Resilience: How adversity builds character. How to effectively deal with stress

It’s often been said that adversity builds character. How does this work? Research on resilience suggests a metaphor: Comparing the building of resilience with the building of strength through physical exercise.

You cannot get stronger without exercising (say, for instance, lifting weights). For the training to be significant, you have to go beyond your comfort zone. But, if you lift weights that are way too heavy for you, you get injured. Then, not only do you not get stronger, you’re not even able to exercise any more, until the injury is healed.

The practical implications are very clear:
- You need to be challenged in order to grow. As you successfully overcome challenges, you build resilience, i.e. the ability to successfully face other challenges.
- But, if the challenges are overwhelming, i.e. too far beyond your capacity to handle adversity, you get traumatized. I use the word “traumatized” to describe a situation that is similar to the physical injury that comes from exercising way beyond your abilities: This reduces your capacity to function effectively, let alone face adversity. You can’t make significant progress until this is healed.

Hence the following five characteristics of effectively dealing with stress:

1. The goal is not to avoid any and all stress, but to improve your ability to deal with stress.

2. Managing stress is not some esoteric quality that you have or don’t have in your genes. It is a learning process: You are faced with something difficult; you engage with the challenge, and learn from experience how to deal with it.

3. As you’re in the midst of a challenge, it is helpful to remember that there is a larger payoff. Think of what’s happening as part of a “continuing education” that builds up your resilience. This is similar to the way a yoga class, or a run, or a workout have the larger payoff of helping to shape who you are.

4. To the extent possible, it is good to choose your challenges, to calibrate the level of difficulty you’re facing. It is not useful, and it can actually be very harmful, to keep pushing very hard to do things that are way beyond your capacity.

5. When you find yourself unable to move forward, either consciously resistant to change, or unconsciously avoidant… it probably means that something needs to be healed before you can move on, very much the way that a severe muscle sprain requires healing before you can resume your exercise program.