Sounds fantastic. But what exactly does resilience mean?

Resilience generally describes the bounce-back ability of individuals who return to the similar shape, form and condition after misfortune, harm or injury.

But how does resilience work?

Is resilience something one can ingest, like Popeye’s spinach, to become stronger whenever out sized by stress? Can it be put on like Wonder Woman’s bracelets to protect against threat? Can it be given, taken or shared?

Is resilience an internal trait, an external circumstance or some mysterious blend of both?

“There’s always the debate about what’s called state versus trait: Is (resilience) something enduring in a person or is it going to come and go from week to week? The answer is somewhere in the middle,” says Dr. Jonathan R.T. Davidson, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center and co-creator, with Dr. Kathryn M. Connor, of the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC).

“What we often considered to be enduring characteristics in people can, in fact, change over the course of several weeks in response to some appropriate prompting. So resilience is a bit of both.”

While working together at the Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Program at Duke University in 2003, Connor and Davidson noticed that some people with post-traumatic stress were “able to bounce back better”, he says, which is how they got interested in resilience.

Full piece on ACEsTooHigh where is was originally published.