The Psychology of Resilience

When researcher Mark Seery at the University of Buffalo tracked thousands of people over many years, cataloguing every hardship they experienced—deaths, illnesses, divorces, job losses, financial disasters—and then measured their mental health and life satisfaction, he found something unexpected. The people who had been through no struggle during the study period were struggling anyway. They reported more distress, lower satisfaction, and were more knocked around by everyday problems than people who had actually experienced real pain. The healthiest group sat in the middle: some hardship, but not crushing amounts. As host Rob Dial puts it, "A life with zero difficulty in it doesn't produce a strong person. It produces a fragile person."

That study, Dial argues, explains something he has watched in his coaching clients for over a decade. Some people who have built genuinely impressive lives—money, business, freedom—can get completely leveled by small things: a hard conversation, a rejection, one bad quarter. Because they optimized their lives to never feel anything bad, they removed every uncomfortable thing they could. And when you remove all discomfort, you don't get peace. You get a lower and lower threshold for what you count as unbearable.

The feeling is not a warning