Resilience is a word that gets used a lot, often to mean "toughen up and keep going". But that's not what resilience actually is, and it's not what the research says builds it.
My Master's in Psychology at Massey University specialised in resilience and youth mentoring, so this is the topic closest to my heart. The most important thing I learned is also the most hopeful: resilience isn't a rare trait some people are born with. It's built from ordinary, learnable skills and relationships, at any age.
This guide covers what resilience really is, what decades of research tell us about it, and eight evidence-based strategies for building your own.
What is resilience?
Resilience is the ability to adapt well to adversity, stress and change, recovering, adjusting and often growing through difficult experiences rather than being permanently knocked off course.
The American Psychological Association describes resilience as both a process and an outcome: it's not just whether you get through something hard, but how you adapt along the way. That distinction matters. Resilience is something you do, not just something you have.
Developmental psychologist Ann Masten, one of the leading researchers in the field, famously called resilience "ordinary magic". After decades of studying children who thrived despite adversity, she concluded that resilience doesn't come from extraordinary qualities. It comes from ordinary human resources: relationships, problem-solving skills, the ability to regulate emotions, and a sense of meaning. Which means it can be built.
What resilience isn't
Resilience isn't toughness or suppression. Pushing feelings down and carrying on can look resilient from the outside, but research by Stanford psychologist James Gross shows that habitually suppressing emotions is linked to poorer wellbeing and weaker relationships. Real resilience includes feeling the hard things.
Resilience isn't never struggling. Resilient people still grieve, doubt and fall apart sometimes. The difference is that they find their way back.
Resilience isn't bouncing back to exactly who you were. Often it's bouncing forward: adapting into a slightly different version of yourself, shaped by what you've been through.
Resilience isn't purely individual. Psychologist Michael Ungar's research emphasises that resilience depends heavily on the resources around us: relationships, community, financial security, access to support. Asking people to be more resilient without changing an environment that's harming them misses the point.
What the research tells us about resilience
Three findings have shaped how I think about resilience more than any others.
One caring person can change everything. Psychologist Emmy Werner followed nearly 700 children born on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1955 for more than 40 years. About a third grew up with multiple serious risk factors, such as poverty, family conflict or parental mental illness. Yet one in three of those high-risk children grew into competent, caring adults. The most consistent protective factor was at least one stable, caring relationship with an adult who believed in them. It's the reason I care so much about mentoring.
Resilience is the norm, not the exception. Columbia University psychologist George Bonanno's research on loss and trauma found that most people are far more resilient than we assume. After even very painful events, the most common pattern is a period of distress followed by a return to healthy functioning, not long-term collapse.
Some adversity can strengthen us. A large study led by Mark Seery found that people who'd experienced some adversity in their lives reported better mental health and wellbeing than both people with a great deal of adversity and people with none at all. Manageable challenges, worked through with support, appear to build capacity for the next one.
8 strategies for building resilience
1. Build connection, and let yourself lean on it
If the research had to be summed up in one sentence, it would be this: resilience is built in relationship. Strong, supportive relationships provide emotional support, perspective and practical help when things are hard. Being around calm, safe people even helps regulate your nervous system. In one well-known study, psychologist James Coan found that holding a trusted partner's hand reduced the brain's response to threat.
Resilient people don't go it alone. They reach out, ask for help, and let people in, which often takes more courage than coping solo. And connection works both ways: being there for others builds your own sense of purpose and capability too. If your support network has thinned out, creating deeper, healthier connections is a good place to start.
2. Name and regulate your emotions
Emotional awareness is the foundation of resilience. You can't manage what you can't recognise. Something as simple as naming what you feel helps: a 2007 brain-imaging study led by Matthew Lieberman at UCLA found that putting feelings into words reduced activity in the amygdala, the brain's alarm centre.
Beyond naming, resilience depends on having ways to bring your nervous system back down when it's activated: slow breathing, grounding, movement, journalling and rest. My guide to emotional regulation tools for adults covers the practices I use most with clients.
3. Change how you explain setbacks to yourself
How you interpret a setback shapes how quickly you recover from it. Psychologist Martin Seligman's research on explanatory style found that people who see setbacks as permanent ("this will always be hard"), pervasive ("this ruins everything") and personal ("this is all my fault") struggle far more to recover than people who see them as temporary, specific and partly situational.
This isn't positive thinking. It's accurate thinking. When something goes wrong, ask: What does this tell me about this situation, rather than about who I am? Pair that with self-compassion, the research-backed alternative to harsh self-criticism, and you have one of the most powerful resilience skills there is. There's more on this in how to stay motivated in the face of setbacks.
4. Focus on what you can control
Psychologist Julian Rotter described locus of control: the degree to which people believe outcomes are shaped by their own actions rather than external forces. Feeling some sense of control is consistently linked with better coping under stress.
In hard times, it helps to literally divide a page into two columns: what I can influence and what I can't. Put your energy into the first column, and practise letting the second one go. You can't control a redundancy, a diagnosis or someone else's choices. You can control your next step, who you reach out to, and how you speak to yourself.
5. Solve problems in small steps
Big challenges can feel paralysing because they're so big. Resilience often comes down to breaking a problem into manageable pieces and taking one small action at a time.
Each small step does more than move you forward. It rebuilds what psychologist Albert Bandura called self-efficacy, your belief that your actions can make a difference. Bandura found that mastery experiences, actually succeeding at something, are the most powerful way to build that belief. So start smaller than feels meaningful. The win is the point.
6. Look after the foundations
Resilience is much harder to access when you're running on empty. Sleep, movement, food and rest aren't optional extras. They're the physical foundation that emotional resilience is built on. Sleep in particular has a direct effect: research from Matthew Walker's group found that sleep-deprived people showed around 60% more amygdala reactivity to negative images than rested people.
Protecting those foundations often means setting boundaries around your time and energy. And if you're consistently depleted, it's worth checking for the early signs of burnout, because resilience can't be built on an empty tank.
7. Practise flexibility
George Bonanno's later research found that what predicts resilience isn't using one "right" coping strategy, but flexibility: reading what a situation needs and adjusting your response. Sometimes the resilient move is to push forward, sometimes to rest. Sometimes it's to express emotion, sometimes to set it aside until later.
Flexibility also means accepting change as part of life rather than resisting it. Change often feels uncomfortable even when it's good, a pattern I explore in why change feels so uncomfortable. It helps to remember times you've already adapted to change successfully. You have more evidence of your own resilience than you probably give yourself credit for.
8. Find meaning in what you're facing
Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps, wrote that people can endure almost anything if they have a sense of why. Meaning doesn't make hardship good, but it makes it bearable, and it gives you direction.
Meaning often comes from your values: what you care about, who you want to be, what you want to protect or contribute. Gratitude helps too. Psychologist Robert Emmons' research found that regularly noting what you're grateful for is linked with greater wellbeing, even in difficult seasons. If you're not sure what matters most to you right now, identifying your core life priorities is a good place to begin.
Building resilience in young people
Because my study focused on youth mentoring, I'm often asked how parents, teachers and mentors can help young people become more resilient. The research is strikingly consistent: the single biggest factor is a stable, caring relationship with at least one adult who believes in them.
Beyond that, young people build resilience by being allowed to face manageable challenges, rather than being shielded from all difficulty, and by having support to work through them. Paediatrician Kenneth Ginsburg's widely used "7 Cs" framework is a helpful guide: competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping and control. Supporting even one or two of these makes a real difference.
When resilience isn't the answer
Resilience is valuable, but it isn't always what's needed. If you're in an environment that's genuinely harmful (a toxic workplace, an unsafe relationship, ongoing discrimination), the answer isn't simply to become more resilient to it. Sometimes the most resilient thing you can do is recognise that something needs to change, and seek support to change it.
And if you're struggling with persistent low mood, anxiety or trauma, resilience strategies are a complement to professional support, not a substitute for it. Please talk to your GP, or in New Zealand, call or text 1737 any time to talk with a trained counsellor.
Start with one
Resilience isn't built all at once. It's built through ordinary moments: reaching out instead of withdrawing, naming a feeling instead of pushing it down, taking one small step instead of none. Choose one strategy from this list and practise it this week. That's how resilience grows.
If you'd like support building resilience through a difficult season, or simply want to feel more steady and capable in how you handle what life throws at you, that's the heart of my coaching work. I work with clients one-to-one in Palmerston North and online across New Zealand, and the first session is free.
Book your free introductory session with Elise →
Resilience questions people ask
Can resilience be learned?
Yes. Research consistently shows resilience is built from learnable skills and supportive relationships, not a fixed personality trait. Ann Masten called it "ordinary magic" for exactly this reason.
What are the 7 Cs of resilience?
Developed by paediatrician Kenneth Ginsburg, the 7 Cs are competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping and control. They're most often used to support resilience in children and teenagers.
What's the difference between resilience and mental toughness?
Mental toughness usually means pushing through. Resilience is broader: it includes feeling and processing difficult emotions, asking for help, adapting and recovering, not just enduring.
What is the most important factor in resilience?
Across decades of research, supportive relationships are the most consistent protective factor, especially having at least one person who genuinely believes in you.
How long does it take to build resilience?
Resilience grows gradually through practice and experience. Most people notice small changes, like recovering from setbacks a little faster, within weeks of practising specific strategies consistently.
Elise O'Shea is a life coach based in Palmerston North, New Zealand, with a Master's in Psychology from Massey University specialising in resilience and youth mentoring. She works one-to-one with clients in person and online, and is the creator of the Quarter-Life Reset framework.
