Emotional resilience: what is it and how do we develop it?

By Dr Anthony Lewis

Humanists seek to ‘be happy’ but recognise this isn’t always possible amid life’s suffering. Emotional resilience enables us to face adversity, adapt, and recover from life’s crises without lasting harm. Rather than avoiding difficulty, resilience involves learning from our experiences, and from other people. By balancing emotion and reason, emotional resilience helps us to pursue a meaningful and connected life.

Anthony is Chair of Watford Humanists.

A central plank of the humanist outlook on life is to seek happiness and fulfilment. Unfortunately, suffering is an unavoidable consequence of being alive. So being happy all the time is impossible, and it is inappropriate when we face the worst vicissitudes of life. Nothing fully prepares any of us for the direct experience of the death of a loved one or serious personal illness or injury. These are the hardest paths in life to endure and bear.

As conscious beings, we possess the awareness that our lives are book-ended by inevitable non-existence. This exposes us, as mortal sentient creatures, to the need to find purpose in our lives against the backdrop of individual insignificance in the greater scheme of things. The human condition has always been about coming to terms with an indifferent natural and human social world in order to find individual happiness and purpose.

Our lives are book-ended by our non existence. Source: Unsplash+

Our natural sensitivity to threats

Evolution has endowed us with greater sensitivity to threats rather than the more positive opportunities of life. This bias has helped us survive in the brutal natural world. Our current apocalyptic fears, as implied by the theme of this issue, are far from new. Across history, many generations have believed that they were facing the end times. Other humans can provide succour and support to us, but they can also pose serious threats, both physically and to our mental wellbeing and ultimate happiness. Finding happiness amid these perpetual natural and human threats, and our ever-present collective fear of dystopian annihilation, has been a constant of human existence.

What is emotional resilience?

The ability to navigate these contradictions, and chart our own path in life, requires emotional resilience. This capacity can help us attune our expectations to the realities of the natural and human worlds so that we can face life’s many ups and downs and, despite everything, live happy and fulfilling lives. Emotional resilience is the ability to adapt to life’s stressful situations and adversity, and recover from its inevitable challenges without lasting damage. Rather than avoiding stress or ‘never failing’, it is the capacity to process difficult emotions with renewed strength, insight, and a clearer perspective. It is a skill that can be developed and strengthened through life experiences and by building an accurate understanding of ourselves and the impact we have on others and the world around us.

Understanding our emotions stretches our cognitive abilities. Source: Unsplash+

Our ‘internal models’ of reality – correcting misconceptions and delusions

Fundamental to building such emotional resilience is the ability to perceive and understand the world as we find it – its dangers, its opportunities, and our place in it, while also dealing with our important relationships with other human beings. This is a continuous and complex learning process that often stretches our cognitive abilities. Modern neuroscience and psychology have demonstrated that we all build internal models of reality to help us navigate ourselves through life and guide us on how to behave and react in different situations. These internal models can be helpful when they match reality but can also be very harmful for us if they are inaccurate or flawed in some way. This can be due to our own psychological make-up, temperament, disposition, upbringing, or traumatic experiences. We are impacted by both nature and nurture. 

All these factors can distort our mental models and perceptions. Working out who you are as a person and what impact you have on others and the world can be very difficult. Much of the therapeutic process of counselling and psychotherapy is about correcting unhealthy misconceptions and delusions that we hold about ourselves and others, to help us lead more authentic and contented lives. Our mental models are thus in continual flux throughout our lives as they are adjusted in response to all the feedback we receive.

Understanding our impact on the world can be very difficult. Source: Unsplash+

How we develop emotional resilience

Such processes of understanding the world, ourselves and others are extremely complex and unfortunately there is no manual. We all have to ‘bootstrap ourselves up using our own shoelaces’ based on our own thoughts feelings, reactions and perceptions. It’s a process based on trial and error as we interact with the world. They require us to have sufficient awareness of our own internal emotional states and motivations. At the same time, we have to be able to observe, ‘read’, and understand the behaviours and motivations of others. Unravelling and understanding the reciprocal emotional impacts we all have on each other, at the same time as managing our own internal feelings and responses, forms an enormous part of what defines us as individuals.

There is a complex interplay between how we relate to others and how we interact with them, a major factor shaping our individual personalities. This is a continuously evolving process of social interaction and the forging of close emotional bonds. Modern science shows that we develop emotional resilience through this interplay between our emotions and our interactions with others as we mature into adulthood  – a process that continues throughout life. Neuroscientists suggest that a large proportion of brain activity is devoted to managing emotions and social connections, and have identified ‘mirror neurons’, which are thought to play a role in our ability to empathise with others.

Balancing the use of our hearts and heads is the very definition of being a wise person. Source: Unsplash+

Head and heart

Unfortunately, our emotions are among our most primitive responses: they evolved to keep us safe in the natural world, and they can be useful, but they also have a dark side. For example, love can become obsessive and anger can easily turn into hate. Our primal emotions, if left unchecked, can become like a herd of wild stallions: given too much room, they can stampede out of control and take over, damaging our lives and the lives of those around us. Collectively, they can lead us to war; personally, they can contribute to mental illness. Developing emotional resilience, then, is about maintaining a healthy balance between our emotions and our capacity for critical, rational thought. Getting this balance right is the essence of wisdom: using our heads to make reasoned choices, and our hearts to empathise with ourselves and others. Our emotions can help direct our attention to issues that need addressing, or to experiences we should appreciate and enjoy, but they are rarely the best basis for making important life decisions.

Desiderata by Max Ehrmann. Public Domain since 2023. Image from Pinterest.

Seeking and giving feedback

Developing emotional resilience is also about taking the time to honestly assess both our impact on the world and our reactions to it. All of us can seek feedback to help ground our perceptions from trusted loved ones, friends, family, and even professional therapists. We all have to find a way to understand ourselves. In this sense we are all ‘children’ when faced with the existential burdens of existence. But this also means that all of us possess valued insights that might help others. No one has a monopoly when it comes to facing life. So all of us can reach out directly to those around us for help and assistance. We can also draw on the great wisdom about the human condition written down in literature, for example, in the plays of Shakespeare and in poems such as Desiderata (attached above). Being involved in activities with other people – such as sports, outdoor pursuits, drama and other challenging activities – can also help us learn about ourselves, others and our characters, especially when we are younger. Through this focus on understanding ourselves we can learn to manage our expectations about life. We can develop adaptability to life’s crises, and exhibit flexibility when faced with life’s emergencies.

To summarise, emotional resilience is about learning how to manage the boundaries between yourself and your external world – and your responses to what life throws at you – with grace and good humour. It provides a ‘psychological immune system’ offering protection against anxiety, depression and burnout. It directly correlates with better physical health, stronger interpersonal relationships, and a greater capacity to make the most of your life. Maintaining emotional balance and resilience is an unavoidable and essential task that never stops while we are alive and connected to the world.

My own outlook on life is summed up by this humorous perspective that my dear departed friend James liked to quote, with a twinkle in his eyes, to the very end of his life, even when he was dying from cancer:

‘Life is like falling off a tall building; you can scream and wail the whole way down, or you can admire the view. The choice is yours. But whatever you choose, the end is the same.’