How To Be More Resilient
A scientific dive into the mental strength
Post Summary
Being mentally tough and resilient can boost your mental and physical health, make life easier, and help you achieve more.
The problem: Popular portrayals of mental toughness are wrong.
And building mental toughness isn’t a cakewalk. It requires dedication to various techniques and strategies.
Our writer dove into the science and research and discovered what really makes us mentally tougher.
You’ll learn the new science of resilience and four research backed strategies for mental toughness.
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The post
Today’s post is by David Silverberg. David is a top-notch science journalist. His work has appeared in BBC News, The Washington Post, New Scientist, MIT Technology Review, and more.
Today he’s with us to write about resilience. David dove into the science and talked to some of the world’s leading experts to learn the truth about mental toughness. Here’s David:
What mental toughness is (and isn’t)
“Mental toughness” is one of those nebulous concepts that can be hard to pin down, even though it’s a popular catchphrase.
Its associated idioms include “grit it out” and “mind over matter.” That idea of toughness is imprinted in popular culture, ranging from self-help books to Navy SEAL boot camp courses to Masterclass sessions.
But that approach isn’t how researchers view mental toughness—and it might be doing more harm than good.
Real mental toughness is complex. The literature suggests we can think of it as a multidimensional psychological strength. It’s the ability to perform consistently under different stress levels, bounce back from setbacks, adapt to challenging situations, and maintain a positive outlook despite difficulties.
In other words, mental toughness isn’t about ignoring and pushing through pain at all costs—it’s about responding intelligently to life’s challenges and framing them in a way that helps you.
The benefits of mental toughness
New research is unpacking the benefits of this type of mental toughness:
Improved health and longevity
A 2024 study published in BMJ Mental Health found that resilience, perseverance, and optimism “were associated with a reduced risk of all-cause mortality… Triggering these positive emotions may enhance the protective effects of psychological resilience and mitigate the negative impact of accumulated adversity on mental health in adults.”
Better physical activity levels
Another study from 2024 linked higher resilience levels to stronger levels of moderate and vigorous physical activity among seniors. In short, these seniors were able to frame the trials of exercise as a necessary buy-in to better health and well-being.
Enhanced performance
One study on trail runners found that mental toughness and resilience accounted for 21 percent of performance differences between runners. This study gave runners a questionnaire about how they viewed challenges—for example, it asked to what degree they viewed threats as opportunities and how they viewed difficulties—and compared the data to their running performance. Those with the highest resilience scores had faster times.
How to build true mental toughness
Here are four ideas from the research and my conversations with some of the leading experts:
1. See setbacks as signals
I spoke to Greg Everett, an Oregon-based Olympic weightlifting coach. A few years ago, Everett mentored Eliise Peterson, the Estonian Olympic weightlifter. Peterson hadn’t been training for months due to a back injury, and she contacted Everett to get back to competition.
“She was very negative about herself, and a big part of that came from other coaches who told her to suck it up,” he told me of Peterson. She believed pain was weakness leaving the body, injury was inevitable, and that she should shut up and keep gritting it out—which had only hurt her.
Everett went a different route: Beyond the physical conditioning, he asked Peterson to start seeing pain as “an indication that something needs to be changed in training or recovery, and that (Peterson should) communicate with her coach when things were hurting, or something was wrong.”
She drastically improved and began winning more.
The lesson: