Resiliency, to summarize, is the ability to bounce back from difficult circumstances. People living with mental health challenges often have high resilience to the opposition because they have grown resilient through trial by fire.
This piece will focus on what is going on in the brain with resiliency and perhaps a few suggestions on how we can help our brains form it.
The Different Aspects of Building Resiliency
First, let us discuss what scientists believe are the building blocks of resilience. In one paper written in 2013, they examined the “multiple interacting factors” of resilience including, “genetics, epigenetics, developmental environment, psychosocial factors, neurochemicals, and functional neural circuitry, play critical roles in developing and modulating resilience in an integrated way (Wu et al. 2013.)”
Centering on the “neurochemicals and functional neural circuitry,” they go on to state that genetics (how we are changed by genetic changes) and epigenetics (the study of how a person’s environment influences their genes) interact and determine the biological characteristics of a person including how, when, and if they will form.
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