24 Evidence-Based Ways to Train and Track Resilience
Resilience has emerged as key to health and recovery from traumatic experiences.
Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Jonathan DePierro, Ph.D., about his newly updated book Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges. DePierro is associate director of the Center for Stress, Resilience and Personal Growth (CSRPG) at New York’s Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine. The book provides pragmatic practices based on years of clinical research with Vietnam veterans, 9/11 recovery workers, and others, backed up by inspiring stories of endurance and transformation.
What Is Resilience, and How Can I Build It Up?
Resilience can be hard to measure, and many longstanding ways to assess resilience, while helpful, have fallen short. For instance, resilience is not simply the absense of post- traumatic stress disorder; it is the presence of health and, often (but by no means exclusively), accompanied by post-traumatic growth.
Regardless, resilience serves to buffer PTSD such that people with greater resilience are less likely to develop pathological outcomes following significant trauma. Not only that, but while many aspects of resilience are innate (related to biological factors…
