A death in the family, a rent increase or trouble at work - many events can trigger stress. And everyone reacts to them differently. Why some people seem to be able to cope better than others is being researched in psychology under the term "individual resilience".
The focus of research here is not on the event that triggers the stress, but on the human behavior that enables recovery from it. This paradigm shift is based on the medical principle of salutogenesis (see Antonovsky 1997): the focus is not on what makes people ill, but on how they can get well and stay well.
Since its origins in the 1970s, individual resilience research has been characterized by disagreement. As is so often the case, researchers cannot agree on what exactly constitutes a resilient individual, nor how exactly one becomes resilient in the first place. It is therefore still necessary to define one's own understanding of resilience for each research project.
When comparing different definitions, two terms usually emerge, which we summarize as adversity and positive adaptation (see Fletcher & Sarkar 2013, p. 13f).
Two components: Adversity & Adaption
The two main components take on the role of the trigger (adversity) and the reaction (positive adaptation). Both are equally crucial for the occurrence of resilience, but offer scope as to what exactly is meant by them.
The term adversity literally translates to misfortune, need or accident in German (see Langenscheidt), although in the context of psychological resilience research it is used more synonymously with stressor (see Böhme 2019) or shock (see Brunnermeier 2021). It always refers to an event that interrupts the individual's everyday life and thus triggers stress. The "size" of this event remains variable, so it can include a temporary challenge as well as a global disaster; the decisive factor is the significance for the stressed individual. As already discussed in an earlier blog post, crisis is also a term for such an event. Cullberg (2008, p. 17) defines a crisis on an individual level as a "loss of emotional equilibrium [...] when a person is confronted with events or life circumstances that they cannot cope with at the moment because they exceed their previous problem-solving abilities". This definition in particular shows that adversities often result in a loss of control or paralysis (see Bünder 2020) - without a solution in sight, giving up seems inevitable.
To avoid this reaction, the principle of resilience provides for a positive adaptation to the crisis instead. Positive, because a resilient adaptation to the crisis always means an upward movement - either I come back from the low of the crisis to my previous everyday life (or have never lost it), or even change it by learning from the crisis and improving myself. Leipold and Greve (2009, p. 41), for example, decide to include both movements in their definition and describe individual resilience as "an individual's stability or quick recovery (or even growth) under significant adverse conditions".
Resilient or not resilient - is that the question?
Resilience (i.e. how we deal with crises) is therefore determined by the relationship between adversity and positive adaptation. But why does this ratio vary so much from person to person and why are we not all equally resilient?
In the initial phase of psychological resilience research, attempts were made to explain differences through personality traits and characteristics. Accordingly, it was assumed, for example, that an optimistic, self-effective, believing person would generally react more resiliently to crises than a person who did not have these characteristics. This goes hand in hand with the fact that individual resilience itself was regarded as a trait, i.e. a kind of state that remains measurable even outside of crises, as an individual either possesses it or not (see Hoffmann 2017, 57f).
In the 1990s, however, this principle was lost, as scientists looked less for characteristics that make a person resilient and instead focused on the process that characterizes the reaction to a crisis as resilient. Resilience is therefore not a kind of magic formula of certain personality traits, but rather the ability to adapt to new circumstances. This view of resilience emphasizes its changeability: individual resilience can vary situationally, be learned or even lost again, depending on the type of adversity and the interaction between the individual and their environment (see Fletcher & Sarkar 2013, p. 13).
Despite the broad conceptual acceptance of resilience as a changeable ability, personality traits remain important. However, instead of seeing them as fixed components of individual resilience, they are now regarded as resilience factors. These are supportive factors that enable or facilitate the process of positive adaptation (see Kalisch et al. 2017). In psychology, they are divided into protective factors and promotive factors, i.e. those that protect the individual from the crisis and those that promote healing if the individual is affected by the crisis (see Fletcher & Sarkar 2013). In addition to personal factors such as optimism and self-efficacy (see Gilan, Helmreich & Hahad 2021), they also include external factors (educational opportunities, finances, social environment, etc.) and learned skills such as coping strategies. All of these resilience factors interact with each other and enable me to perceive them in a situation-specific manner - more or less consciously - and to shape my own resilience processes (see Hoffmann 2017, 61ff).
One for all - all for one
Resilience is obviously a complicated concept, as it is extremely individual and multifactorial. Ultimately, every social system in which a person is embedded, whether family, workplace or society, plays a role in the development of resilience. A resilient individual can therefore never be viewed in isolation from their environment. The greatest potential for promoting individual resilience therefore lies in the systematic development of resilience factors at a community level (see Doppelt 2023). As soon as individual resilience is recognized and actively promoted as a general ability that can be learned and improved, it will not only mean a large number of resilient individuals, but also a more resilient society. In this sense, Brunnermeier (2021, p. 26) writes "A society as a whole is resilient when all, or at least most, people have the ability to respond in a way that allows them to bounce back." The responsibility to increase individual resilience therefore lies not (only) with the individual, but also with the community - from local to global.
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