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What Psychologists Say About Resilient People · Health and Healing Dealing with Trauma and Addictions

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Hey guys, once again, it's your man Mike D.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Just wanted to stop in and chat with you a little bit.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: And thanks guys once again for loaning me your listening here.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to talk a little bit about psychology.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: What does psychology say about resilient people?
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Are you resilient?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: When people ask you, how you doing?
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm doing fine, I'm doing good, is usually the go-to.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: But are we always doing okay?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Are we always fine?
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Or is that just an appeasement?
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: So most resilient people aren't the ones who bounce back fast or stay positive through everything.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: They're the ones who let themselves fall apart quietly on Tuesday evening and still show up on Wednesday morning without making anyone else carry it.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: They carry it themselves.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: There's a version of resilience we've all been sold.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: It looks like someone who never wavers, who absorbs hard news with a deep breath and composed smile, whose posed sometimes motivational on a bad day.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: We've been told that the strongest people are the ones who bounce back fast, who keep their chin up, who never let the cracks show.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Psychologists are starting to disagree pretty firmly with all of that.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: What research is actually finding is something messier, quieter, and a lot more human.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: The most resilient people aren't emotionally bulletproof.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: They're the ones who let themselves feel everything, process it privately, and then show back up.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: They fall apart on Tuesday evening and still make that Wednesday morning.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And when they do it without asking anyone else to carry it, they do it with poise and confidence.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's a different kind of strength.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: And it's one most of us have never been taught to recognize, let alone practice it.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: There is a myth behind this whole emotional stuff person.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: When most of us imagine a resilient person, we picture someone who is suppressing discomfort, well, someone stoic, unshakable, always composed.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: But psychologist today points out that this is actually backwards.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: Resilience isn't about being immune to negative emotions.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's more about how you respond when those emotions show up.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: The counterintuitive truth is that the path to being resilient means becoming more willing to experience your emotions.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Not less.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: The idea that keeping it together is the gold standard of mental toughness is so deeply baked into how we were raised that most of us don't even question it.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: I certainly didn't.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Growing up, one of the two brothers that I had in the family were strength was shown through action, not expression.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: I learned early that when you work hard by pushing through everything, feelings were something you outpaced on a long run, not something you sat with.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's solid science on this today where we chronically suppress what we're feeling rather than processing it.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: The body keeps the score in very literal ways.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Research confirms that emotion suppression may exacerbate stress, induced psychological arousal, particularly through heightened hemodynamic and neurodoctrines responses.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: In plain English, bottling up emotions makes the body work harder and wears it down faster, guys.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the mental toll compounds over time.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Studies on emotions regulation have found that habitual use of suppression is associated with higher levels of negative effect, lower levels of positive effect, poor social adjustments, and decreased well-being.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: You're not managing your emotions when you suppress them, you're just accumulating them with interest.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And Buddhism figured this out a long time before modern psychology did.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: The concept of dukkha, usually translated as suffering, is usually better understood as dissatisfaction, as the resistance we create when we refuse to let things be what they are.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sitting with discomfort, letting it move through you without clinging or pushing it away.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's not weakness in Buddhism thought.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the most demanding practices there is.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so, as I get ready to close, the science of letting yourself feel bad.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Here's where it gets generally interesting.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: A landmark study from the research of UC Berkeley at the University of Toronto, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, looked at over 1,300 adults across three experiments.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: They found that people who resist negative emotions are more likely to experience psychiatric symptoms later compared with those who accept such emotions.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Those who showed greater acceptance of their negative feelings also showed higher levels of well-being and mental health.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: As they figured out, people who habitually accept these negative emotions experience fewer negative emotions, which adds up to better psychological health.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: The people who allowed themselves to feel hard stuff actually ended up feeling less of it over time.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Acceptance worked as a pressure valve.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Resistance, paradoxically, amplifies everything it tries to contain.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: This is what falling apart quietly on Tuesday evening actually does for you.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's not weakness or a failure of coping.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's a regulated private release that prevents the pressure from building into something unimaginable.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: The problem isn't the fall.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is when we don't give ourselves a safe private space to fall in the first place.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: The quiet part of the title matters too.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't about performing your pain.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about seeking validation or making your hard evening someone else's emergency.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's about having an open and honest, contained relationship with your own internal experience.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: So the showing up part is what distinguishes processing from wallowing.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: And the research on resilience as a process rather than a fixed personality trait is worth understanding.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_00: The research found that individuals with high resilience disengage from both positive and negative emotions, information much faster than those with low resilience, meaning they move through the feelings rather than getting stuck in it.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: They felt it and then let it go.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: That movement, fill it fully and then disengage, is the whole mechanism.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Wednesday morning isn't about pretending Tuesday didn't happen.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's about having given Tuesday its due space so it doesn't leak into everything that comes after the Thursday or the Friday.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: There's also a quiet dignity in not making your hard nights someone else's burden to carry.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't about isolation or toxic self-sufficiency.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's about developing enough internal capacity to hold your own emotional weight without overloading it onto every person around you.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: You can still reach out to people you trust, but there's a difference between genuinely connecting over something difficult and chronically externalizing your emotional regulation on to others.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: For me, the practice has been simple and imperfect.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: Some evenings were just harder than others.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: After a long day, maybe writing, working, visiting with people, can be hard on you sometimes.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'll sit back with a black cup of coffee and just let whatever there is be what it is.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Not trying to fix it, not scrolling past it.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Just enough presence to actually feel it before it calcifies into something harder to move.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: The next morning, get up, say a prayer, usually before the world gets too loud.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that rhythm of it, through the heat past of the motor sounds and all of the things that are going on around us, I just happen to clear all of the residue.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: Not because I've solved anything, but because I've already done the real work the night before.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Resilience isn't the absence of failing.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: It is what you do in the quiet hours after you fall and how little of it you need anyone else to fix.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, we need community.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: Community is always helpful, but the most resilient persons you know probably isn't the one who never struggles.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: They're the one you never guessed was struggling at all.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: Not because they're hiding it, but because they have already made peace with it by the time you've seen them.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Alrighty guys, once again, I hope something was had here today that will encourage you.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: Your resilience is important.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Just because you have a bad Wednesday night doesn't mean your Thursday morning has to be bad and that anyone else has to carry it.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: You have the tools.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_00: Let's make it work for you.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: God bless.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Bye now.