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The Nuance
It’s Okay If You’re Not Resilient
Blaming young people’s feelings of defeat on a lack of grit is ‘simplistic and counterproductive,’ experts say
“Resilience” has become a buzzword. A quick Google Scholar search brings up hundreds of recent research papers on resilience and its role in mental health. And the World Health Organization (WHO) has identified building resilience as a “key pillar” of its Health 2020 policy framework for improving health and well-being.
While definitions vary a bit from one source to the next, resilience is usually defined as the ability to cope and persist in the face of adversity. It’s often used interchangeably with the word “grit,” and it falls into the category of noncognitive skills that includes things like motivation and attitude.
“Resilience, the short version of it, is the ability to make lemonade out of lemons,” says Bruce McEwen, a professor at the Rockefeller University in New York who studies the neuroscience of stress and resilience. “It’s learning to deal with problems so that you’re not besieged and made helpless by them.”
A lot of research has concluded that resilience is a measurable skill, and people who possess high levels of it are more likely to succeed academically and professionally. There’s also evidence that resilient individuals are shielded from suicidal thoughts following negative life events and are resistant to the self-doubt, anxiety, and depression that hardship engenders.
These findings have fed into the idea — one popularized in bestselling books and self-help guides — that resilience is akin to a superpower that shields its bearer from strife and despair, and that it correlates with success in all facets of life. Best of all, resilience is a trainable, augmentable skill that anyone can acquire with practice, or so the thinking follows.
People don’t fail because they lack resilience; they lack resilience because circumstances have set them up for failure.
But some experts argue that the whole concept of resilience is ill-defined, and the amount of resilience a person displays is dependent on…
