What Is Resilience? What Decades of Research Reveal

Keeping your life working through a hard time, even while it hurts, is what psychologists mean by resilience. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines it as the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress, and says the road there is likely to involve considerable emotional distress.¹ So what marks resilience is whether the basics of your days hold up, not whether you feel calm.

The research answer to what is resilience is also more ordinary than the popular image of rare, unbreakable people. A 2018 review of long-term studies of people facing events such as bereavement, serious injury, disaster and war found that resilience, steady functioning with only brief disruption, was the most common response, though how common depends on how the data are analyzed.²

Trait, process or outcome: what is resilience, exactly?

In psychology, resilience means healthy functioning that holds up, or soon returns, during and after adversity. When five leading researchers compared their definitions in a 2014 panel published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, they disagreed on details but mostly shared that core idea of adaptive functioning over time after something bad happens.³

The details matter because the word gets used in three ways. The panel’s chair, the Yale psychiatrist Steven Southwick, asked researchers to say whether they mean a trait (something a person has), a process (something a person does with the resources around them) or an outcome (how a person turns out). The anthropologist Catherine Panter-Brick preferred process, because it implies that resilience is not just an attribute, or even a capacity, of a person.³

The choice changes the advice. If resilience is a fixed trait, you either have it or you do not. If it is a process or an outcome, it depends on what you do and what help you have, and it can differ from one hard event to the next. The research below mostly treats it as an outcome: how people actually function over time.

Resilience also leaves room for a rough patch. George Bonanno of Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote in 2004 that resilient people may have brief upsets, such as several weeks of restless sleep or preoccupation, while their overall functioning stays stable.⁵ Take an illustrative case: after layoffs on her team, a colleague is tearful for days and sleeps badly for a few weeks, but keeps doing her job and seeing friends. By this definition she is resilient; looking calm is not the test.

Myth

Resilient people don't get upset when something bad happens.

Fact

Distress is normal in resilience. What marks it is that everyday functioning holds up, or soon returns, over the following weeks and months.

Nor is resilience a mindset. Beliefs about, say, whether talent can be developed belong to what a mindset is and how beliefs shape what you do. How you read a setback can color your response, but resilience is judged by what you keep doing.

What this means for you: after a blow, feeling low is not by itself a sign that you are coping badly. The definition looks at whether daily life keeps going: most of your work, sleep, regular meals, time with people. That is a way to read the idea, not a mental health check. If those slip for weeks, or your distress worries you at any point, see the help section below.

The first clue came from children who did better than expected

Resilience research began more than six decades ago, when developmental researchers noticed that some children facing major adversity were doing unexpectedly well and set out to learn what protected them, a 2016 paper by Frank Infurna and Suniya Luthar of Arizona State University recounts.⁶

What surprised researchers most, the University of Minnesota psychologist Ann Masten wrote in a 2001 paper titled Ordinary Magic, was how ordinary resilience is. It is common, she argued, and usually comes from the normal workings of the systems that help all humans adapt; the biggest threats are whatever damages those protective systems.⁷ In the 2014 panel she named some of those systems, from close relationships to the drive to master new skills, and said the practical task is to support them.³

In practice, those systems are everyday things. As an illustration, a child who still has one steady adult and something they are getting good at keeps two of them working, even while much else is going wrong. For an adult after a blow, the equivalent is protecting the relationships and the small competences that keep you going.

Bonanno carried the idea to adults. In his 2004 paper he argued that theorists had long seen resilience after loss or trauma as rare, or even as a sign that something was wrong, because most of what psychology knew came from people who sought treatment or were in great distress.⁵ A clinician mainly meets the people who are struggling; the many who cope never come through the door.

Your own picture of grief is skewed the same way, because quiet, steady stories rarely get told. If you are coping reasonably well after a loss, that is not a sign you did not care.

Most people follow a resilient path after hardship

In studies that follow the same peoplelongitudinal study: A study that measures the same people more than once over a period of time, so it can see how they change and which thing came first. Following people over time still does not show that the earlier thing caused the later one.Full entry in the glossary for months or years after a potentially traumatic event, the most common pattern is resilience: steady, healthy functioning with only brief disruption. A 2018 review in Clinical Psychology Review by Isaac Galatzer-Levy, Sandy Huang and George Bonanno found this pattern after events ranging from bereavement and injury to disaster and combat. The studies measure symptoms such as post-traumatic stress or depression several times, then let statistical models sort people into groups that change in similar ways. Four paths keep appearing: resilience, recovery, chronic distress and delayed distress.²

The study

Moderate evidence

Mapping four paths across 54 long-term studies, from bereavement to combat

The authors pooled studies that measured people at least three times after events such as bereavement, spinal cord injury, disaster, police work and military deployment. Averaged across studies, about two thirds of people followed the resilient path, about one in five recovered after a period of distress, about one in ten stayed distressed and slightly fewer developed problems only later. Studies that had also measured people before the event found resilience more often, not less.²

In plain terms, a hard first few weeks is not a verdict on the year ahead: recovery, the second most common path, starts with high distress that then eases. The main caveat is measurement, since nearly all of these studies relied on people rating their own symptoms a few times. The review also found that more severe events did not bring less resilience, and its authors suggest psychological factors matter more than severity; earlier studies they summarize link people’s paths to flexibility in coping, confidence in your ability to cope, optimism and stresses before or after the event, such as money worries.²

That points to the weeks and months after a blow, not only the blow. As an illustration, two neighbors lose their homes in the same flood. One sleeps badly for a fortnight, then settles; the other seems fine at first but starts to struggle months later as insurance disputes and debts pile up. The event was the same; what came after was not.

1. Resilience: steady, healthy functioning, with perhaps a few weeks of restless sleep or preoccupation
2. Recovery: distress rises, then eases back over months, sometimes a year or two
3. Chronic: distress rises and stays high
4. Delayed: little distress at first, with problems emerging later

A short burst of distress after a shock is part of the ordinary stress response, and on this evidence it usually settles.

Why no single trait makes a person resilient

No single trait reliably predicts who will be resilient. In a 2023 review in Nature Reviews Psychology, Bonanno, Shuquan Chen and Galatzer-Levy call this the resilience paradox: the factors widely linked to resilience, from coping strategies to social and economic resources, each explain only a modest share of who ends up on the resilient path. Resilience questionnaires fare no better: the authors write that such scales track how well people are doing at the moment, but there is no evidence that they predict who will follow a resilient path after adversity.⁸

The authors’ explanation is that situations differ and coping strategies come with trade-offs between costs and benefits. Seeking support, positive emotions and reappraising a problem help in many situations but not all, while habits usually seen as unhelpful, such as distraction or keeping feelings to yourself, can be the right move in some. Averaged across every situation, any single strategy looks weak. Their answer is regulatory flexibility, which they describe in three steps: read what the situation demands, pick a strategy from the ones you have, then watch whether it is working and change course if it is not.⁸

For example, after a failed product launch, keeping busy may get you through the first week. Later, talking it over with a colleague and fixing the plan may serve you better, and if going over it again and again leaves you more stuck, that is the cue to switch.

This is a theory with growing but mostly self-reported support, proposed by the researchers who developed it, so treat it as a useful lens rather than a proven method.

Two open questions: how common is it, and can it be taught?

How common resilience is remains disputed. In their 2016 reanalysis of a long-running German household survey, Infurna and Luthar found that resilience looked most common when they used the same statistical settings as earlier studies, but became the least common path once they loosened two assumptions built into those settings. For people who lost a spouse, the share classed as resilient fell from about three quarters to about a quarter. Their point was not that people are fragile but that any single “rate of resilience” depends on modeling choices; they warned against using high rates to argue that people who have lived through major stressors do not need help.⁶ The 2018 review, by contrast, found resilience the most common path across many kinds of studies.²

Both can be true: resilience is common, and a precise figure deserves caution. Treat a headline such as “most people are resilient” as a rough guide to what usually happens, not a prediction about you, and not a reason to hold back help from someone who is struggling.

Whether resilience can be trained is also open. The APA says resilience is not necessarily a personality trait that only some people possess, and that it involves behaviors, thoughts and actions that anyone can learn and develop.¹ The evidence is thinner than that suggests. A 2020 Cochrane review of 44 randomized trials of resilience training for health care workers found they may report higher resilience and lower stress and depression right after training, but rated the evidence very low certaintycertainty of evidence: A rating of how confident we can be that a body of research has an effect about right, graded high, moderate, low or very low. It grades the evidence, not the stakes: low certainty means little is known, not that little is at risk.Full entry in the glossary, with little data on lasting effects.⁴ Bonanno and colleagues go further, arguing that trying to build resilience directly will bring only minimal success at best.⁸

Nor is resilience only an individual matter. In the 2014 panel, Panter-Brick argued that interventions should change the odds society stacks against people, rather than tinker with individuals’ capacity to cope.³ For a manager, that means asking what about the work itself makes a hard period harder, not only how staff can cope with it.

Getting help when a hard time does not ease

Most people’s reactions after a traumatic event lessen over time, according to the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), but when symptoms last for an extended period and interfere with daily life, such as relationships or work, a person may be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).⁹ You do not have to wait months to ask for help; the advice below is ordered by urgency.

• Now: if you or someone you know is struggling or having thoughts of suicide, in the US call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or call 911 in a life-threatening situation, NIMH advises.⁹ For the UK, the NHS lists calling 999 or going to A&E when someone’s life is at risk or you do not feel able to keep yourself or someone else safe.¹⁰ Elsewhere, call your local emergency number.
• Soon: in England, the NHS advises calling 111 (choosing the mental health option) or asking for an urgent GP appointment if you need urgent help that is not an emergency, and lists Samaritans on 116 123 as a free, confidential listening service.¹⁰ The APA says it is important to get professional help if, after a traumatic or stressful experience, you cannot function as well as you would like or manage basic daily activities.¹
• At your next appointment: in the UK, see a GP if you think you have symptoms of PTSD, such as flashbacks, nightmares or avoiding reminders of an event, the NHS says; symptoms can start straight away or months or even years later.¹¹ In England, the 2018 NICE guideline on PTSD suggests clinicians consider active monitoring (watchful waiting) for people with symptoms below the diagnostic threshold in the first month after a trauma, and firmly advises against offering psychologically focused debriefing to prevent or treat PTSD.¹²

The bottom line

Resilience is not a rare gift or an absence of pain. It is the ordinary pattern of functioning that holds up, or comes back, after adversity, and long-term studies suggest it is the most common path, even if the exact share is disputed. No single trait guarantees it; one leading theory points to matching how you cope to what each situation demands, and noticing when a strategy stops working. If distress lasts and gets in the way of relationships or work, that is the time to seek help.