the morning.
It is also helpful to write down your affirmations or repeat them during a short meditation.
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3. Gratitude
If you regularly think about what you are grateful for, you will not only strengthen your confidence, but you will also practice self-reflection, solution orientation and acceptance.
Why should you dwell on what you're missing when grateful thoughts make you so much happier ? Gratitude immediately creates feelings like contentment , serenity , and calm , but at the same time, it also helps you see something positive, or at least a lesson , in seemingly negative events [4].
4. Build and maintain a network
Yes, networking isn't just important for your professional advancement! Your resilience also benefits from maintaining your social contacts.
It is important to be selective: surround yourself only with positive people who give you energy and can also be there for you [5].
A strong inner circle, in particular, can give you the feeling that you're not alone in difficult times. Maintaining and nurturing your network strengthens your resilience by allowing you to practice social self-efficacy.
5. Consciously express impressions and emotions
Especially in the stresses of everyday life, we often don't have time to feel and understand our emotions. In the long run, however, this doesn't do us any favors: What's there needs to be acknowledged and recognized.
Only when you understand your impulses can you truly live and act in harmony with yourself . Therefore, it's a good idea to record emotional and physical signals in a notebook .
In order to specifically strengthen your self-awareness, you can also rate the intensity of your feelings on a scale of 1 to 10 .
4. A long-term study on resilience
Emmy Werner is one of the pioneers of resilience research. The renowned American developmental psychologist published numerous studies on this topic between 1977 and 2006.
What was new about the research approach of the 1970s was that psychologists and physicians had previously pursued exclusively pathological concepts. Thus, the primary focus was always on evaluating risk factors, disorders, and abnormal developments.
Werner's long-term study "The Children of Kauai. A longitudinal study from the prenatal period to age ten" from 1977 was particularly groundbreaking in this context. For this study, she and her colleague Ruth Smith followed 700 Hawaiian children over a period of 10 years.
Some of these children grew up under extremely difficult and, in some cases, deeply traumatizing conditions. They experienced violence, poverty, poor educational standards, neglect, and even serious parental illness.
While a large proportion of these severely disadvantaged children later became noticeable due to behavioral problems, learning difficulties or even criminal offenses, one-third developed incredibly positively despite all the hurdles.
Where others developed mental illnesses, they remained healthy and, compared to others, even showed an outstanding ability to cope with difficult life situations with courage, compassion and confidence.
Among other things, it turned out that attachment and affirmation are essential for the development of resilience [6].
5. All about resilience - in 60 seconds
6. Conclusion
Resilience is the ability to remain positive and strong in challenging situations. Thanks to resilience research, driven primarily by Emmy Werner in the 1970s, we now know that resilience can be learned.
So, if you work specifically on training acceptance, confidence, self-awareness, reflection, solution orientation and self-efficacy and build a stable social network, you can significantly strengthen your psychological resilience.
Mindfulness practices such as meditation, gratitude, or positive affirmations can also help you develop the 7 pillars of resilience from within.
However, it is also particularly important to constantly look within yourself and check how you are doing and whether you are really living in harmony with your own values.
7. Sources
[1] Russo, S.J.; Murrogh, J. W.; [...]; Nestler, EJ (2012), Neurobiology of Resilience, Nature Neuroscience, Volume 15, Issue 11, p. 1475-1484, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3580862/.
[2] Kwak, S.; Lee, TY; [...]; Kwon, JS (2019), The Immediate and Sustained Positive Effects of Meditation on Resilience Are Mediated by Changes in the Resting Brain, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Volume 13, p. 101, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6448020/.
[3] Albalooshi, S.; Moeini-Jazani, M.; [...]; Warlop, L. (2020), Reinstating the Resourceful Self: When and How Self-Affirmations Improve Executive Performance of the Powerless, Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, Volume 46, Issue 2, p. 189-203, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6931103/.
[4] Sansone, RA; Sansone, LA (2010), Gratitude and Well Being The Benefits of Appreciation, Psychiatry (Edgmont), Volume 7, Issue 11, p. 18-22, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3010965/.
[5] Ozbay, F.; Johnson, D.C.; [...]; Southwick, S. (2007), Social Support and Resilience to Stress: From Neurobiology to Clinical Practice, Nature Neuroscience, Volume 4, Issue 5, p. 35-40, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2921311/.
[6] Werner, E.; Smith, R. (1977), The children of Kauai: A longitudinal study from the prenatal period to age ten.
