The word resilience gets used in ways that can feel discouraging. It tends to show up attached to people who seem to absorb difficulty without much visible struggle, who “bounce back” quickly, who appear constitutionally suited to hard things. If that is what resilience is, then it sounds less like something to cultivate and more like something you either have or you do not.
Two decades of research have made this clear: the capacity to recover is not fixed at birth. Resilience is a set of skills, and skills can be practised.
What the Research Actually Found
Ann Masten, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota, spent years studying children who thrived despite significant adversity, things like poverty, family instability, and community violence. What she found upended the earlier assumption that these children were simply exceptional. They were not outliers by nature. They were ordinary children with access to certain protective factors: caring relationships, some sense of efficacy, and basic regulatory skills.
Masten called this “ordinary magic.” Resilience, in her framework, is not a rare quality distributed unevenly across the population. It emerges when the right conditions are present. That is a fundamentally different picture from the “tough by nature” account, because it means the conditions can be built.
George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University, added a further complication to the popular account of resilience. His longitudinal research on grief and trauma found that the most common response to loss or adverse events is not prolonged struggle followed by gradual recovery. It is something closer to stability with fluctuation, what he calls the resilience trajectory. Most people, most of the time, maintain adequate functioning even in the face of significant difficulty. This does not mean they are unaffected. It means the capacity to continue is more widely distributed than we assume.
Key Insight: Ann Masten’s research showed that resilience in children emerges from protective conditions, not innate temperament. George Bonanno’s longitudinal studies found that stable functioning after adversity is the most common human response, not an exceptional one.
From Learned Helplessness to Learned Optimism
Martin Seligman’s contribution to this picture arrives from an unexpected direction. His early research, conducted in the 1960s, documented learned helplessness: the finding that animals and humans who experience uncontrollable negative events come to expect that their actions will make no difference, and stop trying, even when the situation changes and effort would actually help. Helplessness, it turns out, can be learned through repeated experience of uncontrollability.
But if helplessness is learned, Seligman reasoned, so is its opposite. His later work on explanatory style found that the way people habitually explain negative events to themselves has a measurable effect on their vulnerability to depression, their physical health, and their persistence in the face of setbacks. People who explain bad events as permanent, pervasive, and personal (“this always happens to me, everywhere, because of something I am”) are more vulnerable. People who explain them as temporary, specific, and external have a buffer. And the explanatory style, critically, can be changed through practice.
This work did not suggest that optimism is simply a matter of choosing to feel differently. It identified a cognitive skill: the ability to examine one’s own explanations for events and evaluate them more accurately. Seligman and colleagues developed training programmes around this skill, with measurable effects on depression prevention and wellbeing outcomes.
Broaden-and-Build: The Resource Base for Recovery
One of the most important contributions to understanding resilience comes from Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory, which we explore in more depth in the post on how positive emotions build lasting strength. The short version is this: positive emotions do not just feel good in the moment. They expand thinking and behaviour in ways that accumulate psychological resources over time, things like social connections, cognitive flexibility, and a sense of meaning.
These resources are not decorative. They are the material that resilience draws on when difficulty arrives. Someone who has cultivated genuine engagement in their work, warm relationships, and a sense of purpose has more to work with when things go wrong. The resources were built during the good periods and become protective during the hard ones.
This is why resilience is not primarily about crisis management. It is built in the quiet ordinary days, through the practices that accumulate positive emotional resources. Fredrickson’s research found that people with higher positivity ratios, not through forced positivity, but through genuine engagement with meaningful experience, showed greater psychological resilience and faster physiological recovery from stress.
Key Insight: Barbara Fredrickson’s research found that positive emotions build psychological resources over time, and these resources function as a buffer when adversity arrives. Resilience is constructed during the ordinary days, not only tested in the difficult ones.
A Repertoire, Not a Trait
Perhaps the most useful reframe in the resilience literature is the shift from asking “am I a resilient person?” to asking “what is in my repertoire?” Resilience researchers increasingly describe it not as a fixed quality but as a dynamic process, one that depends on available skills, accessible resources, and supportive context.
A repertoire might include the ability to regulate strong emotion without suppressing it, the skill of maintaining perspective during setbacks, the capacity to reach for social support rather than withdraw, and the flexibility to shift strategies when one approach is not working. None of these are innate. All of them respond to practice.
For anyone thinking about their own wellbeing, the distinction matters. If resilience is a trait, the question is whether you were lucky enough to receive it. If it is a skill set, the question is where to begin building it. The PERMA model offers a useful map here: engagement, relationships, and meaning are all domains that, when cultivated deliberately, contribute to the resource base that resilience draws on.
The capacity to recover is not a personality type. It is something closer to a garden, built slowly, tended regularly, and most useful when the weather turns.
Remember: Asking whether you are resilient is less useful than asking which resilience skills are available to you and which might be worth developing further.
If building that repertoire is something you are thinking about, the Upward Spiral program was designed with exactly this kind of gradual, evidence-based skill development in mind.
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Upward Spiral is a 52-week program grounded in positive psychology and neuroscience, designed for people who are functioning but not flourishing. Each week builds on the last. Learn more and start your free trial.
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