Why Some People Cope Better Than Others, and How to Build Resilience

What Researchers Mean by Resilience

The word resilienceGlossaryResilienceThe ability to adapt to adversity, trauma, or significant stress. Can be developed through supportive relationships, self-care, and coping skills. gets used so often that it has started to lose its meaning. In popular culture, it has become shorthand for toughness, for bouncing back quickly as though the hard thing never happened. Researchers who study resilienceGlossaryResilienceThe ability to adapt to adversity, trauma, or significant stress. Can be developed through supportive relationships, self-care, and coping skills. have a very different understanding, and their findings are both more nuanced and more hopeful than the popular version suggests.

People who score high on resilienceGlossaryResilienceThe ability to adapt to adversity, trauma, or significant stress. Can be developed through supportive relationships, self-care, and coping skills. measures still experience distress, doubt, and periods of feeling overwhelmed. What distinguishes them is that they have developed specific internal and external resources that help them move through difficulty without becoming permanently stuck. The encouraging news from this  is that these resources are learnable.

Research across developmental psychology, neuroscience, and traumaGlossaryTraumaA disturbing or deeply distressing experience that results in an emotional response that overwhelms an individual’s ability to cope and that may result in lasting psychological symptoms. studies has converged on three broad capacities that underlie resilient functioning.

The Ability to Regulate Your Emotional State

This does not mean suppressing emotions or maintaining constant calm. It means having a range of strategies for managing intense feelings so they do not overwhelmGlossaryOverwhelmThe state when demands on your time, energy, and emotions feel greater than your ability to cope, often resulting in paralysis or emotional flooding. your ability to function. Physical activity, honest conversation, humor, davening, journaling, or simply the awareness that intense feelings are temporary.

The key is not which strategies you use but whether you have them at all, and whether you can access them when you need them. People with broader emotional toolkits tend to recover more readily because they have more ways to meet themselves where they are.

A Sense of Agency

Resilient people tend to believe, even in difficult circumstances, that their actions matter. This does not mean they believe they can control everything. They can identify the parts of a situation they can influence and direct their energy there, rather than becoming paralyzed by the parts they cannot change.

This sense of agency is one of the first things to erode under chronic stress, which is why people going through prolonged difficulty often describe feeling helpless even where they do have options. Rebuilding agency is often the slow work of recovery.

Connection to Others

This is perhaps the most consistently documented factor in resilienceGlossaryResilienceThe ability to adapt to adversity, trauma, or significant stress. Can be developed through supportive relationships, self-care, and coping skills. research. People who maintain meaningful relationships during and after adversity recover more effectively than those who face hardship in isolation. A spouse, close friend, sibling, mentor or really any relationship where you feel known and supported provides a buffer that changes how your brain and body respond to stress.

What the Popular Narrative Gets Wrong

The most common misconception about resilienceGlossaryResilienceThe ability to adapt to adversity, trauma, or significant stress. Can be developed through supportive relationships, self-care, and coping skills. is that it means recovering quickly. This creates an unspoken expectation that if you are struggling for a long time, you are not resilient. In practice, the timeline of recovery varies enormously. Grieving a loss for a year is not a failure of resilienceGlossaryResilienceThe ability to adapt to adversity, trauma, or significant stress. Can be developed through supportive relationships, self-care, and coping skills. in the same vein that utilizing professional support is not a failure.

A more honest understanding includes the possibility that some experiences change you in lasting ways, and that adapting to that change, rather than returning to who you were before, is itself a form of resilienceGlossaryResilienceThe ability to adapt to adversity, trauma, or significant stress. Can be developed through supportive relationships, self-care, and coping skills.. Sometimes resilienceGlossaryResilienceThe ability to adapt to adversity, trauma, or significant stress. Can be developed through supportive relationships, self-care, and coping skills. looks like slowly building a new version of your life that integrates the pain rather than pretending it did not occur.

Building Resilience in Practice

If emotional regulationGlossaryEmotional RegulationThe ability to manage and respond to emotional experiences in a healthy and adaptive way. is a weak spot, beginning with the body can be transformative. Regular sleep, physical movement, and even basic breathing practices have a measurable impact on your nervous system’s ability to handle stress.

If your sense of agency has eroded, look for one small area of your life where you can make a choice and follow through on it. The size of the choice does not matter. What matters is the experience of deciding and acting, because this experience, repeated over time, rebuilds the neural pathways associated with self-efficacy.

If connection is what is missing, reach out to one person this week. Not with a performance of being fine, but with something honest, even if it is small.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.