Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life's Greatest Challenges is written by Steven Southwick, a Yale Medical School and Yale Child Study Center psychiatry professor who specializes in PTSD and resilience, and psychiatrist and neurobiologist Dennis S. Charney, dean of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

On Huffington Post yesterday, Southwick explained why he and Charney wrote the book. One reason was because they'd always wondered why some people were able to overcome adversity and others weren't. In the book they looked at three groups: former prisoners of war in Vietnam, Special Forces instructors and civilians who found the strength to carry on after traumas, including the attack on the World Trade Center.

Because resilience is the complex product of genetic, psychological, biological, social and spiritual factors, we investigate resilience from multiple scientific perspectives. We synthesize the latest scientific and popular literature on the topic, describe our own psychological and neurobiological research on resilience, and quote from our in-depth interviews with a large number of highly resilient people.

When we began our study, we assumed that resilience was rare and resilient people were somehow special, perhaps genetically gifted. It turns out, we were wrong. Resilience is common and can be witnessed all around us. Even better, we learned that everyone can learn and train to be more resilient. The key involves knowing how to harness stress and use it to our advantage. After all, stress is necessary for growth. Without it the mind and body weaken and atrophy.