How to Become Resilient [SOLVED POCAST]

Brief Summary

This episode of the Solved Podcast explores the concept of resilience, moving beyond the traditional definition of "bouncing back" to a more nuanced understanding of adaptation and growth through adversity. It emphasizes that resilience is not about suppressing emotions but about managing them effectively. The podcast is structured into three main sections: the biology of resilience, mental practices and mindsets, and the importance of social networks and community.

• Resilience is trainable and a moral duty.
• Resilience is about adapting and growing, not just bouncing back.
• Social connection is a key factor in resilience.

Introduction

Mark Manson and Drew Bernie introduce the episode's topic: resilience. They highlight the extensive research behind the episode, noting the PDF guide includes 164 citations. They encourage listeners to download the free PDF guide at solvepodcast.com/resilience and explore the membership at membership.solvepodcast.com for implementation tools and community support. The podcast is transitioning to a twice-monthly schedule, with the first episode of each month covering a major topic and the second focusing on a subtopic or related theme. The next episode will be on stoicism, featuring Ryan Holiday. Drew reassures listeners that resilience doesn't require emotionlessness and emphasizes its trainable nature.

Chapter 1: Reframing Resilience — Definitions & Misconceptions

The hosts discuss Ernest Shackleton's 1914 expedition to Antarctica as a case study in resilience. Despite facing extreme conditions, all 28 crew members survived. Resilience is defined not as avoiding pain but as effectively dealing with it, acting in one's best interest despite negative feelings. The hosts clarify that resilience isn't about suppressing or ignoring feelings but about not being controlled by them. The episode will cover the biology, mental practices, and social aspects of resilience, along with the hidden costs of being highly resilient. Mark shares his experience participating in an endurance race with minimal training to test resilience strategies.

The Word That Started It All

The term "resilience" originated in engineering, describing a material's ability to return to its original form after being bent or stressed. It entered psychological literature in the 1960s through the work of Norman Geese, who studied children thriving despite adverse circumstances. Geese used "resilience" to describe their ability to function despite difficult environments. However, the hosts argue that "anti-fragility" might be a more accurate term, as resilient individuals often improve and grow stronger through challenges, rather than simply returning to a baseline. The American Psychological Association (APA) defines resilience as adapting well to adversity and trauma, involving a dynamic process of successful adaptation and developable ability.

Bounce Forward, Not Back

Resilient people adapt to external circumstances in a highly functional way, leveraging events and emotions to their benefit. They don't bounce back to what they were before. Changing is scary, but resilient people are highly adaptive and flexible in dealing with setbacks and challenges. From the outside, resilient people may appear unchanged, but subtle transformations occur internally. Resilience is more common than people realize, with studies showing that 75-85% of people recover from extremely difficult events. The perception that trauma is debilitating is a minority case, though this perception is critically important and will be discussed further in the psychological section.

Chapter 2: Developmental and Biological Foundations of Resilience

The Swedish have a folk wisdom categorizing children as either "dandelion children" (resilient in any environment) or "orchid children" (fragile but thriving in perfect conditions). Research confirms that 70-80% of children are dandelions, while 20-30% are orchids. Resilience is more about environmental fit than inherent weakness. Orchid children can thrive with the right support and environment. Dr. Thomas Boyce and Bruce Ellis introduced the concept of "biological sensitivity to context," suggesting that some individuals are more sensitive to all environments, requiring specific environmental factors to thrive.

The Evolutionary Puzzle

The evolutionary advantage of "orchid" children lies in their malleability. They represent a high-risk, high-reward strategy for the species, thriving in good conditions while being more fragile in harsh ones. Examples include Charles Darwin, who was considered an "orchid" due to his sensitivity. Orchid personalities are often associated with brilliant artists, whose art is an adaptive reaction to their sensitivity. Nature has preserved the orchid style because it is a high-risk, high-reward phenotype, and it's a matter of finding the right fit and tools. There are different kinds of resilience, and "stay hard" is not the only way to approach it.

Chapter 3: Biological & Physiological Foundations

Resilience is deeply biological, involving the brain, gut, and heart. The anterior cingulate cortex, specifically the anterior medial cingulate cortex, acts as a "resilience engine" in the brain, allocating energy and deciding whether to push through or pull back. This brain region predicts outcomes, calculates cost versus value, monitors the body, adjusts expectations, and prepares the body for action. In more resilient people, this area downplays the cost of effort and overvalues the reward. Engaging in difficult activities leads to structural and functional differences in this brain region, including more gray matter and stronger connectivity with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Training Your Brain to Be More Resilient

The anterior cingulate cortex is trainable through social connection and aerobic exercise. People who exercise more have larger anterior cingulate cortices with higher gray matter density and more functional connectivity. Challenging the mind with cognitive tasks like reading, writing, and strategy games also helps exercise this resilience muscle. The HPA axis, the backbone of the stress system, is another biological factor influencing resilience. Resilient people have an adaptive stress response, experiencing a spike in stress hormones followed by a return to baseline. This system can be trained through meditation, CBT, exercise, nutrition, and sleep.

The HPA Axis: Our Central Stress Response System

Heart rate variability (HRV), the variation in time between heartbeats, is higher in more resilient people, reflecting their ability to adapt and respond to their environment. High HRV represents efficient toggling between stressful and resting responses. HRV is trainable through breathing exercises, aerobic exercise, meditation, and yoga. The vagus nerve acts as a reset button for the nervous system, and activating it can mean the difference between panic and calm. A high vagal tone, indicating good vagus nerve function, leads to better stress recovery, lower inflammation, and better emotion regulation.

Heart Rate Variability: The Resilience Rhythm

The vagus nerve can be trained through slow exhale breathing, humming, singing, cold exposure, and gargling. The bacteria in the stomach can shape mood, energy, and resilience. The gut produces neurotransmitters like serotonin, regulating immunity and emotional stability. A healthy gut biome is supported by eating 30+ different plant foods per week, daily fermented foods, and prebiotics. Quitting drinking can also improve gut health. The tighter one gets on lifestyle habits, the more sensitive one becomes to disrupting them. Resilience is not numbness but being sensitive and responsive.

Physiological Interventions

Maintaining a reserve through good nutrition and exercise is crucial for handling life's challenges. There are trade-offs, and resilience in one area doesn't guarantee resilience in another. However, strong physical health habits can spread to other areas of life. Exercise, specifically 150+ minutes of moderate to aerobic exercise per week, provides a controllable stress event that builds the resilience muscle. Consistent sleep, light exposure, and a good diet also contribute to this reserve.

Gut-Brain Axis

The hosts discuss the skepticism surrounding simple solutions like vagus nerve stimulation, emphasizing the importance of evidence-based approaches. The biology lays the foundation for psychological resilience, and taming the body can help tame the mind. Having control over one's body is a form of control over one's mind.

Chapter 4: Psychological, Philosophical & Evidence-Based Frameworks

The key to psychological resilience lies in finding the Goldilocks zone of pain: not too little, not too much, but just enough challenge to promote growth. This is known as stress inoculation training. Strong people are not strong by feeling good all the time, but by getting good at feeling bad and adapting to pain. This section breaks down resilience into five mindsets: anything is possible, stories are just stories, focus on what you control, make it fun, and assume a resilient identity.

The 5 Mindsets of Resilience

The dividing line between a small amount of pain and a meaningful amount of pain comes down to perception. The more you believe you're capable of doing something, the more likely you are to do it. The "manifestation" concept works when you're already in a struggle, not when you're seeking comfort. Resilience increases in proportion to your perceived ability to accomplish a task. The borders of the Goldilocks zone are perceptual: am I capable of handling this challenge, and is this meaningful?

Mindset #1: Anything Is Possible

The more you believe you're capable of doing something, the more likely you are to do it. The timing is very important here. The context is important. The borders of the Goldilocks zone are very much perceptual. Mindset number one is it's worth believing anything is possible.

Mindset #2: Stories Are Just Stories

Stories are just that. They're stories. Psychological safety system that that trip wire that tries to stop you halfway from doing the thing. It will a lot of stories and narratives will start emerging in your head. It's important to recognize that these things they're not necessarily true they're just stories. This comes from CBT. The central insight of CBT is that there's kind of this chain that happens inside of all of us, which is that our behaviors create emotions and then the emotions create thoughts and then the thoughts create behaviors.

MIndset #3: Focus on What You Control

The next mindset is a classic stoic mindset, which is focus on what you can control and ignore everything else. There's a little bit of a tie in here with acceptance and commitment therapy, which is essentially accepting the things that you cannot control.

Mindset #4: Make It Fun

Mindset four is make it fun. Find a way to make it enjoyable. When Shackleton came back with all of his men, obviously it was like a a huge story at the time. And when they asked him how they survived, the number one reason that Shacklin gave was he said he called it enforced cheerfulness. So when they were stuck on the ice, he made it mandatory that all of his men carry on and live and do all the fun things that they used to do when they were at home.

Mindset #5: Assume a Resilient Identity

When you do hard things consistently, you start to develop an identity of someone who is capable of doing hard things. And so you in this way you get like a self-reinforcing loop of the mindsets that if you survive difficult things long enough you build an identity of somebody who is capable of of overcoming and surviving difficult things which then feeds back in mindset number one which is believing that anything is possible.

Pheidippides

Kuros decided to be the only other person other than Fidipities to run Athens Sparta Sparta Athens in one go. So in 2005 he recreated Fidipity's greatest feat running from Athens to Sparta and then back again 306 miles without stopping. He was the first to ever do it.

Chapter 5: Sociocultural & Community Dimensions

In the 1950s, doctors noticed that people in Rosettto, Pennsylvania, an Italian immigrant community, had half the rate of heart disease as the rest of the country. They found that their social structures were very robust. They had very tight-knit communities there and extended communities as well that they could tap into. Grandparents, you know, they weren't kind of shuffled off into the corner or even off into homes or anything like that. They were very much integral as a part of the family structure.

Social Connection and Resilience: Why Strong People Don't Go It Alone

Resilience isn't really, it's not an individual sport. It's it's a team sport. It really is a team effort, a collective effort of your social circle, the greater community around you, and largely the culture as well. Yeah. What you grow up in. Um, so they called this the Rosettto effect. Actually, this it's got a name called the Rosettto effect. And really, again, it does show that the just what a huge factor this is.

Blitz Spirit: Myth vs Reality

During World War II, Hitler was sending planes and bombs into London and at first all the experts there were like oh this is just going to tear apart the social fabric here. There's there's we're screwed. Kind of the opposite ended up happening and there's this I think it goes a little bit to your point of where communities kind of develop through that there has there's some underlying agitation.

How to Build Your Resilient Circle

Prioritize depth over breath. You need a quality social circle, but there's physical health benefits to that. We've mentioned in the Rosettto case, uh buffers against heart disease, uh dementia, too. I mentioned this a little bit earlier, the super aers. Super aers and the single biggest predictor of that was how vibrant of a social life they had. How many not necessarily how many how many social connections they had but the quality of those social connections that they had.

Chapter 6: The 80/20 of Becoming More Resilient

Once you get to a point where you are resilient people see you as like a a competent resilient person now you're the competent resilient person that people come to. And so you know, you get to putting out a lot of fires or you're seen as like this rock or whatever, right? And there is more responsibility put on you when you when you get this part of your life kind of figured out, right?

The Hidden Costs of Resilience

If you're always the rock who's there supporting or if you're always the bread winner who's like paying the bills and uh covering for your deadbeat partner like it's it it's a reinforcing dynamic in a very subtle way. And then in a kind kind of an ironic way as well, you end up maybe long-term being less resilient because you're taking care of everybody else's problems and not your own.

What We Learned

The environmental fit stuff, the orchid and dandelion stuff um I guess I kind of I kind of knew a little bit about that, but having the empathy for some people um in certain situations where I I have been a lot I have been one of those people who was like you like toughen up. Yeah. Yeah. Just toughen the [ __ ] up. That's what resilience is is just harden the [ __ ] up and get over it.