How Resilient Are You?
Not how much you can take. How quickly you come back.
Resilience is usually pictured as toughness - the amount you can absorb before something breaks. The people who measure it define it far more narrowly and more usefully: it is the speed of return. Not whether a bad month knocked you over, which happens to everyone, but how long you stayed down. The finding that reshaped this field is also the most reassuring one in psychology: after serious adversity, recovering well is not the rare outcome. It is the most common one.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you have been over the last year or two, across ordinary setbacks rather than one enormous event.
What it measures
The first bar is resilience as the researchers define it - the speed of coming back. The other two are not parts of it; they are the two resources that most reliably turn up alongside it in the research, and they are shown separately because they are the ones you can actually change.
Based on: Brief Resilience Scale (Smith et al., 2008) and resilience research (Bonanno, 2004)
Possible results
Coming back
How long you stay down after something knocks you over.
Someone to call
Whether help is available and whether you use it.
Room to move
How many ways you have of responding.
Common questions
Is resilience something you are born with?
Partly, in the same loose way most traits are, but the more useful finding is how much of it sits outside the person. Recovery depends heavily on what is available - people, money, time, whether the difficulty arrived alone or with four others - and those vary enormously and are not distributed fairly. Someone recovering slowly from a bad year may have had far more to recover from, and treating resilience as a personal quality quietly turns that into a fault.
Does resilience mean not being affected?
No, and that misreading does real harm. In the studies, people who recover well are visibly upset at the time - the difference is in the trajectory afterwards, not in the reaction. Someone who reports feeling nothing after a serious loss is not describing resilience; they are describing something else that the research treats separately. The measure is how long, not how much.
How do I become more resilient?
Not by trying to raise the first bar, which is the outcome rather than the mechanism. The two things with the most evidence behind them are unexciting and both appear here: having at least one person you actually tell, and having more than one way of responding when the first does not work. Everything else people recommend tends to operate through one of those two. The unromantic additions are sleep and load - both change recovery speed measurably, and both are usually the first things sacrificed during exactly the period when they matter most.
Sources
- Smith, B. W., Dalen, J., Wiggins, K., Tooley, E., Christopher, P., & Bernard, J. (2008). The Brief Resilience Scale: Assessing the ability to bounce back. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine.
- Bonanno, G. A. (2004). Loss, trauma, and human resilience: Have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events?. American Psychologist.
An honest note One point about the structure. The scale the first bar is adapted from was deliberately built to measure a single thing - the ability to bounce back - and it was found to behave as one unified construct rather than several. So the first bar is resilience as that research defines it, and the other two are not components of it: they are resources that consistently appear alongside recovery in the wider literature, shown separately because they are the parts that can actually be changed. Three limits. All of it is self-report about the past, and memory for how long a bad period lasted is not reliable. The result moves with circumstances: almost everyone scores lower during a difficult stretch, so this reads your current conditions as much as your disposition. And resilience is not a duty - the finding that most people recover well is meant as reassurance, not as a standard to be measured against. If a difficult period is not lifting, that is a reason to get help, not evidence of a low score.