Resilience is *not* the key to stress reduction

Let’s shift away from the over-dependence on individual responsibility for stress management. Please and thank you.

adapted from art by Anton Vierietin for iStock

If you’ve been following along for a while now, you’ve probably sensed my general annoyance with (and borderline aggression towards) the application of the phrase stress management. 

If you’re new here, welcome: 

Stress Awareness Month is a bunch of BS

Yes, I have a tendency to scoff at the list of tools that inevitably accompany that phrase. I bristle at the insistence that a list of“tips and tricks” will help manage stress. I make a face that hasn’t even been fully captured by emojis (maybe 🫣🤔😖😶😒) when I encounter an emphasis on coping or a reliance on the word resilience.  

And, fine, ok, I should acknowledge that there is some value in the general stress management advice. As I have written: 

“I’m not telling you to throw up your hands and do nothing for your own wellbeing as it relates to stress. Some of the tips and tricks in here for stress management are spot on. Wonderful, excellent stress coping strategies. Resilience is a thing and a useful tool for buffering stress perception….”

(I will give this some more space below)

Here is why the language around stress management drives me bananas… 

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Let’s start at the beginning. 

The stressors that I’m rounding up in the maternal stress map are psychological stressors. This means that they are external challenges that our brain categorizes as threat vs. non-threat¹, and then, once perceived as threat (real or potential), the brain activates a physical stress response that affects physiological systems² across the body. 

Chronic stress is when this physical response is activated too much, too often, in a way that does not allow the body to recover, or in a way that fails to shut off. Chronic stress is when you see the negative health consequences that we tend to blame on “stress”.   

Our modern human brain gets us in trouble when activating and over-activating this totally normal physiological response that evolved to help us, and nearly every other animal, survive in the wild. 

A quick(ish) lesson about stress

More than 99.99% of the time, our modern human brain is not responding to a life or death situation. But the signals in our modern day environment still hit just the right spot in our brain to activate this physical response.

Without getting too into the weeds, here are the key bits: 

The human brain is complex. The modern human experience is messy. The brain’s perception of ‘yes stressor / no stressor”, “big stressor / small stressor”, “long stressor / short stressor”, etc. encodes if the physical response is activated and modulates the degree to which the body physically responds to each challenge. This perception filter incorporates and integrates information across a range of brain regions and brain networks. All of this winding through the complicated “psychological milieu”³ of the individual experience and the messy existence of being a modern human. 

The maternal stressor map is a diagrammatic attempt to disentangle stress exposure related to modern American motherhood (and parenting and caregiving and life, and, well, just being a woman)– from the external stressors to the internal connections that add context and make up the psychological milieu.

Mapping the web of stressors related to modern American motherhood

Given that the complex, individual context adds a different filter through which our brain perceives and interprets challenges, potential stressors, and the severity of them, it’s important to consider this stopover point between external challenge → internalized response.

So let’s break it into three different zones - external potential stressor, internal perception of the stressor, physical stress response that could eventually impact health: 

red arrows = external stressors; yellow squiggle = internal perception filter; blue arrows = physical stress response

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EXTERNAL POTENTIAL STRESSORS:

This zone takes into account the external factors – e.g. presence of and exposure to a potential stressor⁴, timing of exposure, how often or how consistent exposure is, etc. External factors relay important information to our brains.

In the stressor map, these are the stressor nodes. Just because a potential stressor is present, doesn’t mean the body will respond. They need to be processed in the next zone… 

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INTERNAL PERCEPTION FILTER

This zone is a bit trickier to summarize in a small block of text but I’ll give it my best shot. This zone adds the context that determines how each individual perceives and responds to external stressors. Essentially, the brain is assessing the basics of stressor characteristics (e.g. control, predictability) while also bouncing around the information we already have in our brain to add additional context (e.g. getting worse/better, prior experience and outcome, etc). In the stressor map, this is where the connections between stressors comes in.

Perception is not binary, the stress response is not all or nothing, this is the zone where our brain categorizes the challenge – assessing threat vs non-threat, evaluating the severity of the challenge and subsequently enhancing or limiting the triggered physical response.

If two individuals face EXACTLY the same stressors, this is where the two start to deviate in how they respond and how their health is affected by those stressors.

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PHYSICAL RESPONSE

This zone determines the degree of the physical response after the brain has sent the signal out – including how our body recovers and returns to a pre-stress baseline.

I’m not going to drag you into the deep recesses of a physiology lesson so I’ll leave this one there. 

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Quick poll

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Stress management

Reducing the input to any of the three zones can affect the way our body is pushed to a state of chronic stress – how often do we encounter stressors; how severe do we perceive that stressor to be; how big is the response and how quick do we recover. To me, this reflects the opportunity to target stress at multiple levels within each zone: 

Note: I recognize that it is damn near impossible to eliminate all stressors and all responses from everyone's lives. That doesn't mean we can't reduce the size, the number, or the impact!

However, this is not where current stress management advice falls.

Commonly described stress management advice tends towards over-dependence on strategies that address stress in the moment or in the short-term (e.g. deep breathing, exercise, social engagement). This advice concentrates the focus in the last zone — the individual’s physical response. This is especially true for resilience (for reasons discussed below). 

This is lopsided logic:  

The external stressors do not change, the context feeding the internal processing has not changed. And while there are great stress mitigation tools that could reduce perceived severity (e.g. meditation and mindfulness), they are only effective if you have access to them⁵. 

This lopsided logic demands that WE, the stressed human, and only WE are tasked with decreasing the way our own body reacts and the way that our body returns to a pre-stress baseline. It demands that WE and only WE are expected to “bounce back” to or better than our pre-stress baseline.  

I do not accept lopsided approaches when it comes to stress.

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Ok, ok, not all stress management tools are terrible.

Deep breathing absolutely works. But, it’s not enough.

The fight-or-flight response activates the sympathetic nervous system (adrenaline/noradrenaline) and drives that heart-beating-out-of-your-chest feeling you might be familiar with. The way to counteract that drive is by activating your parasympathetic nervous system through deep breathing. As a visual learner (could you tell?), I think of this technique as applying the brakes to a runaway self-driving car. The vagus nerve controls the parasympathetic nervous system (the counterbalance to the sympathetic) and you can actively stimulate the vagus nerve with controlled, deep diaphragmatic breathing. That’s so cool. Next time you feel your heart racing, try this, it's legit. 

My beef with deep breathing is the context in which it’s used. It’s plugged as a broad “stress management” tool but it only really addresses one response to one stressor with a focus on the individual responsibility in that moment⁶.

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Coping strategies absolutely work. But, they aren't sufficient. 

Categorizing the ways that animals cope with stress goes far back in the world of stress research. Much further than the concept of resilience (more below).     

Coping strategies are valuable behavioral counterbalances in the adaptive acute stress response. Accessing coping strategies can limit and shut off the physical response. Very important for the long-term effects of chronic stress. 

Behaviors categorized as coping strategies are based on decades of animal research ranging from lab rodents to baboons. They include exercise, social engagement, beating up a subordinate, even infant bonding. If an animal is exposed to a stressor, those who have access to and initiate a coping strategy fare better, health-wise, than another animal who does not have access or fails to activate a coping strategy. 

Coping behaviors also include escape and avoidance. Avoidance relates to anticipation of the stressor in order to reduce/eliminate exposure to the stress. Escape relates to reducing/eliminating perceived intensity of the stressor during or after exposure to the stress. In our human brains, avoidance relies on the perceived likelihood of something stressful happening while escape relates to our perception of control once we’ve encountered the stressor.

My beef with coping strategies is the overdependence on them and how this advice misses critical nuance when it comes to mental health:

First, over-dependence. Emphasis on coping strategies, when it comes to advising humans on how to handle stress, relates right back to the individual responsibility for an individual problem. 

Second, nuance. I have yet to see advice⁷ (when given generally), taking into account the circular nature of stress and mental health conditions and coping. For example, depression and anxiety are considered stress-related illnesses. Stress can initiate or exacerbate both conditions. And clinical depression and anxiety also relate to a discrepancy between appropriate coping strategies and types of stress.

For clinical depression, this discrepancy manifests as learned helplessness – people struggling with depression don’t even try to deploy a coping response to combat stress. For clinical anxiety, the anxious brain tries to deploy a coping response in a whack-a-mole manner – the stressors are too many and too big and too much, resulting in a “disorganized attempt to cope “. In addition, dysregulated neurobiology of both escape and avoidance behaviors (enhanced or diminished) are also components of mental health disorders.

How do you tell someone they need to use coping strategies to limit stress when their ability to do that is one of the hallmarks of their stress-related illness?  

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Resilience is absolutely a thing. But, it’s problematic.

I actually never used the term resilience until recently. I don’t like it. It hits me in the same guilt-center that the advice for teaching my kids ‘grit’ hits me. That spot of: “here is a characteristic that some people naturally have and protects them from a lifetime of blah blah blah. You can learn/teach it too! So it’s your fault if you/your kid never gain(s) this skill.” 

Fuck the guilt.  

After I started digging into all of this, I read

Courtney Martin

’s interview with author

Soraya Chemaly

, who wrote The Resilience Myth. The book will show up at my house next week so I haven’t read it yet, but I did appreciate Soraya’s beautiful reduction of her thesis that seems to echo my gut reaction to the concept: 

“The idea of resilience is shaped by the highly individualistic nature of our culture. We learn through stories, news headlines, popular movies, education materials, sports culture, militarism and more that individuals suffer but, if “strong,” persevere and even “grow.” We mainly learn to think that our coping with stress and loss, or adapting to adversity and trauma is mainly up to us as individuals because that is the schema that promises — an allure — the highest level of real or perceived control.”

Resilience is not conformity

As far as I can tell, resilience, as a scientific concept, first came into the human stress world when researchers started to observe that, in a group of individuals exposed to the same exact traumatic event, some individuals would start to show health repercussions related to the stress of that trauma while others would be totally fine. They deduced that those individuals who were “fine” escaped the health effects of traumatic stress because of their body’s ability to physically recover from the stress exposure was different. These individuals were categorized as resilient. 

As defined in the literature:

“resilience is the concept that an individual can bend to threats from the environment but does not break. It is not usually meant to reflect that there is minimal disruption or a lack of disruption for an individual, rather, a resilient response is the ability to bounce back from disruption. It is both a process and an outcome.” – Bhatnager, 2021

And 

“resilience as positive adaptation to adversity, requiring that there be both the presence of adversity and positive adaptation” - Bhatnager, 2021

Once researchers started examining how individuals become resilient, the framing of this concept took the turn into “Can anyone become resilient?” 

And this is where the term jumped the shark (in my opinion):

“Resilience means being able to adapt to life's misfortunes and setbacks. Test your resilience level and get tips to build your own resilience.” – Mayo Clinic 

Now, my problem is not with the actual techniques to gain resilience. I think it's actually pretty cool that we can teach our bodies to internalize stress and “bounce” in a productive way. 

BUT, here is my beef with resilience: over-reliance on yet another individual solution for an individual problem, and reliance on a tool that categorizes humans in a way that sets us up for failure. 

First, over-reliance. You’re probably catching the theme here – I just don’t accept individual strategies OR conceptualizing stress as an “individual problem”, especially when strategies are expressed as THE solutions for decreasing stress and improving stress-related health issues. 

Second, categorization. Whenever you categorize humans – e.g. resilient vs not resilient – that categorization can also become a source of stress. Add if that the categorization is something that can be technically “learned”, when you are not able to develop resilience, you have failed, as in: “here is a great tool for you. Didn’t work? YOU failed.” 

I can’t get behind that. 

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Why I prefer to call out “stress buffers” 

You may notice that I tend to use the term “stress buffer”. This isn’t a widely used term. But I swear I didn’t make it up. I have found it in the literature (e.g. here, here, and here) so, it’s a thing. One stress buffer that I come back to often is social support (also consider a coping tool).  I’ll save the deep dive on this one for another time. Sorry for the tease. 

The reason I prefer discussing stress buffers – those that have been described and studied as well as potential stress buffers that remain understudied or unidentified – comes down to the goal of extending the stress mitigation tools beyond the individual. When the stressor has already been encountered or the human is at risk for encountering a stress, what external resources are available to soften the way these stressors are perceived and interpreted? What actions, by others, can decrease the perceived severity of a stressor? What additional information, prior experience, level of load sharing would reduce how the body internalizes external stress? 

I think of stress buffers operating in the middle zone, the perception zone, the zone of psychological milieu. This is the zone of “education is power”, the zone of having a sense of control or predictability, the zone of emotional support. 

For example, I think of doula care operating in this zone as a stress buffer. Research on how doula care improves birth outcomes often reflect the role of advocacy and emotional support. When I see the outcome data, I also think about the stress buffering effect related to having a trusted support person with skills to guide emotional needs, having a go-to person providing a sense of control in a chaotic moment, and having a predictable face in a sea of unfamiliar care providers. Harder to study but an impact that makes sense to me in the context of stress physiology.

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The ultimate stress management strategy should be stressor elimination  

If you aren’t exposed to a stressor to begin with, you will not have a physical stress response. It really is that simple. 

So let’s start there. 

Or at least, let’s acknowledge that eliminating/mitigating/reducing external stressors is a critical piece of “stress management” strategy for everyone.  

Stressor elimination also impacts the zone of internal processing and perception – the stressor connections, the squiggly brain mess in my illustration, that psychological milieu that contextualizes the individual filter for what the body responds to and how. Eliminating/ mitigating/reducing external stressors not only changes external exposure but also affects the context in which other stressors are perceived. 

In order to start on the outside and restructure the lopsided view on stress management, we need to visualize how all the pieces stack up. Hence, the stressor map, and the motivation behind kicking off the Maternal Stress Project. But, this, of course, is bigger than me and a reminder that we can all work on changing the narrative around stress and how to address it (for all) in our own day-to-day. For example:

Reducing the stress of modern mammalian motherhood

So, now my challenge back to you, my reader friends, what is one thing are currently doing (or want to do today/ tomorrow/this year) in your workplace, in your community, amongst your friends, in your partnership that is eliminating/mitigating/reducing the stressors in other people’s lives (and/or your own)?  

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1. This is relative to 'survival' but we are modern humans and what “threatens” our survival goes right back to the basics of how the primitive brain perceives stress…

2. e.g. cardiovascular, metabolic, immune, neurological, endocrine, reproductive, etc.

3. As far as I can tell, this term was coined by the extraordinary scientist and author, Dr. Robert Sapolsky, in his book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. I cannot think of a better way to describe the slurry of information that stress perception wades through so I borrow heavily on this term. Thanks, Dr. Sapolsky!

4. for context on why use “potential stressor”, revisit the Stress 101 post for definitions. It’s not incredibly important for wrapping your head around this topic, specifically, but its important for me and how I personally define terms. (and, honestly, I’m guessing I already messed up somewhere in here!)

5. I don’t have space to get into the cool science behind mindfulness, meditation and stress, but I hope to in the future.

My beef with mindfulness and meditation as a stress management tool is that it requires time and, often, it also requires training to get the most out of the practice. In the unequal world of gendered time burdens and modern parenting, women have far less time to dedicate to anything outside of caregiving, parenting, and working than men.

Also, it isn’t readily accessible to everyone, as Dr. Karen Sheffield-Abdullah has discussed and is out to change!

6. I don’t have space to get into the cool science behind meditation and stress, but I hope to in the future. My beef with meditation as a stress management tool follows the same theme as the other tools presented.

7. As always -- I am not an expert in this field. If you are, and I got any of this wrong, please please please let me know!