LU HANESSIAN

What is resilience?

Decades of research, across multiple disciplines from developmental psychology to interpersonal neurobiology, metallurgy to cultural and social sciences, physics to neuroplasticity, scientists have studied the characteristics of resilience and the factors that might promote it.

Research on human potential and the capacity for growth in adversity has revealed fascinating discoveries about how we are wired and how our innate chemistry, systems, and circuitry are impacted by thresholds of stress. What determines how we cope and what expands our repertoire of actions in a given moment?

Resilience is not a trait or a talent. It is more like a continuum, a process of unfolding, non-linear, dynamic, a forward-moving trajectory, pushing us inward, outward, forward, toward. Resilience can be both vulnerable to loss and strengthened through that vulnerability.

What predicts resilience? What promotes it? Robust research reveals the significance of proactive coping skills and support networks (Charney, Southwick), the power of cultivating a "flexibility mindset" (Bonanno), the emergent factor of hope (Panter-Brick), "vicarious resilience" (Hernandez), and the "ordinary magic" of resilience (Masten), highlighting just some of the key discoveries which explain our capacity to, not just 'bounce back', but thrive, and even be transformed through challenge and adversity.