“How do I become more resilient?”
It is a question many people ask, especially during difficult periods in life. The usual answers tend to focus on what we should do: develop coping strategies, think more positively, talk to others, look after ourselves. All of this has value. And yet, for many people, something still does not quite shift.
There is another, less discussed question that sits underneath this one: what is it that makes our inner experience so overwhelming in the first place?
Resilience is often described as the ability to cope with adversity, to keep going in the face of difficulty. There is something valid in that. Effort matters. Responsibility matters. At times, a degree of toughness is necessary.
Phrases like “keep calm and carry on” have endured for a reason. They point to a capacity to remain functional, to continue acting even when things are not ideal.
However, effort on its own has limits. Many people reach a point where they feel they are constantly managing themselves: regulating thoughts, ‘controlling’ emotions, using coping strategies. It can begin to feel like hard work just to stay afloat.
You might hear this in therapy as: “I know what I’m supposed to do, I just feel tired of having to do it all the time.”
Part of the difficulty lies in when we try to intervene.
Once we are fully caught in anxiety, anger, or distress, our options narrow. At that point, we are no longer choosing freely; we are trying to manage something that already has momentum. It is a bit like trying to regain balance after we have already started to fall.
Many psychological tools are designed for this stage, and they can be helpful. But if we rely on them exclusively, resilience becomes a reactive process. We wait until we feel overwhelmed, and then try to bring ourselves back.
This is where an important shift in perspective can help: resilience may not only be about coping better once we are overwhelmed, but about becoming less easily overwhelmed in the first place.
To understand this, we need to look more closely at the role of the mind.
As William Shakespeare famously wrote, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” This is not to say that events do not matter. Of course they do. But our interpretation of events plays a powerful role in shaping how we experience them.
Thoughts tend to arise quickly and automatically. We make sense of situations, anticipate outcomes, replay conversations, imagine worst-case scenarios. None of this is unusual; it is part of how the mind works.
The difficulty begins when we become fully absorbed in these thoughts, taking them at face value and reacting to them as if they were real. What might have been a manageable situation can become overwhelming, not only because of what is happening, but because of how the mind engages with it.
In this sense, much of what we experience as distress is not only about the situation itself, but about the additional layer created by our thinking.
Long before modern psychology, traditions such as Yoga and Buddhism described a related idea, often referred to as equanimity.
Equanimity does not mean indifference or emotional numbness. It is not about suppressing feelings or pretending that difficulties do not matter. Rather, it refers to a steadiness of mind – an ability to remain balanced in the face of both pleasant and unpleasant experiences.
In practical terms, this means being able to notice thoughts and emotions without immediately being pulled along by them. There is a small but important gap between what we experience and how we respond to it.
When that gap is absent, reactions are automatic and often intense. When it is present, even briefly, there is more room to respond.
Interestingly, this idea is not limited to Eastern traditions. Modern psychological approaches have begun to emphasise a similar shift.
For example, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy focuses less on changing the content of thoughts and more on changing our relationship to them. Rather than trying to eliminate difficult thoughts or feelings, the aim is to notice them, allow them, and still act in ways that are aligned with what matters.
This does not remove difficulty from life, but it can reduce how much we are internally unsettled by it.
In practice, this kind of resilience is subtle. It is not about dramatic transformations or constant calm.
It might look like noticing a thought such as “I can’t cope with this” and recognising it as a thought, rather than an ‘absolute truth’. It might involve feeling anxious without immediately escalating that anxiety through further worry. It might simply mean returning attention to what actually needs to be done, rather than becoming caught in a loop of mental commentary.
These are small shifts, but over time they change the overall tone of how we experience things. At a certain point, resilience stops being about doing more, and starts being about being less caught up in your own mind.
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