What's the X Factor When it Comes to Resilience?

A new, data-driven analysis, shows what it takes to build your resilience.

Reviewed by Tyler Woods

Key points

• Resilience is a term used in the stress literature, but it often is poorly defined.
• A new, data-driven, method identifies five distinct pathways toward resilience.
• By finding meaning from life's tests, your resilience will build on itself as you navigate new challenges.

Coping with significant life events can test every ounce of a person’s inner reserve. The Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025 present such a challenge on a massive scale. Not only did people lose their homes, but also their communities and potentially their workplaces. Even if you have not been exposed to such devastation, it’s likely that something has gone wrong in your life at some point or another. What got you through it?

Researchers who study the impact of significant life events on people’s mental health begin with the assumption that a life event in and of itself doesn’t have to be stressful. Your appraisal of the event is what counts. Yet, researchers in this field also know that minor daily events, called “hassles,” can also wreak havoc on mental health. Indeed, what can make a life event stressful is its impact on the mundane but necessary aspects of daily life. Imagine all the people affected by the Los Angeles fires. Adding to the psychological impact is the need to go through the physical rebuilding process, which in and of itself is full of potential coping hazards.

A New Way to Look at Resilience

It goes without saying that people vary in their ability to readjust after a major life event. Even everyone exposed to the same stressor (as in a large disaster) reacts differently. You may have a friend who can still make jokes after such an event and another who can hardly speak without breaking down into tears. What differentiates them, and what can you learn to help you the next time you’re faced with a major deviation from life’s even keel?

According to Goethe University Frankfurt’s Kira Ahrens and colleagues (2024), it is resilience that provides the key to understanding how and why people react differently to stress. In their words, “resilience is an outcome of good mental health in the face of stressor exposure, the likelihood of which is increased by the presence of …’resilience factors’ that facilitate successful adaptation (‘resilience processes’)” (p. 1077). In other words, you have something within you that makes it possible for you to engage in effective coping strategies. The question is what that something might be.

It's not enough to say that someone’s good mental health helps them cope, Ahrens et al. note; you need to be able to specify what that magic X factor looks like. Their proposal is that the heart of resilience lies in the concept of “Sense of Coherence,” or SOC. As measured in the Ahrens et al. study (by the Orientation to Life questionnaire), SOC consists of the three components of comprehensibility (perceiving the world as understandable), manageability (feeling that you have resources at your disposal), and meaningfulness (seeing life as having challenges rather than burdens).

Tracking Resilience Over Time

Not only is it important to come up with a predictor of resilience, but also a way to quantify it. The Goethe U.’s approach to studying resilience was a data-driven strategy that defines reactions to stress in terms of patterns of individual trajectories over time.

‘With data from a large sample of German adults measured every three months over several years in a study known as LORA (707 adults ranging from 18 to 50 years old), Ahrens et al. were able to compute a score for each participant based on a combination of life event (LE) exposure and daily hassles (DH). Each person’s LE-DH score was then used as a statistical predictor of their mental health problems (e.g., worry, anxiety, depression) at each test occasion. The extent to which someone’s mental health varied in accordance with life event exposure could then be individually plotted and became the measure of resilience.

Now, with this empirically-based measure, Ahrens and her collaborators could go to the next step, which was identifying systematic patterns of trajectories over time. Based on the idea that people vary in their resilience, their statistical approach involved an advanced method that could produce valid clusters of resilience patterns. Previous LE exposure, SOC, and other demographic factors then became the predictors of which cluster an individual might fall into.

Before turning to the results, it’s worth taking a look at what the significant life events constituted among the LORA sample. The most common involved relationship disputes and separations followed by serious illness or death of others, financial and legal problems, own health or illness, events related to marriage or children, house problems, and finally, trauma/abuse. As already alluded to, these events can be stressful in and of themselves, but it’s the hassles associated with them that can be just as bad, or worse. You might be ready to end a relationship with a romantic partner, but then there’s all the paperwork involved, not to mention legal issues and the need to move your residence. Perhaps you can relate to one or more of these life events; “house” problems clearly would be at the top of the list for the people going through the LA wildfires.

Analysis of the resilience patterns among the LORA participants produced distinct trajectories, with the best fit involving separation into five groupings. The nature of the life event played no role in shaping these patterns, but scores on SOC did serve as significant predictors. Individuals in the high-stress reactivity groups, before and in response to the events, had low SOC scores; these groups represented 26 percent of the sample. Those with low reactions to stress throughout the period (30 percent of the sample) had the highest SOC scores, indicating that “perceiving the world as understandable, manageable, and meaningful seems to contribute to low-stress reactivity” (p. 1087). Interestingly, these groups didn’t differ on age, suggesting that it’s not simply the learning of life lessons that allows people to survive a major upheaval.

From Stress Reactivity to Resilience

The Goethe U. findings reinforce the findings from stress literature that people vary in response to significant life events. However, what the study contributes that’s new is the role of having a sense that life has meaning. Those who managed to pull through a stressful event weren’t just mentally “healthier” or “stronger.” They were able, specifically, to draw from a firm sense of conviction not only that the world is understandable, but that they possess the resources to manage what the world decides to put in front of them.

Turning these findings into practical use, try taking a page from the playbook of those in the resilient trajectory. It’s easy to panic when you feel that you can’t possibly get through the next few hours after a significant event, not to mention days or years. Regardless of what the event is, as the study showed, it’s the meaning-making that you create that will help you pull through.

To sum up, resilience need not be a mysterious entity that you either have or you don’t, nor is it simply a personality trait. Finding fulfillment from even the most dire of circumstances is achievable by looking for the lessons it can teach you.