Simple steps to strengthen resilience in these tough pandemic times

Dear Reader,

For too many Americans, 2020 will go down as a horrible year.

You know the main outlines of the story: Millions were infected with a debilitating coronavirus. The infection killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, leaving loved ones and friends shrouded in grief.

The unchecked virus slammed the economy, with tens of millions of jobs lost and businesses shut, some forever.

Too many of us had work-provided health insurance ripped away, while fear of infection led patients in droves to stay away from medical care, whether preventive or treatment for chronic conditions.

Medical scientists have struggled to get ahead of the SARS-COV2 virus and to counsel Americans on how to protect themselves from it. A shambolic federal response to the disease may have worsened the infection’s consequences.

The nation, riven by political partisanship and an epidemic of public falsehoods, has struggled for months. But it may be months more before a coronavirus vaccine and new occupants of the White House bend the curve of this disaster.

How can all of us look ahead, be realistic — and bounce back from adversity? How can we build the crucial quality of resilience, so when the darkest of recent times fade to memories, we can be in even better shape than before?

After the Great Depression, the two World Wars, and upheaval on a global scale, experts began to wonder how some youngsters not only survived dire circumstances but thrived. Why did cruelty, poverty, starvation, and other abject conditions break many children but not others?

As journalist Maria Konnikova described the studies of psychologist Norman Garmezy and others, researchers flipped the question and began to ask not why people fail in tough times but how they show resilience, so they succeed. Garmezy had his “aha!” moment while observing a smart and charming boy who came to school and smiled no matter what. He wondered why after learning the lad had a dad who had deserted him and an alcoholic mom. The best she could offer her lone kid was to send him to school every day with the same “sandwich” — two slices of plain bread, with nothing between. The boy refused pity, ate his lunch with cheer, and would not hear any doubts about his mother.

Garmezy pioneered an approach to the study of resilience, no longer asking about troubled kids. when he visited schools. Instead, as Konnikova reported, he inquired of teachers and principals about youngsters “who were adaptive and good citizens in the school and making it even though they had come out of very disturbed backgrounds — that was a new sort of inquiry. That’s the way we began.” He and others undertook what we know now to be a difficult study, as the New Yorker reported:

“Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. Whether you can be said to have it or not largely depends not on any particular psychological test but on the way your life unfolds. If you are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity, we won’t know how resilient you are. It’s only when you’re faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, emerges: Do you succumb, or do you surmount?”

Why do some surmount while others succumb?

Researchers could quickly catalog the ways that people can be tested to the extreme, including growing up in poor, abusive, and neglectful homes. They might be directly subjected to harms or be harmed by watching the injury or death of others. The bad things could be persistent or random. Their duration and intensity mattered.

But other elements did, too, described in the New Yorker as, “protective factors: the elements of an individual’s background or personality that could enable success despite the challenges they faced.” These elements emerged, for example, in careful studies over decades of controlled groups, like hundreds of kids on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. This is what the magazine reported that Emily Wenner, a psychologist, found in her longitudinal study:

“She had followed a group of 698 children, in Kauai, Hawaii, from before birth through their third decade of life. Along the way, she’d monitored them for any exposure to stress: maternal stress in utero, poverty, problems in the family, and so on. Two-thirds of the children came from backgrounds that were, essentially, stable, successful, and happy; the other third qualified as ‘at risk.’ Like Garmezy, she soon discovered that not all of the at-risk children reacted to stress in the same way. Two-thirds of them ‘developed serious learning or behavior problems by the age of 10, or had delinquency records, mental health problems, or teen-age pregnancies by the age of 18.’ But the remaining third developed into ‘competent, confident, and caring young adults.’ They had attained academic, domestic, and social success — and they were always ready to capitalize on new opportunities that arose.”

It may sound strange in scientific work, but Wenner and other experts on resilience agree that luck plays a role in all our lives. We bounce back from adversity sometimes because we are fortunate — we are tied in some way to people with the power to pull us out of rotten situations. Or we meet someone new who turns the course of our lives around. We are at the right place at the right moment for fortune to hit us like a lightning bolt.

Evidence has identified crucial ingredients to resilience — human connections and adjustments in attitude. Humans are social animals and we got this far as a species by living and working together, notably in the toughest of times. As the New York Times reported of the importance of our ties to each other under duress and our standing up to bad conditions:

“The most significant determinant of resilience — noted in nearly every review or study of resilience in the last 50 years — is the quality of our close personal relationships, especially with parents and primary care givers. Early attachments to parents play a crucial, lifelong role in human adaptation. ‘How loved you felt as a child is a great predictor of how you manage all kinds of difficult situations later in life,’ said Bessel van der Kolk, a professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine who has been researching post-traumatic stress since the 1970s. He is the founder of the Trauma Research Foundation in Boston. Dr. van der Kolk said long-term studies showed that the first 20 years of life were especially critical. ‘Different traumas at different ages have their own impacts on our perceptions, interpretations and expectations; these early experiences sculpt the brain, because it is a use-dependent organ,’ he said.”

Kids may find the care and nurture they need not just from parents (who may be absent or worse) but from older siblings or encouraging adults — teachers, coaches, and other mentors, experts note. These thoughtful individuals may help foster in youngsters a resilient mindset, boosting individuals’ emotional control, as well the capacity to distance themselves from bad events or situations and to reframe hardships as opportunities. As the New York Times also reported about crucial components of resilience:

“The tools common to resilient people are optimism (that is also realistic), a moral compass, religious or spiritual beliefs, cognitive and emotional flexibility, and social connectedness. The most resilient among us are people who generally don’t dwell on the negative, who look for opportunities that might exist even in the darkest times. During a quarantine, for example, a resilient person might decide it is a good time to start a meditation practice, take an online course or learn to play guitar. Research has shown that dedication to a worthy cause or a belief in something greater than oneself — religiously or spiritually — has a resilience-enhancing effect, as does the ability to be flexible in your thinking.”

Efforts to help people build their resilience have become a serious concern. The University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, headed by Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman, reports that more than 1 million people from around the world have participated in its evidence-based Penn Resilience Program (PRP) and PERMA™ Workshops. These have benefited people in health care, law enforcement, the military, primary and secondary schools, colleges and universities, corporations, first responders, government, and professional sports. The programs assist them in learning “to navigate adversity and thrive in challenging environments,” the center reports.

Resilience, experts emphasize, is itself a flexible characteristic, ebbing and flowing because most of us typically do not need to tap constantly into our capacity for it. It can be built up — more on that important idea in a second. It also can be influenced by key considerations, among them age and experience.

Seniors and kids, as demographic book ends, have provided experts further insight about resilience, particularly during the pandemic.

It turns out that older adults, at the outset, may have stood up to recent grim times better than many young people. That’s because seniors could reflect on lives filled with good and bad times: They knew they had gotten through with both pluck and persistence. And they could get through what the world was throwing at them now. As a quartet of doctors from institutions across the country reported in a Viewpoint published in the online version of the Journal of the American Medical Association:

“[C]ounter to expectation, older adults as a group may be more resilient to the anxiety, depression, and stress-related mental health disorders characteristic of younger populations during the initial phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. Approximately eight months into the pandemic, multiple studies have indicated that older adults may be less negatively affected by mental health outcomes than other age groups.”

Seniors, the doctors asserted, may withstand difficult circumstances because they have determined who counts most for them, even if that means deeper ties but with fewer friends and family members. The experts also reported:

“An additional factor to consider is wisdom, a complex personality trait comprised of specific components, including prosocial behaviors like empathy and compassion, emotional regulation, the ability to self-reflect, decisiveness while accepting uncertainty and diversity of perspectives, social advising, and spirituality. Several recent studies involving various groups of people across the adult lifespan (25-≥100 years) have shown a significant inverse correlation between loneliness and wisdom, based on validated scales for measuring these constructs. The component of wisdom that is correlated most strongly (and inversely) with loneliness is compassion. Other data also suggest that enhancing compassion may reduce loneliness and promote greater well-being. Cross-sectional studies show higher levels of wisdom, especially the compassion component, in older than in younger adults.”

To be sure, age alone is not a universal safeguard against life’s vicissitudes. It does not guarantee resilience. Seniors may falter when isolated, alone, and lonely, as tragically is occurring in far too many nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. Older adults also may lose their will to rebound in life if their health or cognitive capacities decline, or if people who are near and dear to them disappear. The aged can be savaged by economic reversal, poverty, hunger, injustice, and, yes, the catastrophes of serious illness and major injury. As a tumultuous summer has reminded, the nation has a far way to go to deal with harmful inequities of many kinds, including unacceptable biases based on age, notably in the workplace.

Youthful struggles to rebound

When it comes to kids and their dealing with tough times, the evidence about experience — as with seniors — is persuasive: Many younger people struggle with resilience because it is an unsummoned capacity for them.

Children may seem to have key strengths for dealing with difficulties, because so many young can be naïve as well as forward-looking. They don’t know what lies ahead, so they may rush forward and roll with circumstances that all may seem novel, especially if their parents and other grownups reassure them. Still, they lack important emotional, physical, and intellectual depths — which also helps explain why society goes to such lengths to protect them and boost families to shield them.

But as they grow older, kids gain not only independence. They also build ideas and expectations about their lives, still, perhaps without all the prowess they will need to make these hopes real. That gap — including the significant developmental leaps, mental and physical, that young people make throughout their teens and into their 20s — can put young people at risk when the world turns upside down.

Consider the information developed for the annual “resilience index” developed by experts working with Cigna, a global health service enterprise. The social scientists surveyed 5,000 parents and their children, ages 5-17, and 1,500 young adults ages 18-23, as well as 5,000 adults ages 18 plus. The experts found most recently that:

“Forty-five percent of those ages 5-10 are considered resilient, but that number decreases to only 34% at ages 11-13 and further declines to only 22% in young adults ages 18-23. Resilience increases again as people eventually become parents …

“Approximately 3 in 10 children say they only sometimes or do not ‘fit in,’ and those who say they do not ‘fit in’ are more than 20 times more likely to have low resilience. Young adults with low resilience are 5 times less likely than those with high resilience to feel that people like to spend time with them (96% vs. 17%).”

These findings have serious implications, this study found:

“The consequences of low resilience can have lasting effects on people and businesses. Children with lower resilience are more likely to have lower self-esteem, perform worse in the classroom, have lower educational aspirations, and require treatment for a mental or behavioral health issue. In adult workers, low resilience has a direct impact on business outcomes, as it is correlated to lower job satisfaction, engagement, performance, and retention. Without the ability to cope with challenges, adults are also more likely to experience stress, anxiety and depression and resort to negative coping strategies, such as social withdrawal and/or substance abuse/alcohol.”

As people around the planet battle the coronavirus and all the harm it brings, clearly the young and old may need extra support and attention. It is one of the heartbreaking parts of this pandemic that infection risks have cut traditional bonds between kids and seniors, inter-generational ties that could be beneficial to both in difficult times.

It would be great to think that new and powerful Covid-19 treatments, improved clinical care, and the growing likelihood of effective and safe vaccines would end the pandemic and its fallout — snap, just like that! That is looking less likely by the instant.

Instead, the coronavirus metrics are worsening fast: infections are skyrocketing, hospital and intensive-care beds are full in too many places, and deaths from the disease are increasing. With political leaders and health officials putting the clamps again on what are permissible activities, schools and businesses that had struggled to reopen are reducing their capacities or closing. Hunger has become a major problem for too many Americans, along with joblessness and under-employment. Eviction moratoriums will start to lift at year’s end, putting millions of renters at risk.

The nation faces what could be a dark winter. This means that the savvy may need to take the expert-recommended steps to boost their resilience. How?

Here’s an overview of approaches as described by Cigna, the American Psychological Association, the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and articles in the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, and the New Yorker magazine. Keep in mind that even the best, common-sense ideas do not take the place of professional help — if you need it, please seek it. The quest for resilience also may strike some as full of mock-worthy platitudes, but, c’mon, listen to the sentiments of the holidays — more on that in a second — and so be it …

People and relationships

When the going gets tough, it can be beneficial to connect, as the psychologists’  association says, with “empathetic and understanding people [who] can remind you that you’re not alone in the midst of difficulties. Focus on finding trustworthy and compassionate individuals who validate your feelings, which will support the skill of resilience.” Sure, many people have found online get-togethers helpful in maintaining social contacts. But Zoom and FaceTime can be tiring, and participants in a group session may not speak as frankly and as much from the heart as needed to benefit from the wise counsel or different perspectives of a trusted friend. Men, for example, may stick to macho talk — conversations about work and sports. Those may not be enough, and guys may want to go deeper in their discussions with mentors and friends. There also is a fine line to be aware of, so you’re neither trying to turn your friends into amateur therapists nor becoming one yourself for others. By the way, don’t make the error of thinking that you need to just start scrolling through your computerized contacts list, calling everyone to say hello and exchanging superficialities. You want to take the time to really work out your problems, feelings, and hopes with someone who is savvy enough to offer you helpful insights. By reaching out to others, by the way, you give them a boost, too. People who feel they are part of a supportive community, who are not isolated and alone, can deal better with collective and individual challenges.

Changes in attitude

These times are unprecedented, the pundits keep intoning. Maybe so. That may mean we need to reset our expectations, if only for the while it takes to return to greater normality. We need to let go of perfectionism and relentless striving because these qualities can impose undue hardships on us and those around us. In the 2008 recession and in the record job losses of this year, workers have learned that good, steady employment isn’t easy to find and keep. While workers have turned more conservative about position-hopping, government statistics suggest that the average American will hold a dozen jobs between ages 18 and 48. While it once was an important sign of stability, many managers and executives have found that employers may care less about finding hires with long tenure in one organization. Translation: With corporations showing less loyalty to employees, workers should not feel guilt or shame about losing a position or leaving a job. It happens. If it occurred due to big market changes or problems with a corporation or industry, don’t take on that burden. We can’t turn rude, self-absorbed, or Cassandra-like. Experts say the resilient aim to be both pragmatic and optimistic. They see the negatives that surround them but try to focus on positives, notably opportunities that may be worth pursuing through bad times. The pandemic may have pushed millions of employees into not only working remotely but also in leaving employers to start businesses of their own.

Self-care

It’s tough to look to the future if we don’t feel well, or if we’re beating ourselves up with guilt or self-doubt. It may be tempting, if you’re working from home or between employment, to get up late, turn in early, and never jump out of PJs or sweats. But isn’t it time now to be resetting yourself into a helpful new routine?

It is important to exercise, eat healthy, get plenty of sleep, and moderate your use of intoxicants like alcohol or marijuana. Give yourself “me time,” too, for example to  build those crucial relationships.

As “gig” workers, and many other types of professionals know, it also can be important to set boundaries on work time. It can be too easy to try to lose one’s self in work. That is not healthy. It can be better for people to work for set periods and take frequent, short breaks. Too many people, pre-pandemic, hated their commute and dreamed of finding a way to get home on time for supper with spouses, kids, and other family and friends. See if you can set aside non-work times (they were called weekends in the days of yore) to prepare batches of meals all at once. Then try to get everyone who is at home these days to shut out the distractions for a few family meals each week. No devices at the table, please.

Ditto for a shutdown of social media. Your partner and kids may really need you to be present and engaged during a shared supper, so they can get your support and assistance with their challenges — and vice versa. If you can, find quiet time, too, for yourself. You may wish to spend some of this period on personal interests, aka hobbies. Historians have urged us all to keep journals that will be invaluable to scholars in the future to understand what life was like in these unsettled times. You also may wish to meditate or to seek the balm to soul found by many in spirituality, religion, and prayer.

Is it, as popular culture likes to describe it, “peak 2020” that some of the greatest tests of our collective fortitude will occur just as the holidays are upon us? We will all march into cold and stormy months ahead, as we always do, but this winter may be remembered above many for disease and death.

The research on resilience can underscore crucial concepts that we will need to carry into 2021 and what we all hope will be much better times ahead.

The pandemic has re-taught the world just how interconnected people are. If my neighbors get sick, I am likely to, as well. If others around me take precautions, and so do I, we all may increase our chances of staying healthy. If hospitals and their intensive care units overflow with coronavirus cases, things can be bleak not only for the infected but also for patients needing care for cancer, heart attacks, and car wrecks.

We all belong to a collective humanity, as we have been reminded in 2020. We have seen inspiring role models in those who have drawn on huge wells of personal and professional strength to care for others — courageous health workers, tireless first responders, and poorly paid but extraordinarily dutiful “essential” employees. A crucial component of resilience, the studies say, is rooted in such caring for others, and believing in a greater good and the importance of having a higher purpose.

When we look out for others, we benefit in significant ways, research finds. As the New York Times reported:

“At a time when we are all experiencing an extraordinary level of stress, science offers a simple and effective way to bolster our own emotional health. To help yourself, start by helping others. Much of the scientific research on resilience — which is our ability to bounce back from adversity — has shown that having a sense of purpose, and giving support to others, has a significant impact on our well-being. ‘There is a lot of evidence that one of the best anti-anxiety medications available is generosity,’ said Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton and author of Give and Take: A Revolutionary Approach to Success. ‘The great thing about showing up for other people is that it doesn’t have to cost a whole lot or anything at all, and it ends up being beneficial to the giver.’

“Our bodies and minds benefit in a variety of ways when we help others. Some research has focused on the ‘helper’s high.’ Studies show that volunteering, donating money, or even just thinking about donating money can release feel-good brain chemicals and activate the part of the brain stimulated by the pleasures of food and sex. Studies of volunteers show that do-gooders had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol on days they did volunteer work.”

The “season of giving” may take on new meaning this year, among many. And not for materialism. Fr. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, recently wrote an email to his community. He said a few months ago that he found three sources for great spiritual guidance in difficult times:  “Etty Hillesum (1914 – 1943), the young Jewish woman who suffered much more injustice in the concentration camp than we are suffering now; Psalm 62, which must have been written in a time of a major oppression of the Jewish people; and the Irish Poet, W.B.Yeats (1965 – 1939), who wrote his Second Coming during the horrors of the World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic.”

Rohr urges his readers to reexamine their life’s priorities, prodded by the pandemic’s terrible toll. He observed:

“It’s no wonder the mental and emotional health among a large portion of the American population is in tangible decline! We have wholesale abandoned any sense of truth, objectivity, science or religion in civil conversation; we now recognize we are living with the catastrophic results of several centuries of what philosophers call nihilism or post-modernism (nothing means anything, there are no universal patterns) … Somehow our occupation and vocation as believers in this sad time must be to first restore the Divine Center by holding it and fully occupying it ourselves. If contemplation means anything, it means that we can ‘safeguard that little piece of You, God,’ as Etty Hillesum describes it. What other power do we have now?”

We may have hard times for a time now with the pandemic. But the prospects are brightening for a safe and effective vaccine, as well as helpful treatments for the disease and experience- and evidence-based improvements in clinical care for coronavirus cases. In the meantime, we will buck ourselves and each other up, boosting our resilience and practicing shared altruism. We will practice great hygiene (lots of hand washing), maintain distances, cover our faces, and stick around our homes with people we know have stayed safe, too. We also will cherish the holiday joys as we can, including greatly appreciating the gifts of giving and caring for loved ones and friends.

We know that soon Covid-19 must yield, and we will have much work to do, including ensuring that health care is a right not a privilege in the wealthiest nation in the world. We have many inequities to address, and we need to ensure that Americans are nourished and working to their desired, full, and fair capacity.

That’s a lot to look forward to, so my colleagues in the firm and I wish you not only the happiest holidays but also great health through the holidays, 2021, and beyond!