Whether it’s talk-show confessionals, high-performance podcasts, or boardroom meetings, the word resilience is frequently on people’s lips. Resilience’s stock has been on the rise in recent decades. According to Google’s Ngram Viewer (2025) programme, which charts words used in published books, the use of the word resilience rose 800 percent in the 30 years between 1989 and 2019. Resilience’s appeal lies in its versatility. Various fields—including biology, engineering, disaster management, and psychology—all employ the term for different purposes. But versatility can be a liability. A 2015 New York Times article stated that the use of the resilience is so widespread that the word manages to be simultaneously “profound and profoundly hollow” (Sehgal, 2015).
The word resilience comes from the Latin verb resilire, which translates to bounce back. Philosophers from antiquity, including Seneca the Elder and Cicero, used the term to refer to ‘leaping back’ and to ‘rebounding’ respectively (Alexander, 2013). In 1625, it was Francis Bacon, the English philosopher and statesman, who first used the term resilience in a scientific context. In his English language book Sylva Sylvarum (Bacon, 1625), he used it to describe the rebounding strength of echoes.
Reportedly, it was the Irish writer Robert Bell (1839) who first used the word resilience to capture the fortitude of a person recovering from adversity. After being initially adopted by the field of psychology in the 1950s, its use dramatically increased in the 1980s concerning children’s ability to adapt positively following adversity. This was primarily down to the pioneering work of the American psychiatrist Norman Garmezy and the English psychiatrist Sir Michael Rutter. The growing interest in resilience was consistent with advances in the field of psychology, which are broadly referred to as positive psychology, that seek to understand strengths as well as weaknesses, and to identify factors that can be protective for, not just detrimental to, well-being.
Problems with the definition
Researchers have highlighted several problems with how resilience has been defined (Fletcher and Sarkar, 2013). These include:
- A focus on understanding resilience as a response to ‘adversity’ prevents adequate consideration of the response that people can have to struggles that are not generally considered to be adverse (becoming a parent, getting a new job).
- Viewing resilience as an adaptation to major events (a road traffic accident or life-threatening illness) serves to neglect the impact that the ongoing stresses of everyday life might have on us.
- A lack of consistency in recognising what constitutes ‘positive’ adaptation. Resilience has variously been described as both an absence of disruption to our usual level of functioning and a disruption to our usual levels of functioning that quickly returns to where it was before. Some theorists have proposed that the former should be labelled ‘robust resilience’, and the latter ‘rebound resilience’ (Fletcher and Sarkar, 2016).
- It is being confused with other concepts such as antifragility (Taleb, 2012) and post-traumatic growth (Tedeschi and Calhoun, 1996). Whereas resilience refers to the idea of bending without breaking, antifragility and post-traumatic growth are about bending and becoming stronger.
The absence of a clear consensus on the definition of resilience increases the likelihood that the term will be used incorrectly. This can have potentially disastrous effects. For example, the Whyte Report that investigated incidents of abuse and mistreatment against gymnasts by staff working for British Gymnastics (BG) noted that its performance pathway resources referred to resilience as the “ability to suffer” (Whyte, 2022, P 124). What doesn’t kill you—and all that.
The concept of resilience has also been criticised for situating the responsibility for dealing with stressful situations squarely on the shoulders of individuals (Fergus and Zimmerman, 2005; Oliver, 2017). Yet, factors operating at different levels of our social environments—including those affecting our families, our communities, and society at large—influence the challenges we face and our ability to respond to them. Focusing on what makes people resilient may inadvertently shift attention away from the need to address root causes of adversity, including economic inequality, bullying, racism, and sexism (Chandler and Reid, 2016). This gives rise to what has been referred to as the resilience paradox—resilience could potentially produce more vulnerability because root causes are not addressed (Ogunbode and colleagues, 2019).
Resilience as a process
Despite the inconsistencies in how resilience has been defined, there is widespread acceptance that it should be understood as a dynamic process that is shaped by an interplay between our experiences, the thoughts and emotions we have about those experiences, and how we subsequently respond. When it comes to resilience, context matters. We can’t fully understand resilience without asking two questions:
1) Resilience against what? (Work stress, experiences of neglect.)
2) Resilience in which outcomes? (Productivity levels, well-being.)
Interventions
Various interventions aimed at boosting resilience, including art therapy, theatre play, physical activity, social support, cognitive behavioural therapy, and mindfulness, have been investigated. Reviews of the research evidence have concluded that these can be effective, albeit their effects are not large (Liu and colleagues, 2020; Joyce and colleagues, 2018). Consistent with the claims that resilience is shaped by our social context, social support interventions have been highlighted to be particularly helpful (Chandler and Reid, 2016). Moving forward, there are several ways in which research into resilience needs to be improved: theoretical understanding about resilience needs to be developed further, larger samples need to be recruited, consensus needs to be reached on what assessment tools are best for assessing resilience, and interventions need to be compared directly with each other to see which are potentially superior.
The next time someone invokes the phoenix rising from the ashes metaphor, you might want to pour a little cold water on those ashes and point out that our understanding about resilience is still a work in progress.
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