The real reason some people adapt faster than others

Who's in the Video George Bonanno George Bonanno is an internationally known expert on trauma and resilience. He is a Professor of Clinical Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University and has studied resilience in the face[…] Go to Profile Part of the Series The Big Think Interview Explore series

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Become a Member Login The real reason some people adapt faster than others “The big question then is why are most people resilient and why are some people not resilient?” ▸ 26 min — with George Bonanno Description Transcript Copy a link to the article entitled http://The%20real%20reason%20some%20people%20adapt%20faster%20than%20others Share The real reason some people adapt faster than others on Facebook Share The real reason some people adapt faster than others on Twitter (X) Share The real reason some people adapt faster than others on LinkedIn Sign up for Big Think on Substack The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free. Subscribe

We’ve grown comfortable with the idea that trauma leaves people permanently altered. It’s a compelling story, but a misleading one.

Drawing on more than a hundred studies, clinical psychologist George Bonanno explains why resilience is not a rare trait or a heroic exception, but the most common human response to adversity.

GEORGE BONANNO: There's a kind of a cultural trend toward thinking we're all pretty fragile right now. The internet has got us focused on how dangerous, how harmful the world is right now by all the things that we perceive that we're fed because it gets our attention. But I think that it's good to remind ourselves of how strong we actually are. It can sometimes seem like a tough sell, but it's really important to cut yourself a little slack and to allow yourself to take on that belief for a little while, at least to let yourself dig in and try to move forward with your life. My name is George Bonanno. I'm a professor of Clinical Psychology at Columbia University. My most recent book is titled, "The End of Trauma: How the New Science of Resilience is Changing How We Think About PTSD." I'm known for identifying and documenting human resilience in the face of basically the worst things that happen to people.

- [Narrator] Developing tools to overcome trauma.

- When we began to become confident that we really had identified something real, this resilience trajectory I've talked about, we've identified it in many studies at this point. It's been identified convincingly in the majority and over 100 research studies by other people than myself, lots of other people. So it's very much a real thing. The big question then is why are most people resilient and why are some people not resilient? That turned out to be a harder question to answer than I thought, because when we measure the things that correlate with resilience, the things that co-occur with resilience, we find lots of different factors. The kind of a myth in the general public, we see it in the media, we see it in even in some professional literature is that there are a few magic traits. The three traits of highly resilient people, the five traits of highly resilient people. It turns out there are many, many factors that have been associated with resilience, but they all have what we call small effects. They don't explain very much. They only explain a little bit of who will be resilient. So in other words, if somebody says, has positive thinking or they're good at problem solving, or they're good at distracting themselves or whatever it is that they do, that is something that helps them to be resilient, it turns out that that only predicts a little bit of whether or not they will actually be resilient when something happens. I call that the resilience paradox. We can identify these things, but paradoxically, they don't actually predict who will be resilient the next time something happens. And the reason for that it turns out, is because situations vary a great deal and their are cost and benefits to everything, so these different factors that we think make us resilient, these different behaviors, even the go-to things that we think we use when we are trying to cope with adversity, they only work sometimes, they work sometimes in some situations, and they don't work very well in other times, even the things that we think are kind of our best shot don't always work. So what that means is every time something happens, all of us, we have to work out what's the best solution, what's the best strategy for this particular moment right now, this particular situation I'm in, and I call that process of doing that, adaptive flexibility. I also called it regulatory flexibility. Adaptive flexibility is basically a set of skills that most people have actually, which is a good thing. Most people have those skills, they're also highly learnable. But even if we have those skills, we have to use the skills we have, and that's work. And in order to do that work, we have to be motivated. We have to believe that we'll be able to do it, otherwise we won't even try. And that belief, that idea that I'll get through this eventually, I'm not happy this happened, this really sucks, this is painful, it's ruining my life, but I'll get through this eventually, that's the belief that we need in order to do that work. We need to somehow think we'll get through it. We call this the flexibility mindset. There are three core beliefs that seem to comprise the flexibility mindset. They're related and they feed off each other. One of them is optimism. That's essentially a belief or a conviction that it's going to be okay. The future will be okay, this isn't good now, but it will be okay in the future. You know, you can see this in sports, you can see it in many other domains of life. There are some athletes who have all the skills in the world, but if they don't have the motivation, if they don't have the sense of purpose, they're not going to perform well. And you see this over and over in sports. We need always to have that motivation, that belief that I'll get through this, I can do it. So another one of those beliefs is confidence of coping, sometimes called coping self-efficacy. And this is essentially a belief that I have some ability to cope. And most people do. Most people have at least some coping that they can do, some behavior, some coping mechanisms that they can use. So it's a sense of reminding ourselves, I can cope. The third belief, the third component of this that appears to be part of the mindset is what we call challenge orientation, sometimes called challenge appraisal. And that's when we think of threatening events in terms of the challenge at hand, what we need to do to get through it. You know, when we're first confronted with a threat, we naturally assess the threat because we need to know how bad something is, but that at some point we have to shift from thinking about the threat to thinking about what we need to do to get past it. If we stay too focused on the threat, we're paralyzed by that. So the challenge appraisal is a sense of, all right, what happened, what's the challenge here, what do I need to do? Our research program gradually began to point to three key components, three steps of what we now call the flexibility sequence. I pulled these together for the first time in my recent book, "The End of Trauma," and laid them out in some detail. The first step, and all three of these come from our research. The first step we call context sensitivity. And this is where we stop, and we, when something is disturbing us, we're upset, we stop and we reflect and we think, what is the problem? What's happening right now? What's the problem? What do I need to do? And this is really about the moment. You know, one of the difficulties we experience sometimes when we're really upset by something is we take a very broad perspective, right? This thing happened, it's ruining my life, it's horrible. That's too big of a problem to undo all at once. We need to take it in pieces. What's the problem at hand? What's the problem in this moment that's really bothering me. It may be that I'm feeling anxious. It may be that when I go to this one place, I get really anxious 'cause this is the place where this thing happened. It may be any number of reactions we have, and we have to take these one at a time. When we think about, okay, I need to sleep, the problem is I'm not sleeping well and that's making me unhappy during the day, and it's making me have trouble concentrating, and then I'm worried about my job, whatever that may be. What do I need to do? I need to focus on solving that problem. How do I sleep better? Or I need to focus on feeling less anxious in the moment. Once we've done that, we have a clear problem we can solve, we move to the second step of the sequence, which we call repertoire. And here we decide on a strategy we'll use, we call it repertoire though, because all of us have a repertoire of personal strategies, the things that we know how to do, the things we've used in the past, and we choose from that repertoire. It's kind of like a toolbox. We open up that toolbox and we say, "All right, I need to sleep better," or, "I need to feel a little less anxious now," or, "I need to find a way not to feel threatened when I'm in this situation." And we look in that toolbox and we decide which of these tools is going to be best to use right now, and we try something out, that takes us to the third step which we call feedback. And this is basically very quite simple in a way. We just simply monitor what we just did and ask ourselves, is it working? As simple as that may sound, this is really a key step because a lot of people give up here. If they try something, it doesn't work, they think, I can't deal with this, I just can't cope with this. I tried, you know, I tried doing this thing where I distract myself, so I won't think about it. I tried getting wrapped up in my job, which really helps me a lot, and I still kept thinking about it. So I can't cope with this. And that's actually a very dangerous misconception, I think, because what we need to do in this situation, and as it is laid out in the flexibility sequence, is we go back to the repertoire step and we try something else, we try another strategy. And we might have to continue trying strategies several times before something actually works. Or if we've tried many strategies, it may be that we have to go all the way back to the beginning and think about the problem in slightly different terms. Maybe I'm focusing too broadly, I'm focusing on the wrong problem. What's the problem that I can solve right now? There's a lesson in all of this, in these different pieces of the flexibility sequence, because not only does it give us tools for dealing with these challenges, these aversive events we experience, it also essentially is teaching us about our own mastery. We can actually do something about these events. We can actually work these things out ourselves over time. And it does teach us really that we don't need to simply let things happen to us. There's a phrase, "Time heals all ills," and time does heal things, but time doesn't, is in no rush time, takes a long time. So we can actually get in there and work to get ourselves through these events in a way that we're making the decisions, we're trying things out. The good way to think about this is even when we try something and it doesn't work, we've tried it, it's been our choice to try it, and we know, okay, this isn't working, let me see what else I have. And over time, we also begin to learn more about our tools. We learn more about how we perceive things, we learn more about the tools we have, and we can actually kind of think, okay, this tool worked pretty well in this situation and now I know I have this tool, and I saw somebody else, I heard about somebody else doing this other thing maybe I'll try that in the future I'll put that in my toolbox. So there are a lot of ways that we can grow as people and become more efficacious and more independent in a way with these kinds of tools. I think there's a kind of a general idea that it's pretty easy to latch onto that somebody might think I've been traumatized and it's really ruining my life and you know, I just have to limit my life now. And there's nothing I can do about it. It's just happened to me. And there's a lot of helplessness built into that idea. And the flexibility notion, the sense that we can actually get in and change the way we're experiencing the world, the way things are happening to us, the challenges we face, I think gives us a lot more efficacy, a lot more mastery, a lot more sense of agency in how we deal with these events. I coined the term the fallacy of uniform efficacy, but I, because I see in the way people talk, and I see this actually in my own research discipline, this idea that there's some behaviors, some strategies that people can use that are just golden. They always work, they are the perfect strategies. And then there are others that are just not healthy, they're maladaptive, don't do these things, these things are unhealthy. And in fact, that doesn't hold up to the research at all. So that the fallacy of uniform efficacy is that any strategy is always good or always bad. And we find that there are strategies that people like to use. There are strategies that are healthy and good strategies to use. But in certain situations, even the most unhealthy strategy can actually be adaptive. I call this coping ugly, leads the idea that say something like doing some impulsive thing is not really healthy, you know, you should behave, you don't need to be self-destructive here. If you do something that once or twice in certain situations, it's actually can be just what you need to do. John Lennon wrote a song, "Whatever Gets You Through the Night." And that's exactly what this kind of idea embodies. By the same token, the things that we think are always healthy, we should just do these things, they're not always efficacious, they don't always work. Great examples are something like mindfulness, mindfulness is good stuff, there's no doubt about that, but mindfulness isn't always going to solve a problem unless you are maybe one of the 18 people in the world who can meditate all day long. Most of us can't do that. Most of us use mindfulness in a kind of a daily way or what, however anybody uses it. That's going to help a lot but it's not gonna solve every problem. Social support is another one. Turning to other people for comfort and advice, that helps in many situations, but it doesn't always help, it doesn't always give us what we need for a particular problem. The way I actually got into a lot of this flexibility research was by studying emotional suppression. I was doing research on suppression at the time that there were a lot of people beginning to study this behavior, but it had developed this kind of reputation as being uniformly bad, uniformly maladaptive. And there are plenty of anecdotal examples that show that it, suppression can be very adaptive in some situations. For example, in our 911 research, parents who were with young children told us in interviews that they had to really suppress all the emotions they were re-experiencing at the moment 'cause they didn't wanna frighten their children. When you're in the midst of a tremendously challenging situation, like a war for example, there are times when we have to just simply bottle up whatever we're feeling because we need to remain focused on what we're doing. We need to concentrate. There's some research even about suppressing positive emotions. There have been some studies where people winning awards, people winning sporting events, if the winners show too much positive emotion, other people actually don't like them because they feel like they're being inconsiderate of the losers, the people who didn't win. So in many social situations, many dangerous situations where we need to suppress the emotions we feel. Of course, in other situations, that's not adaptive, because in other situations we need that information. What are our emotions telling us? So it really, like every strategy we use, it depends on the situation, it depends on the challenge we're facing in that moment. So often this simply comes down to trial and error and trying something, asking ourselves, "Is this working," and if it's working, great, let's keep doing it, if it's not working, we need to try something else. Adaptive flexibility and the flexibility mindset, the flexibility sequence, these concepts can also be useful if we're thinking about how to cope with something that happened some time ago, say a potentially traumatic event that did cause us lasting harm and is still causing us lasting harm. In this case, we though have to focus on using it the way we use it for current events. So if we think about a traumatic event that really did upend our life that we're still struggling with, we tend to think of that event and we will tend to think of that event as, in a sort of broad, generic way. I was traumatized by this event, it's changed my life, I can't go out anymore, I don't do the things I used to do. my relationships are not so good anymore because of this 'cause I'm kind of in this broken state, that's a problem that can't be solved in one go. It's too big of a problem. But what we can do just like anything that's happening currently in our life is we go through the steps of the sequence, the flexibility sequence, and think about it in terms of what's the problem in the moment, what's happening right now? What is a piece of this problem that's bothering us and that we can address? An example comes to mind of someone I knew long time ago who was traumatized to such a point that that person never went out anymore. They were worried that if they went out, they would have a flashback and be overwhelmed and be somewhere out in public in this sort of flashback, you know, panic attack state. So that became the problem. How can I go out into the world despite the fact that I am feeling quite vulnerable, quite fragile at the moment. The solution was to first identify that problem, then to think about strategies that might help with that particular problem. And that led to a gradual kind of realization, that person could tell friends, had never told a lot of friends that he had PTSD, he could tell friends he had PTSD, and then those friends could be kind of safe houses for him. So that was a step. Try that out, how's that working? Then again, so we go through the trial and error process. Let's try telling some friends, "I have PTSD," and let's try then going out and knowing that we can call them, they agreed to this, that, call them if I'm feeling upset, that seemed to work really well. I went out the other day, I tried this, I felt a little uneasy, I called my friend, I went over there, I didn't have a flashback, I didn't have an attack, panic attack, but I was able to feel like I could go to safety if I needed it. Okay, that worked. Let's expand it a little bit. And that person gradually developed a way to get back out in the world that gave him more confidence in what he could do out in the world that allowed him to deal with some other pieces of the problem. So he broke it down that way and took it one at a time, tried to find the solutions through the trial and error approach, paying attention to the feedback. Did it work? If it worked, great. If it didn't work, try something else. And that gradually allowed him to give himself more latitude in his life. He had tools to address the pieces of the problem. We can use self-talk both as a tool and a reminder for how to use the flexibility components in our lives. So self-talk is something we naturally do. We condense what's going on in our mind. You know, our mind's running all the time and we sometimes condense what's going on in our mind into a few sentences. We might say them aloud or we might say them to ourselves. Unfortunately, a lot of self-talk we use is negative. We might say to ourselves, "Ah, dummy," or something along those lines, "why did you do that?" But it can also be used positively. And people do naturally use positive self-talk. The classic one word, "Yes, yes!" You see this in sporting events, you see it in other contexts, people taking an exam or some context. And that has been harnessed in many different disciplines. It's been harnessed in education, it's been harnessed to a great deal in sports and in clinical context as well. It's a way of condensing what we're thinking and to phrases that we can use then to remind ourselves and guide us through some behavior. So for the flexibility mindset, we might actually make a little chart of these kinds of phrases. In my recent book, "The End of Trauma," I have a little chart of these phrases in the back, but there's simple things like for the flexibility mindset, we can tell ourselves things like, "It's gonna be, okay, I have some tools to work with this," or for challenge appraisal, so "It's going to be okay" would be being optimistic about it. "It'll be okay, the future will be okay," confidence in coping, that would be something along the lines of, "I have some tools, I know how to cope." And challenge appraisal would be something like, "Okay, this sucks, I didn't want this to happen. What do I need to do to get through this?" For the flexibility sequence, these are also quite simple for assessing the context. We can ask, we can say to ourselves, "What's happening now, what do I need to do," and that actually is quite powerful. I've used this in my own life when I'm struggling with something and it's a little confusing, I'm feeling upset, and then sort of take a second back and say, "What's happening, what do I need to do here?" And it really helps us focus in on a core piece of the problem, what is it that I need to do right now? Once we do that, then we, the repertoire stage, we can just say "So what tools do I have in my toolbox? What kind of things can I use here to cope with this?" These are simple statements, but they have a way of focusing our mind. And when we're talking about the flexibility sequence, this is a kind of a dialogue. A lot of self-talk are just simply statements like, "I'll get through this, this will be okay." But when we talk about the flexibility sequence, we're actually asking ourselves a question. We're having a dialogue with ourselves. It's almost like having ourselves in the room next to us asking us these questions. And it's simple and easy and very effective. There's a phrase that is often used when my work is talked about, summarized as, "You are stronger than you think." I'm a little leery of that phrase because it's presumptive. I don't know what anybody thinks, but it is fair to say, I think, there's a kind of a cultural trend toward thinking we're all pretty fragile right now. I think that's more and more been the case. And I don't know exactly why it all is. It has something to do with the internet has got us focused on how dangerous, how harmful the world is right now by all the things that we perceive that were fed because it gets our attention. But there's also a lot of industry that's sprung up around this idea, the industry that feeds off the idea that we are broken and fragile. And I think that's not a good trend. And I think, as I've said, the flexibility ideas are kind of a counter to that because it puts it back, puts us back in the driver's seat. But I think that it's good to remind ourselves of how strong we actually are. It can sometimes seem like a tough sell, this idea that you are, you can actually get through something, that you're stronger than you might think you are at the moment. But it's really important to cut yourself a little slack and to allow yourself to take on that belief for a little while at least to let yourself dig in and try to move forward with your life. And you can remind yourself both that you are strong. You can also remind yourself of all the times you've been strong in the past, all the things you've got to. You know, a little exercise that I like to do is to think back in my own life, in the past when something had really upset me and something had led me to feel like my life was really going to take a dark turn or some bad thing had happened and then I got through it. And I would love if someone from the future could have come back to me then and said, "Hey, you know, you got through this right when I was struggling with it, you know, you're struggling up, but you actually, I know I'm from the future, you got through this," and it's hard, something that we don't tend to believe at the time, we tend to feel like this struggle is means I am weak. You know, there's a related literature from the wonderful work by Carol Dweck on growth mindset. And that's the idea that if we think that something is fixed, a quality in us is fixed, then we tend to give up. If it looks like we're failing, that means that we must not be good. If it's fixed and I'm failing, it means I must be bad at this. But like many things in life, flexibility is about trying, it's about, it's about using the skills and doing the work to get through something. So it's not, resilience is not fixed, resilience is an outcome, and the idea with a flexibility is to get in there and dig in and work to get through something. And when we do that, more often than not, we do get through it. If we think, you know, I'm doing poorly, that means I'm broken, we are not going to get anywhere with that attitude. The best we can do is to just give ourselves the chance to believe we'll get through a situation and most of the time we will.

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