Resilience Redefined: Neuroscience Behind Mental Toughness and Stability

Figure 1: Oscar Figueroa. A Colombian weightlifter who retired in 2016 after winning gold in the Rio Olympic Games. This was his first olympic gold medal after over a decade of competing and suffering a herniated disk in 2008, a true model of resilience.

Introduction

Everything changes … all the time! We live in a world where all forms of comfort will inevitably decay at one point or another. At the whims of Earth’s forces, the security we work so hard for always seems to disappear. Thankfully, when unforeseen external stress presents itself, we demonstrate tremendous resilience time and time again. We are not born with this ability. Rather, it is a skill that is built throughout our lives and is reinforced by physiological and neurological mechanisms. When nurtured correctly, we will have the gall to say “Ball up top,” even if we get dunked on. Frontal Foundations has previously talked about the neuroscience of willpower; however, we want to bring this conversation into a more applicable context and discuss practical means of facing pressure. In this article, we will highlight some of the byproducts of external pressure, specific processes that can build upon our ability to showcase healthy resilience, and the neurological outcomes that arise from these processes. 

Pressure as a Form of Stress

The World Health Organization defines stress as “a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation. Stress is a natural human response that prompts us to address challenges and threats in our lives,” (WHO, 2023).

Stress is an incredibly broad term that encompasses many different experiences, but ultimately it is an unpleasant cognitive experience that mobilizes us to deal with threats. This evolutionarily-reinforced emotion drives a change to our behavior/motivation whether we are aware of it or not, making it a central component in our ability to survive. The idea of pressure sits underneath the umbrella of stress, but it has a distinct contrast in the way that it arises in our everyday lives. While stress is concrete and drives more primitive processes related to maintaining homeostasis (eating, sleeping, escaping threats) pressure refers to the external demands or expectations placed on an individual. These expectations are often set by other people, circumstances, or self-imposed goals, and are generally a more prolonged feeling that surpasses allostatic function.

Is pressure a form of stress? Of course, it is. However, the way in which we respond to pressure is more complex and thought out than the way we respond to immediate stress. This distinction will assist in breaking down the context of neuroscience research.

Resilience is Malleable

Figure 2: Wonder Woman, one of DC Comics’s most prevalent superheroes. Wonder Woman is most closely associated with her resilient nature and her empowering nature. 

It is widely recognized that the ability to manage and comfortably deal with pressure changes throughout one’s life. Generally, factors such as personality, motivation, confidence, focus, and perceived social support play a critical role in determining the capacity for resilience (Fletcher et al., 2012). As these factors change, so do we. It is the constellation of these characteristics that enables individuals to adapt to the circumstances they encounter (Connor & Davidson, 2003). The more we bolster these aspects, the more benefit we receive from them.

Additionally, there is a critical mental component of stress appraisal that sits at the core of strengthening resilience. Researchers have investigated gold medal-winning Olympic athletes to determine what aspects of their livelihood allow them to surmount tremendous pressure on the world's biggest stage. One of the most recurring themes was that these athletes perceived moments of intense pressure as opportunities for intense growth. Furthermore, these opportunities brought them closer to obtaining deep, intrinsically motivated, fulfilling goals, in this case obtaining a competitive edge over their opponent that will set them up for success.

“I remember one of my coaches saying to me what I was doing over Christmas and I said ‘Oh, I’ll be training twice on Christmas Day … I know [opponent’s name] won’t be training on Christmas Day twice and that will give me the edge’ … It was more the mental side of things because I knew that I’d be doing something that he wasn’t doing.” (Fletcher et al., 2012)

Interpreting pressure as something that is harmful only for the sake of being harmful directly restricts our ability to overcome it. Rather, the active reassessment of external stimuli and connecting them to purposeful motivations strengthens our ability to overcome challenges. This idea was studied by John Flavell, an American psychologist who described an individual’s control over his or her cognitions as meta-cognition (Favell, 1979). The self-perception of one’s knowledge, skills, and experience alters the salience of pressure, transforming it into something that can help us.

Neuroscience and Resilience

While it is challenging to point towards a specific cortical structure that is responsible for eliciting feelings of resilience, longitudinal studies have highlighted several key areas that are responsible for overcoming negative/restrictive feelings that arise from stressful events. In one investigation, researchers compared the cortical activity of “healthy” individuals (people who had been exposed to severe adversity but demonstrated emotional recovery) with “unhealthy” individuals (people who had been exposed to severe adversity but had not emotionally recovered). These adverse events captured a diverse set of experiences including neighborhood violence, military combat training, domestic violence victims, police forces, etc…

Figure 3. The Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism and a global symbol of peace, compassion, and of course resilience.

One of the biggest takeaways was that “healthy” individuals had a larger grey matter volume and better functional connectivity within the frontal cortex and the hippocampus relative to “unhealthy” individuals. This difference in cortical strength allows for more effective processing of emotions and memories that facilitate motivation-related adaptive behaviors. Furthermore, “healthy” individuals were shown to have lower amygdala activity relative to “unhealthy” individuals, potentially corresponding to a decrease in negative emotional responses to threat perception (Egan et al., 2024).

This study is complemented by other investigations which reveal that healthy post-traumatic subjects have a greater cortical thickness in the lateral occipital cortex (responsible for visual processing) relative to unhealthy post-traumatic subjects. Growing evidence suggests that in addition to emotional processing, the evaluation of visual stimuli plays an equally critical role in processing stressful events (Kahl et al., 2020).

When we are repeatedly exposed to extreme pressures that are not cognitively controlled, we produce excess levels of cortisol. The increase in cortisol activity damages our synaptic density in a variety of the brain regions needed for emotional processing, impeding our capacity for resilience more broadly (Liu et al., 2015) (Gruenewald et al., 2004). If we are continuously stressed and are unable to properly mitigate negative responses to life’s challenges, it initiates a vicious cycle that becomes increasingly difficult to fix.

Control

We encounter many challenges that are comically out of our control. However, we can control the way we respond to them. Did I just summarize Marcus Aurelius’ entire stoicism philosophy in two sentences? Pretty much. But in the conversation of resilience, it fits pretty well. There is no hack or shortcut to becoming emotionally strong, but if we always run from challenges we will never learn how to pull ourselves out of moments of pain. We have the choice to nurture fortitude and prepare ourselves for anything life may throw our way.

Nurture Fortitude

References

Hunter, Richard G., et al. “The Neuroscience of Resilience.” Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, vol. 9, no. 2, June 2018, pp. 305–339, https://doi.org/10.1086/697956.

Robertson, I.T., Cooper, C.L., Sarkar, M. and Curran, T. (2015), Resilience training in the workplace from 2003 to 2014: A systematic review. J Occup Organ Psychol, 88: 533-562. https://doi.org/10.1111/joop.12120

David Fletcher, Mustafa Sarkar, A grounded theory of psychological resilience in Olympic champions, Psychology of Sport and Exercise, Volume 13, Issue 5, 2012, Pages 669-678, ISSN 1469-0292, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2012.04.007.

Connor, K.M. and Davidson, J.R.T. (2003), Development of a new resilience scale: The Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC). Depress. Anxiety, 18: 76-82. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.10113

World Health Organization. “Stress.” World Health Organization, 21 Feb. 2023, www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/stress.

Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A new area of cognitive–developmental inquiry. American Psychologist, 34(10), 906–911. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906

Luke A Egan, Haeme RP Park, Justine M Gatt, Resilience to stress and trauma: a narrative review of neuroimaging research, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, Volume 58, 2024, 101408, ISSN 2352-1546, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2024.101408

Kahl, M., Wagner, G., de la Cruz, F. et al. Resilience and cortical thickness: a MRI study. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci 270, 533–539 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00406-018-0963-6

Christine Fennema-Notestine, Murray B Stein, Colleen M Kennedy, Sarah L Archibald, Terry L Jernigan, Brain morphometry in female victims of intimate partner violence with and without posttraumatic stress disorder, Biological Psychiatry, Volume 52, Issue 11, 2002, Pages 1089-1101, ISSN 0006-3223, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0006-3223(02)01413-0.

Liu, X., Kakeda, S., Watanabe, K., Yoshimura, R., Abe, O., Ide, S., Hayashi, K., Katsuki, A., Umeno-Nakano, W., Watanabe, R., Ueda, I., Moriya, J., Nakamura, J. and Korogi, Y. (2015), RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CORTICAL THICKNESS AND SERUM CORTISOL LEVELS IN DRUG-NAÏVE, FIRST-EPISODE PATIENTS WITH MAJOR DEPRESSIVE DISORDER: A SURFACE-BASED MORPHOMETRIC STUDY. Depress Anxiety, 32: 702-708. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.22401

Gruenewald, Tara L. PhD; Kemeny, Margaret E. PhD; Aziz, Najib MD; Fahey, John L. MD. Acute Threat to the Social Self: Shame, Social Self-esteem, and Cortisol Activity. Psychosomatic Medicine 66(6):p 915-924, November 2004. | DOI: 10.1097/01.psy.0000143639.61693.ef