Resilience, the ability to recover quickly or object to spring back into shape, is a key to success as an entrepreneur. I can attest to its importance from my own serial entrepreneur experience, Events overtake an entrepreneur when “activity breeds activity” or “action cures fear”. At my height of success as a commercial insurance agent in Atlanta, my body shut down, and it turned-out I had a large pituitary tumor (benign but serious). The pituitary gland is the “master gland” that runs one’s hormonal system.
Time Magazine ran this article in June 2015 titled, “How to Bounce Back” by Mandy Oakland, well worth every entrepreneur’s time to read.
Dr. Dennis Charney knows that each of his five children has hated him at some point or another–particularly when he dragged them along on one of his “semidangerous” adventure trips. He recalls a perilous hike with one of his daughters, who was 13 at the time. “Some weather came in, and there was some wildlife. When she said she despised me it came, like, from her soul,” says Charney, 64, who is now dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.
His son Alex knows the feeling. A decade ago, Charney took him on a kayaking trip to Patagonia with his best friend, Dr. Steven Southwick. It rained the entire time, the life jackets didn’t fit, and Alex had to share a broken-ruddered boat with his dad for 12-mile runs every day. When it was all over, Alex informed his father he never wanted to speak to him again.
But as a psychiatrist who, with Southwick, has studied the science of resilience for two decades, Charney knows there are benefits to forcing people out of their comfort zone. Resilience is essentially a set of skills–as opposed to a disposition or personality type–that make it possible for people not only to get through hard times but to thrive during and after them. Just as rubber rebounds after being squeezed or squished, so do resilient people.
It’s a tantalizing arena for neuroscientists, who are getting better at understanding why some people bounce back from difficult experiences–both those they seek out and those that blindside them–while others don’t fare quite so well. And thanks to modern imaging, scientists can peer inside the brain in real time to see how, and to what extent, stressful situations change the structure and functions of the brain. They are also learning that training for resilience can change the brain to, well, make it more resilient.
Much of the new evidence suggests that with a little practice, anyone can develop resilience, says Southwick, 67, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. There are lots of ways to intervene so that stress or trauma doesn’t derail you, he says. No one size fits all.
That’s good news, because humans get stressed far more than they realize. The hot-and-cold boss, the traffic delays, the spat with their spouse, the monthly bills–these are all registered as stress in the brain. “The vast majority of us will be faced with one or more major traumatic stressors during a lifetime,” says Southwick. But the countless smaller stresses also take a toll. Resilience, research shows, can help with that, and it’s not a moment too soon, given that nearly all our modern ills, including heart disease and possibly even brain disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, have stress as a common risk factor.
Much of the new evidence suggests that with a little practice, anyone can develop resilience, says Southwick, 67, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. There are lots of ways to intervene so that stress or trauma doesn’t derail you, he says. No one size fits all.
That’s good news, because humans get stressed far more than they realize. The hot-and-cold boss, the traffic delays, the spat with their spouse, the monthly bills–these are all registered as stress in the brain. “The vast majority of us will be faced with one or more major traumatic stressors during a lifetime,” says Southwick. But the countless smaller stresses also take a toll. Resilience, research shows, can help with that, and it’s not a moment too soon, given that nearly all our modern ills, including heart disease and possibly even brain disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, have stress as a common risk factor.
After interviewing scores of Vietnam prisoners of war, Army Special Forces and survivors of horrific tragedies, Charney and Southwick became convinced that anyone could train him- or herself to be more resilient. POWs told Southwick and Charney that with only two resources–free time and their minds–they were able to do remarkable things they couldn’t do before; one developed a knack for multiplying huge numbers in his head, while another built a house in his imagination (and then later, on solid ground). “It said to us that there’s enormous untapped capacity of the human brain,” Charney says.
Discovering why some of us fare better than others has always been at the heart of resilience research. Now techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging make it possible for scientists to look beyond their own observations of people and into the parts of their brains that govern emotion. By observing patterns of blood flow, they can measure brain activity and see, for instance, what stress looks like in different people–which is useful because how we respond to stress is a critical part of resilience. Like the animal whose pulse returns quickly to normal once it has successfully outrun a predator, resilient brains seem to shut off the stress response and return to baseline quickly. “Resilient people seem to have the capacity to appropriately regulate the subcortical fear circuits under conditions of stress,” says Charney.
It doesn’t take a predator to trigger a stress response in modern humans. Some research shows that even feelings of social pain–like rejection and loneliness–zoom along the same neural pathways as fear. “This notion that I’m going to be rejected or fail or won’t be accepted by the group activates the same circuits as if I saw a wolf,” Southwick says. It’s an evolutionary hanger-on from when our ancestors survived only in groups.
The problem is, even though we’re no longer bumping into wolves, we’re constantly activating the same neural pathways of fear with everyday stressors–worrying about the future, fretting about the past. The more we use this neuronal superhighway, the more efficient it grows, and this mode of thinking becomes our default. But new research shows humans can train their brains to build and strengthen different connections that don’t reinforce the fear circuit. Over time, if people use this new pathway enough, it can become the new response to stress.
Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, thinks he’s found a connection in the brain that is especially important for resilience: the path from the prefrontal cortex–the seat of cognition and planning–to the amygdala, an emotional part of the brain that responds to threats. A stronger connection means the prefrontal cortex can more quickly tell the emotional amygdala to quiet down, Davidson writes in his book The Emotional Life of Your Brain.
Scientists can see how resilient brains respond to emotion differently, found Martin Paulus, scientific director and president of the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Okla. In a series of brain-imaging experiments on resilient Navy SEALs, Paulus showed the SEALs a color cue that signaled they were about to see an emotional picture. Paulus saw that their brains anticipated the emotion more quickly than the average brain, letting them jump nimbly between different types of emotions. Paulus says that in his research he has seen differences in the brains of people with anxiety or depression that suggest they have a hard time letting go of emotions and are often too engaged in emotional processes. The Navy SEALs, on the other hand, weren’t glued to the emotional experiences. Why? “They’re more resilient,” he says. And just like working your biceps or your abs, say experts, training your brain can build up strength in the right places–and at the right times–too.
Next: The Workout for Your Brain