Are we more resilient than we realise?

I’ve always thought of myself as ‘resilient’. For years, I thought that meant being the type who would ‘grin and bear it’ to complete an important task. I particularly remember the 36h non-stop writing marathon to finish my PhD thesis, and tolerating 20 job rejections and a disruptive relocation to secure a PI position. These caused hardship too, but I’d push aside negative emotions to get on with it.
 
So here’s the surprise – I no longer call that ‘resilient’! I call it ‘short-term’ thinking. 
 
I see the success it brought but I also see its cost: to wellbeing, to family and, on numerous occasions, even to productivity. 
 
I still believe lasting success needs seriously hard work, but is that much pain inevitable or is there another, healthier way? A more sustainable form of resilience?

Emotional rollercoaster
Whatever your career stage, you will have had highs and lows. 38 years in research have brought me many. I’ve experienced amazing moments as my team has helped transform the molecular understanding of axon degeneration; I’ve had the delight of seeing team members begin their own successful independent careers; and I’ve always enjoyed the excitement of networking at a conference. But interspersed among these are the lows: failed experiments, paper and funding rejections, times I’ve lost work-life balance, and unfair criticism.

​What are yours? And what keeps you going in your darkest moments? 
 
The challenge of staying rational
Science needs to be done objectively. In principle, we don’t mind whether the data support our hypothesis or disprove it as long as we increase understanding. Or if the peer review of our paper raises inconvenient questions that could add clarity if we address them, then as a rational scientist we would welcome this.
 
But in truth, we are rarely ambivalent to the result of our experiment and never to the success of our paper. Underneath, we are all worried how other people will see us, we all want achievements that reflect our time and effort, we are all frustrated by something, and the nagging insecurity of fixed-term posts is never far away in early career. Emotion is always part of the deal. So where does it go? 
 
Managing emotions
We can try pushing emotions aside, as I did, but they don’t go away. They may come out at home, complaining every night to our partner; or elsewhere at work, as intense frustration with the unseen sender of an email; or they may build up and turn on us as depression or illness. 
 
Traditional ‘resilience’ has its limits. The ‘grin and bear it’ approach wasn’t much use the time I received eight paper or grant rejections in a week. We might be able to shrug off one or two, muttering “Their loss” but at some point we have to take the time to process it. And periods of job insecurity, despite much hard work and progress, have sometimes sent my motivation so low I’ve been ineffective for weeks.  And yes, there have been many evenings letting off steam at home, times that I now regret deeply because of the example I set my children and the burden I handed to my wife.  
 
Emotions are normal – even for scientists!
This is why Steve Peters’ book A Path Through the Jungle was such a revelation to me. It explains so clearly what emotions are, what they are trying to tell us. We learn how to harness the energy of those that are helpful, and what to do with those that are not. Negative emotions, Peters tells us, are normal and healthy. They evolved to be helpful in a very different (jungle) environment. In today’s society, or laboratory, some are still helpful, others get in the way, and some are destructive. 

​It is futile to fight or suppress them – they are far more ancient and powerful than our rational brains (scientist or not!). But Peters describes a stepwise process to understand them and manage them. Further thoughts on the relevance of this book to research life are in this earlier blogpost. 
 
Resilience is a learnable skill
Crucially, this process can be learned. Like learning a foreign language or a musical instrument, this needs repetition and reward. Sustainable resilience does not come from self-denial. It comes from understanding, and gaining energy from, our strongest values and drives, accepting some unpalatable truths, and figuring out ways to use what we have to move around them. It needs regular repetition of those thoughts until they become second nature. 
 
Some unpalatable truths in research are that peer review is imperfect, the road between scientific achievement and career advancement is lumpy, and not everyone in science is honest. At some point, I’ve found each of these devastating! But if we lift the veil on these and other unfortunate truths and recognise that we cannot change them, they can no longer hurt us. Only then can we channel our energy where we can make the most difference, even if we know things will not always go our way. 
 
The danger of victimhood
One danger, if we accept unpalatable truths, is to see ourselves as a ‘victim’. But building an identity around victimhood holds us back, whether we are dealing with a poor reviewer, a bad supervisor, or inefficient administration. Each of these can be true, but they define the world around us not our response. 
 
Entrepreneur Steven Bartlett grew up in a less-than-functional family facing racial inequalities but credits his success to refusing to see himself as a victim. Michael Bungay-Stanier, in his book The Coaching Habit, goes one step further, describing the Karpman drama triangle. Where there are ‘victims’, there are also ‘villains’ and ‘heroes’, sometimes switching between roles and all of them ineffective. We are best avoiding all of these roles because they lock us in, wasting energy instead of empowering change. 

​Never too young, never too old
Too often, I’ve heard young researchers labelled as “not resilient” or “not having what it takes”. Today, I’m astonished how inappropriate and damaging that label is. Not only does Peters describe how anyone can develop or strengthen resilience, but Sarah-Jane Blakemore’s book  Inventing Ourselves: the Secret Life of the Teenage Brain explains how much our brain continues to develop into our late 20s or beyond. And even if you’re older, my experience of learning about Peters’ model at the age of 57, and discussing it with many others, is that age is no barrier to learning this more powerful version of resilience. 
 
The answer then is that some pain may be inevitable in a research career, as in any profession. Life isn’t fair and nothing is perfect in the way we’d all like it to be. But if we can replace ‘grin-and-bear-it’ with ‘accept-and-adapt’, we can achieve just as much, or more, and save ourselves a lot of grief along the way.