Resilience: Adapting and Recovering From Adversity
The capacity to adapt well to stress and bounce back, and how training may strengthen it.
Recent trauma or acute distress may need professional support before or alongside resilience skill-building.
- Low mood, sadness, or loss of interest that persists most days for more than 2 weeks
- Anxiety, worry, or fear that persists more than 2 weeks or interferes with work, relationships, sleep, or daily functioning
- Any thoughts of self-harm or suicide, stop and contact a crisis line (e.g., 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US) or emergency services immediately
- Distress that worsens or feels unmanageable during or after a practice
- Using these practices to avoid, delay, or replace care for a diagnosed or suspected mental health condition
- Ongoing distress after a traumatic event, or inability to function after adversity
What the evidence says
The sources are three meta-analyses of resilience-training programs. Joyce 2018 (meta-analysis of 17 studies, 11 of them randomised) reports a moderate positive effect (0.44) and concludes that programs combining CBT and mindfulness techniques appear to have a positive impact on individual resilience. Liu 2020 (meta-analysis of 268 studies) reports a small but statistically significant overall effect (g = 0.48) with significant heterogeneity. Leppin 2014 (meta-analysis of 25 small randomised trials) reports a moderate effect of generalized stress-directed programs on resilience (SMD 0.37) and notes that the trials were at moderate-to-high risk of bias. Resilience training here means programs for healthy adults facing ordinary and predictable stressors; this entry is not a treatment for trauma-related disorders.
- Misconception: 'Resilient people do not feel distress.' Resilience is about adapting and recovering, not avoiding hard feelings.
- Misconception: 'Resilience is fixed.' Evidence suggests it can be strengthened, though gains are modest.
- Does not diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent depression, anxiety, PTSD, or any mental health disorder
- Not a substitute for psychotherapy, counseling, or psychiatric care
- Cannot claim to 'fix' emotions, eliminate stress, or guarantee happiness
- No claim of clinical, therapeutic, or medication-like effects
- Cannot claim to treat PTSD or trauma-related disorders
- Agreement
- Direction recorded for 0 of 3 sources; not yet recorded for the rest.
- The claim's outcome
- Outcome not yet recorded
- Certainty
- No source states a certainty rating.
What each source measured and concluded (3)
- What it measured
- Psychological resilience.
- How it measured it
- Connors Davidson Resilience Scale, The Resilience Scale, The Dispositional Resilience Scale, The Response to Stressful Experiences Scale (self-report).
- How it was read
- read in full text
- What the review says it includes
- Meta-analysis of 17 studies (11 RCTs)
- Heterogeneity, as stated
- Heterogeneity in meta-analysis
- What it measured
- Overall efficacy of resilience interventions across multiple outcome domains
- How it was read
- screened only, not extracted
- What the review says it includes
- Meta-analysis
- Studies and participants, as stated
- 268 studies with 1584 independent samples
- Heterogeneity, as stated
- Resilience interventions yielded a small but significant overall effect, Hedges's g=0.48 (SE=0.04, 95% CI 0.40-0.56); significant heterogeneity
- What it measured
- Resilience/hardiness (and quality of life, self-efficacy, depression, stress, anxiety)
- How it was read
- screened only, not extracted
- What the review says it includes
- Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized trials
- Studies and participants, as stated
- 25 small trials
Each source below is shown with its study design and a link to the original study, or, where it is not a completed research paper, with what kind of record it is; those are not counted. This is the audit trail.
Why do some records show a record type instead of a study design?
A study design is shown for a completed, peer-reviewed paper. A registered protocol, a preprint, a conference abstract, a referee report or a book chapter has not been through peer review as a finished paper, so it is labelled for what it is, and it is counted in no source count. Where a record could not be confirmed as a completed paper at all, it says so rather than guessing. They all stay in the list, and their DOI still resolves, because the count of what was screened is part of the audit trail.
- Protocol / registration A registered plan for a review or trial, not its results.
- Preprint Posted by its authors before peer review.
- Conference abstract A conference summary rather than a peer-reviewed paper.
- Peer-review report A referee's report on a paper, not the paper itself.
- Guideline / position stand A recommendation derived from evidence, which is a step further from the data than the evidence itself.
- Book chapter A chapter in a scholarly book rather than a journal paper.
- Type not recorded Our record does not say what kind of publication this is, so it is counted in no source count. That is a gap in our data, not a judgement about the research.