Hard times are upon us. For ourselves, our communities, and the planet, resilience is key to enduring, recovering, and transforming through the hard times.
What is resilience?
Resilience is the hidden inner reservoir of strength, revealed during life’s most trying times, that allows us to succeed through setbacks, persevere through challenges, endure hardships, or healthily grieve through a loss.
Noriko Morita Harth, director of the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness – and a mindfulness teacher herself – described it this way: “Personal resilience is the capacity to recover and grow stronger when we are faced with challenges or difficulties in our life. It is not about avoiding challenges but facing them and navigating the situations.”
Who has resilience? Everyone, said Sarah Newman, executive director at the Climate Mental Health Network, which serves as a hub of resources to support and serve collective well-being. “It’s a matter of strengthening the resilience that is already in us,” she said. “It’s when we’re most challenged that we can foster and muster that resilience to respond.”
What does resilience look like?
We’ve all met resilient people, or at certain points in our lives embodied resilience ourselves.
Our capacity for resilience determines much of our response to a major personal life, community, and societal hardship. People with a strong reserve of resilience not only bounce back but bounce forward.
That resilient bounce forward may mean people may come to meet new parts of themselves, uncovered during a difficult period in life. If certain relationships fall away, resilience welcomes new relationships into life. Resilience helps people adjust, revise, and or decide on a more meaningful life direction and goals if the old plan implodes.
You don’t get to choose when hard times happen, but resilience empowers you to choose how you respond.
Returning to the time before the hardship is rarely possible, but resilience supports people to let go of the time before and focus on the time now and ahead. Hard times are fertile times for self-transformation. Resilience is a crucial factor in changing for the better.
“We each have a responsibility in this world, a role to play,” Newman said. “We each have power and duty and so forth. That sense of self-agency is so tied to resilience.”
Hard times are also vulnerable times, and those with a lower capacity for resilience may face serious struggles.
“Resilience is like the immune system,” Harth said. “When my immune system is low because of stress, and if I get a cold, it may take longer to recover. When I’m low in resilience, I may get easily overwhelmed. I may feel pessimistic and isolated.”
A diminished capacity for resilience often is not the fault of the individual. Traumatic events, adverse childhood experiences, and forms of structural violence, like environmental injustice, are all linked with a decreased capacity for resilience.
How can you build resilience?
The good news is that resilience can be cultivated and practiced, according to the American Psychological Association.
Harth recommended starting by finding external resources and systems of support: emotional, spiritual, physical, or communal. You might turn to places of solace, whether that’s a nearby forest, your church, temple, or mosque, or a pet. You might seek out professional care from a therapist.
A resilient person connects with their inner resources too: self-confidence, agency, compassion, and trust. To get started, try this self-compassion break guide.
Newman said it can be helpful to recall a story of a hard time from earlier in your life and remind yourself of how you endured and recovered. She said she finds it inspiring to read about the resilience of others and to choose to believe she’s capable of the same.
Resilience is not about toughing out difficult times or suppressing feelings of grief, anger, or pain. In fact, resilience is cultivated by just the opposite: “It’s important to be able to name what we’re feeling,” Newman said. The climate emotions wheel is a helpful tool for identifying emotions related to climate change and beyond. Guided meditation and journaling prompts can also be a way to connect to and process the difficult experience.
HelpGuide.org and the Mayo Clinic offer additional tips and strategies for building resilience.
Resilience is bigger than one person
Climate change lays plain that the well-being of individuals is bound up and interdependent with the well-being of communities.
“With climate change, like the wildfires in Los Angeles, the experience is collective. Individuals are suffering and are impacted, but they’re not alone,” Newman said. “When we talk about an individual’s emotional resilience, it’s really bound up in the community’s resilience.”
Community and individual resilience work together in a feedback loop. When individuals can make meaning and find purpose after disaster, participate in recovery efforts with their neighbors, and see the path forward for themselves, they support their community in finding the path through and out, too.
“Individuals contribute to community resilience, and they also benefit from community resilience,” Newman explained. When communities can bounce forward, individuals within that community may receive a boost of resilience and bounce forward too.
And individual and community resilience are linked to the resilience of the entire planet, says Dekila Chungyalpa, who directs the Loka Initiative at the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Healthy Minds. Her paper “A Framework for Deep Resilience in the Anthropocene” argues that the well-being of the individual is tied to everything – and the capacity for resilience doesn’t just come from the individual or their community but is also related to a healthy, resilient planet. (Chungyalpa’s course The Psychology of Deep Resilience is free if you take it without the certificate option.)
“Inner, community, and planetary resilience are interdependent,” Chungyalpa said. “You cannot achieve any one of these things alone. You have to work on all three because they’re interdependent.”
Newman offered one example of this relationship: the return of salmon to the Northern California streams, which is occurring because Indigenous communities and conservation workers are coming together to restore the salmon population. In other words, the resilience of the salmon was made more possible by the resilience of people.
Hard times are inevitable, but we have the resources, inner and outer, to not just survive, but transform into better people for the experience. Hard times also offer the chance to build or deepen connections with friends, family, and the greater community, and strengthen those connections for a more resilient response to the next hard time.
“Resilience is about having hope, about believing in what you and your community can do, about moving forward together,” Newman said.
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