Life is Hard. Here’s How to Cope.
We are more resilient than we think, science shows, and through hardship and some intention, we can face the harsh realities
Kieran Setiya has suffered severe pain off and on since age 27. His condition, chronic pelvic pain, was diagnosed by his fifth urologist only after years of zero help from four others. When it flares up, the pulsing, burning pain makes sleep impossible. There’s no cure. Yet Setiya, now 47, is rather philosophical about his suffering — and that of others — whether due to illness, disability, personal failure, grief over the loss of a loved one, war or disasters.
“Life, friends, is hard — and we must say so,” he begins in his recently published book, Life is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way. “It’s harder for some than it is for others.”
Setiya, a philosophy professor at MIT, is acutely aware of how miserable life often is for so many people. Yet he rejects common platitudes proffered during difficult times. The likes of “Don’t worry; it will all be fine!” are dismissive of a person’s agony, he argues. Instead, we must get real and face our many hardships head-on.
“There is no cure for the human condition,” he points out.
There are remedies, however, science-backed protective mechanisms and positive paths forward — choices in how we think about life when it stinks that are better than wallowing in its stench unnecessarily. And that brings us to the good news: Even in the worst of times, we can be more resilient than we expect.
“The empirical evidence suggests that most people are better at coping with difficulty than they fear,” Setiya told me. “They rebound quite rapidly to their emotional baseline” after stressful or traumatic events.
We humans are highly adaptive, tending to be as resilient as we need to be, psychology researchers say.
So what exactly is resilience? Why do some people seem more resilient than others? And what can we do to bolster our own resilience?
While acknowledging that the cards one is dealt can contribute to serious resilience-resistant mental conditions like chronic stress, anxiety disorder and clinical depression, there are several strategies and tactics rooted in solid science that can help us endure tough times and build a stockpile of resilience for the future.
Just don’t expect it to be easy. Life is, after all, inherently and decidedly hard.
Our incredible capacity for resilience
Resilience is loosely and indelicately defined as the ability to bounce back, or at least eventually move on, from terrible events or circumstances. Psychologists think of it as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or significant sources of stress.”
Bad times are not avoidable, the thinking goes, but they don’t have to define or confine your life and can instead be opportunities to grow and become more resilient.
The blitzkrieg of World War II offers an example. London and other British cities endured months of nightly bombing by Nazi Germany. Some 43,000 civilians died and 139,000 were wounded. Given the horrific circumstances, military and health officials prepared for a flood of psychiatric casualties. No flood ensued. “People are rather more resilient and resourceful than we have tended to think about them,” Simon Wessely, MD, a professor of psychological medicine at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, concluded after researching the event.
Still, anyone can be overwhelmed by a sudden catastrophe or an ongoing, intractable disaster, illness or infirmity. Extreme adversity will pound even the toughest person into the ground for a time.
Setiya stresses that his condition does not compare to the personal, practical and social challenges presented by severe physical disabilities, the onset of which can shatter lives. But through his experience, and by citing other research, he makes an important point about human resilience, a lesson for any relatively fortunate, able-bodied individual who thinks life is too hard now and then: The ongoing experience with disability does not destroy lives so much as we might assume.
“People with physical disabilities do not rate their own well-being significantly lower than other people rate theirs,” Setiya writes.
If they can’t do one thing they’d enjoy, whether due to disability or simply lack of skill, people can find purpose in another, he explains. Someone with no musical skill might be perfectly happy as a writer or engineer, for example. The point: There is much in life to appreciate — a lot of good to go around if we keep eyes wide open — and what’s meaningful for one person isn’t necessarily what matters to another.
“Most disabilities leave enough of value in place for lives that are no worse than the majority — and sometimes better,” Setiya writes.
The concept is called value pluralism, the idea that there are many different things worth wanting, he explained by email. “We are able to find value in our lives even as parts of them go badly wrong. Which is not to say it’s easy, or that it always happens.” Such philosophical thought can help one better understand resilience, but it doesn’t replace the need for mental healthcare, he said.
Lessons from older people…
Viewed through a practical lens, resilience can build with time, experience and perspective, along with a little intention put to generating wisdom, research indicates.
By facing terrible circumstances — living life, you might say — and gaining perspective, you would hope to gradually worry less about any given obstacle or setback—a skill common among older people—confident that you’ll get beyond it somehow, as you’ve done before, and eventually realize that bad stretch has receded to relative insignificance in the rearview mirror of experiences, and the future can’t be controlled, so you might as well try to enjoy the present.
“While certain factors might make some individuals more resilient than others, resilience isn’t necessarily a personality trait that only some people possess,” according to an American Psychological Association summary on the topic crafted with input from nine psychological researchers and therapists. “On the contrary, resilience involves behaviors, thoughts, and actions that anyone can learn and develop.”
So what are the “factors” that underlie resilience? There’s no formulaic answer, but science has yielded some suggestions.
In a recent study, 29,347 U.S. women ages 80-plus were asked to rate themselves on questions like these:
- I tend to bounce back quickly after hard times.
- It does not take me long to recover from a stressful event.
- I have a hard time making it through stressful events.
Given their answers to these and other questions, combined with other data, the following factors were found to be most strongly linked with resilience, and for the most part regardless of race, ethnicity or socioeconomic conditions:
- Low self-perceived stress levels
- Good self-perceived health
- Higher education
- Strong social support
At first glance, it might seem like these factors are largely out of your control or that it’s too late to affect them. That’d be the negative view, which we know is bad for well-being on its own. A positive view of the findings would consider there are ways to work on some of the factors that boost resilience.
Social support, for example, does not have to involve a vast network of people, the researchers found.
“This is about having people around you, but it’s not just the number — this involved a measure of the quality of relationships,” said study leader Jessica Krok-Schoen, PhD, an assistant professor of health sciences at Ohio State University.
However, the study, published last month in the Journals of Gerontology Series B, does not prove that having any of those attributes, or aiming to cultivate them, will automatically make you more resilient.
Instead, the study says something about differences between people who self-report varying degrees of resilience, but not necessarily how one person might increase their resilience, said Thomas Rodebaugh, PhD, director of clinical training in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
“It’s reasonable enough to guess that the current results might give us hints about interventions,” said Rodebaugh, who was not involved in the study, “but there’s no reason to think it should give us much confidence in suggesting interventions now.”
In other words: More research is needed to test the conclusions of this study. Still, Rodebaugh is among the researchers who think people tend to be as resilient as they need to be, able to emerge from tough times with a fresh appreciation for what’s good, he said during the pandemic.
Meanwhile, other researchers and psychologists offer practical suggestions for nurturing resilience, based on the overall body of research on the subject.
Build your psychological toolbox
Regardless of your age, you can take steps today to build your resilience to help you face challenges tomorrow. Think of it as building a “psychological toolbox” over the course of your life, with the expectation that old age isn’t all bad, Krok-Schoen explained in an email.
“Research regularly identifies gains in psychological well-being and wisdom among older adults,” she said. “These results can inform the choices made by younger adults in terms of their individual and interpersonal factors such as education, health status, and the quality of their social support. Nurturing those factors earlier in life can lay the foundation for psychological resilience in later life.”
You might start by reflecting on your worldview.
If you think life is always good, you’re liable to have your assumptions shattered by hardship when it arrives, says Jason Moser, PhD, associate professor of psychology and director of the Clinical Psychophysiology Lab at Michigan State University. If you think the world is totally dangerous, on the other hand, stress and anxiety are apt to be constant companions.
“For those who have a more even view of the world — that is, things are generally good, but sometimes bad things happen — they tend to have the least chronic and intense response to such events,” Moser told me during the pandemic.
Given all this and the new research, I asked Rodebaugh if resilience tends to be innate or learned through experience, or some combination of both.
I may have asked the wrong question.
“There is no important characteristic about people that has proven to be either innate or based on experience,” Rodebaugh said. “Everything interesting is always both. The question may be missing an even more important factor, though: The situation you happen to find yourself in. For example, the ZIP code you live in determines a lot about your health outcomes, and that is neither innate nor likely to be ‘learned through experience,’ but rather another factor entirely. I suspect the [new] study is rediscovering some of those factors, rather than telling us how resilience is learned or innate.”
What to work on
Evidence suggests several underlying behaviors and attributes of resilience that can be improved upon, many experts say. “Like building a muscle, increasing your resilience takes time and intentionality,” the American Psychological Association summary states, noting four core components to focus on. I’ve written about each before, so I’ve included suggestions for further reading:
1. Meaning or purpose in life
Pursuing things in life — big or small — that are meaningful to you provides a strong sense of purpose and direction. Start by figuring out what you love to do, or what you used to love to do, and do more of that. And do less of the things that generate stress, such as working late at night because you think it’s expected of you in today’s counterproductive 24/7 work environment.
2. Connection
We need friends, family and/or romantic partners to lean on and share good and bad times with, because we are social animals. If this isn’t going so well for you, try simply helping and supporting others, experts suggest. Call or text an old friend — they’ll appreciate it more than you know. Aim to listen more, be nicer to people or even volunteer your time — all aspects of being a better person that are known to improve well-being and build resilience. Becoming more connected with others does not mean you have to constantly be around people. Solitude is not the same as loneliness, and many of us crave alone time even as we acknowledge we need others in our lives.
3. Healthy thinking
Our minds can be a wonderland of positive, healthy thoughts, but if you’re human, as I am, negativity is always knocking on the noggin. You’d think we’d be wiser, but wisdom does not automatically come with age. To be wiser and think in healthier ways, we have to open our minds and strive to achieve greater self-reflection, acceptance of diverse perspectives, emotional regulation, and prosocial behaviors, which together foster gratitude and calmness that can help us think clearly and act wisely amid misfortune or tragedy. One way to develop wisdom is through mindfulness meditation, which can help you be more aware of the present moment, not the past or the future, to get inside your own head and focus on your thoughts and feelings without judging them. It teaches you that thoughts and feelings are not your reality; they are a story you tell yourself, one that’s not the same as objective facts. The effect is to lessen stress and anxiety, allow more rational thinking, and bolster confidence that you can handle whatever comes your way.
4. Wellness
It’s a lot easier to be resilient if you’re at your physical and mental best. In addition to the above components, three things (that you’ve heard before, I know) offer a tremendous foundation for resilience:
- Movement. Anything that elevates your pulse and your breathing rate — walking, biking, yoga, gardening, gym workouts — helps clear the head, build your immune system, and promote better physical health — all necessary traits for resilience. And it’s never too late to start, whether you’re in mid-life or well into old age.
- Nutrition: Healthy eating promotes long-term physical and mental health. Lean into nutritious foods with one ingredient — fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts and seeds; lean away from red meat; avoid boxed and otherwise processed food.
- Sleep: You can’t successfully deal with life’s agony and torment if you don’t sleep well. Good sleep helps the brain file away important stuff and offload emotional baggage, setting you up to think clearly. To sleep better, work on the four things above, plus: Set a routine bedtime and wake-up time, and spend as much time as you can outdoors every day, soaking up natural daylight to keep your body clock well-timed.
Bottom line: Life is still hard
Even the most resilient person can be overwhelmed by horrific events or the heat of a highly stressful moment. At such times, one study found, it can help to envision how you’ll likely reflect on the present moment later on. Ask: “How will my future self a year from now think and feel about this time?” Or, as explained by study leader Rachel White, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at Hamilton College: Try to step back from your thoughts and feelings and view your experience as though it was happening to someone else.
Another helpful if rather philosophic approach is to simply recognize that life is inarguably difficult, and you cannot prevent all the bad and uncomfortable things that are bound to happen. But you can seek to control how you react and where your mind goes, and what you might learn from any given miserable situation.
“I try to propagate a growth rather than fixed mindset, emphasizing that, more often than not, what seems like natural ability is the visible 1% of an iceberg of hard work,” said Setiya, the MIT philosophy professor. “This is not to deny that we differ in ways we can’t control, but I’m sure resilience, like most things, can be learned, even if there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy. Acknowledgment of what you’re going through when things are difficult, and patience with your own reactions, tend to play a vital role.”
Setiya contends that resilience emerges not when we run from hardship but when we resist culturally cultivated default reactions and face it openly and honestly.
“We are,” he writes in his book, “heirs to a tradition that urges us to focus on the best in life but painfully aware of the ways in which life is hard. To open our eyes is to come face-to-face with suffering — with infirmity, loneliness, grief, failure, injustice, absurdity. We should not blink… We have to live in the world as it is, not the world we wish it would be.”
Related resources:
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