Many folks consider being resilient a good thing. And on a surface level, it is a good thing.
The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.”
You may be told you’re resilient if you recover quickly from a job loss or understand how to care for your own mental health in a stressful home environment. So, yes, resilience is a good skill to have, but I recently learned of the term “toxic resilience” through a social media post from Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, a stress researcher at Harvard. In the post, Nerurkar says toxic resilience is when you power through and bounce back even when you shouldn’t, leaving you feeling totally stressed out and exhausted.
“Resilience, I don’t think, is a bad thing inherently, I want to make that clear. I believe it’s important to withstand discomfort and to manage the ways in which discomfort impacts our functioning on a daily basis,” said Meghan Watson, the founder and clinical director of Bloom Psychology & Wellness in Toronto.
If you get constructive feedback from your boss, you should be able to handle and work through that distress, Watson noted.
“Do I think that is how everyone uses resilience? Not necessarily. I think a lot of people use resilience as a way to bully themselves into a motivational stance towards doing more, being more ... and it starts to feel a lot like performance and less like actual growth,” added Watson.
This is what some refer to as “toxic resilience,” and it’s a way of bullying yourself into doing more and being more. Below, therapists share what toxic resilience means to them and how you can spot it in your everyday life.
Toxic resilience is a byproduct of hustle culture.
“One of the things that I have noticed is that [resilience] often is hustle culture repackaged,” said Watson. “And the question I usually ask my clients is, ‘What are you needing to be resilient from?’ And if that doesn’t seem reasonable, then the resilience isn’t either,” Watson added.
“A lot of people will work outside of their window of tolerance. A lot of people will push and push and push themselves to be more and more resilient,” said Danica Harris, a somatic therapist and coach based in Texas.
We live in a society that rewards perfectionism and rewards the push-push-push habit, Harris noted. “You’re seen as more successful — more valuable, even — if you can do more. And I think that’s leading to a ton of burnout,” she said.
Instead of sitting with burnout and taking a break from whatever the exhausting thing is, “The toxic resilience is like, ‘I’ll keep going,’ because there’s some belief that if I keep going, things will get better,” Harris said.
And sometimes toxic resilience does lead to good outcomes, said Harris. This could be a promotion or a raise, for instance. But that still doesn’t make it a fair way to treat your body and mind.
Toxic resilience can be a way to disconnect from your body, which can be a natural response to tough situations.
When you continually push yourself to do all the things — work long hours, unnecessarily take on projects at home, go to all of the social gatherings — it’s a way to distract yourself from what you’re really dealing with or what’s really going on in the world.
“If I just keep pushing, then I don’t have to be in my body. I can be dissociative,” Harris said. “When we think about the functional freeze state, I think that’s really connected to this toxic resilience, because it’s like, ‘Well, if I slowed down, I might actually have to contend with what’s happening. I might actually have to feel my feelings,’” she noted.
“I might have to notice that I’m pretty dissociative and not connected to my body, which means I’m denying my body what it needs,” Harris added. “And I think these are the real-world implications of this toxic resilience.”
“You’re breaking your body down, you’re breaking your mind down, you’re breaking your spirit down. And for what?” Harris said.
Maybe you’re doing this to get a better position at work or to get the top spot in your class, which are good things. “But I think we have to be weighing out those positive outcomes with the cost on us,” said Harris.
“You might be able to work a 14-hour day ... but are you nourishing your body? Are you moving your body? Are you hydrating? Do you have friendships and relationships that you can turn to? Do you or do you feel isolated?” Harris said.
“Sure, you can over function. Lots of us, especially trauma survivors, can over function. But you have to see yourself as an important factor worth tending to,” added Harris.
“And I think when this toxic resilience is present, we’re bypassing ourselves over and over again,” she said.
You don’t have to tolerate unfair situations — that is not resilience. That is a trauma response.
“I think it’s hard sometimes to use the word resilience ... because when people hear resilience, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, I just have to tolerate that. I just have to push forward.’ And I want to get away from this idea that resilience is tolerance over the long term. It’s not. It’s actually something a little deeper,” Watson noted.
For instance, if you’re a parent of a Black son and have to warn them about the dangers of getting pulled over by the cops, you aren’t really teaching them resilience, explained Watson. “Are you really teaching them to be resilient? Or is that a trauma response?” said Watson.
“I think resiliency then gets a little bit more dicey in that context,” Watson said. Resilience shouldn’t be rigid or an instinctive response to something, Watson noted. Instead, it should be flexible and adaptive to new circumstances.
Watson equated resiliency to working out. When you go to the gym and your muscles don’t respond to your tried-and-true workout, you have to push yourself a little further to get the gains you want. But that doesn’t mean the discomfort and pain after exercise is always the sign of a good workout or always the sign of a bad workout, Watson said.
“You’ve got to be open to investigating whether or not you actually need that kind of discomfort to grow in the ways you want to grow, and if you don’t, then what are you being resilient against? What are you pushing yourself to do?” Watson noted.
You shouldn’t just keep being “resilient” if it’s making life harder for you or allowing a bad situation to continue. Because, once again, that is not resilience and is an unfair burden.
True resilience is not pushing yourself to the brink.
“I’m wanting to help my clients reach a state of embodied resilience, which is them tending to their own resiliency and not living up to an external definition of resilience,” Harris said.
And that definition of resilience will vary from person to person.
“True embodied resilience is — what does my body need? And how do I tend to it so that I can keep going?” Harris said.
“The difference between someone being like, ‘Oh, she’s so resilient because she overworks,’ versus ‘She’s so resilient because she takes care of herself,’ it’s almost like a different starting and ending point, the outcome being like your well-being,” she added.
When aiming for embodied resilience, Harris said it’s important to ask yourself what’s doable for you and what you need. For example, instead of calling out of work on a day when you’re tired, negotiate with yourself and tap into your own resilience by working from home or wearing comfy clothes to the office, she said.
“To me, that’s what embodied resilience is ... ‘What do I need to make it through?’ As opposed to toxic resilience, which is just, ‘How do I shut up and take it?’” Harris said.