The short answer to that question is… generally the same as it meant in any other time. Resilience is the ability to cope with challenging situations or bouncing back from situations you didn’t cope with. That means there are two separate aspects: coping and bouncing back. It is true that the situations we may find ourselves in from are different to those experienced 40 years ago, or even 10 years ago. It is also true that our capacity to bounce back or cope has always exceeded specific issues. That range presently includes lack of social media engagement, dealing with rising inflation and stagnant salaries or the continuous hardships caused by being in a war-torn country.

There are two distinctly different ways to gain resilience. If both are attempted, resilience is pretty much guaranteed. The first way involves travelling back, first to almost 2,000 years to focus on two Stoicist philosophers, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. Stoicism is a philosophy that promotes resilience as a core principle. Stoicist ideas provide the general framework for two evidence-based therapeutic approaches, Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy (REBT) and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT). Stoicism has a few core tenets and one of them is the idea that our experience is much more impacted by our attitude rather than our current situation.

Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor and Epictetus was a slave. This is – I believe – an exemplary demonstration that this is a useful philosophy to adopt regardless of your life circumstances. We can reinforce this idea by jumping to Vietnam, 1965, and focusing on a prisoner of war, James Stockdale. He was held captive for more than seven years and attributed his survival to the teachings of Epictetus, using them to endure consistent and extreme mistreatment.

You can meticulously build a well-armoured fortress of resilience furnished with philosophical ideas but there is a less challenging way to attain resilience; resuming old behaviour is usually a lot easier than learning something new.

I’ve written a book that was recently published entitled, ‘Find Your Path to Resilience’. I mention in its first few pages that it could have been called, ‘Find Many Paths Back to Resilience’ as this is an ability we all had when we were younger.

We are born disinhibited – we’re inherently expressive, resilient, curious, we seek enjoyment, we have a natural growth mindset, but changes are made when we have negative experiences. That’s when we inhibit behaviours - we learn to not be expressive, or curious or resilient etc. because we want to avoid the predicted negative emotional consequences.

When a toddler learns how to walk, it’s possibly the hardest thing they’ve done so far but they keep going. We are hardwired to be resilient; it’s part of our DNA but we stopped and that means we can resume.  We could find it much easier to resume if we understand the reason why we stopped and that has everything to do with how we think and feel.

There’s a special relationship between perception and emotion. Highlighting this relationship explains why the intensity of our emotions varies. Our emotions stem from our perception – what we feel is directly connected to what we perceive. The general cause of the emotion is easy to explain but the intensity of that emotion is slightly harder. Our specific emotions are the result of a subconscious calculation. We have a view of how reality is and we compare that to our view of how we want reality to be or how we think it should be. Our emotions are a product of that difference.

I can use the emotion of disappointment to illustrate. Our level of disappointment is determined by the difference between an expectation of what is hoped for and what happens. So, if we’re expecting an experience to be +5 but it’s only +1, we are likely to feel -4 disappointment.

I discuss emotions comprehensively in the book, but I’ll attempt to simplify the process here by comparing our emotional responses to traffic lights. These lights help communicate our current internal state to other people. At the green light, we’re feeling good and we want the current situation to continue. At the amber light, we’re feeling neutral and we’re in a state of emotional rest. When the red light is showing, we’re experiencing negative emotions and that means there’s something we don’t like – we want the situation stopped or changed. These lights are controlled by our subconscious, but we can influence them by reframing.

Reframing means looking at the same thing in a different way or telling yourself another narrative and there are different types. One involves changing the narrative because it’s not entirely accurate; you may not have all the information, or you may have misinterpreted information you do have. Another type of reframing involves changing the emotion because it’s not helping you as much as you think it is.

The trauma response and one of its main symptoms, anxiety, changes how the red light works – it’s now a lot more sensitive. This is potentially the biggest obstacle to resilience. We think about being resilient and the red light comes on. We think it’s a lot easier to not be resilient and deal with those consequences rather than dealing with the predicted consequences of being resilient. Proving our predictions to be false is the best way to resolve trauma of any intensity based on any negative experience. The quickest most effective way to resolve trauma I’ve been exposed to is a process called memory reconsolidation.

Reframing helps us change narratives that aren’t accurate or helpful. Memory reconsolidation in some ways is a type of synaptic reframing. Instead of focusing on the accuracy of the narrative or the function of the consequent emotion, it targets the neural pathway that stores the trauma response. Neural pathways are bundles of brain cells that work together to prompt automatic responses. This neural pathway is based on a prediction. If we activate the trauma response and experience a prediction error, we will be able to edit the neural pathway. If we repeat the prediction error, the neural pathway will be overwritten.

This process differs from other forms of trauma treatment, which aim to create another neural pathway. The downside to that is the original neural pathway is still there so there’s always a chance of relapse. In fact, the historic response is probably the one you’re going to resort to during times of stress because it’s more familiar. With increased understanding of neuroscience, and developments in psychotherapy, chronic trauma need not exist, which means resilience would not be an issue at any time.

To definitively answer the original question, we can condition sensible ideas for ironclad resilience. We can also understand our emotions better and, in doing so, be happier and resolve trauma and anxiety easier. These are two sure-fire ways of guaranteeing ever-present and impenetrable resilience. The present time isn’t more challenging than any other time. Even if it were, taking a few things onboard, our capacity to withstand challenges can increase significantly while the time it takes us to bounce back can be significantly reduced. 

Find Your Path to Resilience by Byron Athene | 9781836006978 | Leaping Hare Press | £7.99