Resilience

Resilience is the ability to adapt and recover when life gets hard, through stress, loss, trauma or illness. It doesn’t mean you don’t hurt or struggle. It means you find your way back to functioning, often with other people’s help. Researchers see it as a process you can strengthen, not a fixed trait you either have or lack.

Also called: bouncing back; psychological or emotional resilience; adaptability.

What shapes it

Resilience is more common than people think. Studies of children growing up with adversity, and of adults after loss or trauma, find that many do well, through ordinary things rather than rare strengths. What helps or hinders:

• Relationships: people you can lean on, and a community around you.
• Circumstances: poverty, violence and insecurity make it harder for anyone.
• How you respond: solving problems and asking for help tend to protect you. Drinking to cope or withdrawing tend not to.
• Meaning and faith: belief and belonging can steady people under stress.

How to build it

• Stay in touch with people, and let them help.
• Protect the basics: sleep, food and movement.
• Practise noticing unhelpful thoughts, and tackle one problem at a time.
• Ask for help early, before you reach breaking point.

Training programmes built on CBT and mindfulness raise resilience scores in trials, but the effects are modest. A Cochrane review of 44 trials with health workers, mostly in high-income countries, rated the evidence as very low certainty.

In Nigeria

In camps in Northern Nigeria, displaced people built resilience together: they set up leadership committees, found new income and supported each other. In a study of hospital workers in Nigeria and Botswana during COVID-19, those with more resilience and social support had less severe anxiety. But “be strong, you’ll manage” can turn into pressure to suffer quietly. Needing help isn’t a lack of resilience.

Resilience vs endurance

Enduring means holding on. Resilience means adapting: you bend, get support and recover over time. Someone can look strong and still be struggling inside.

When to get help

If stress or a loss has gone on for weeks and you aren’t finding your way back, or you’re coping by drinking or shutting down, talk to someone. A licensed therapist on Mytherapist.ng who works with stress and burnout can help.

Read next

• Stress: Causes, Signs and How to Cope in Nigeria
• Easy Daily Self-Care Tips for Better Mental Health
• Self-efficacy
• Stress management

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This entry is awaiting clinical review. It’s based on published research and health guidelines, and we’ll update it once a clinician has reviewed it.