9 Ways to Become More Resilient

As modern life has become increasingly comfortable, our ability to tolerate things that discomfort us is disappearing.

I’ve spent my life working to increase empathy and understanding. But the road I’ve walked—through wars and genocide—makes me very skeptical of what passes as “suffering” in much of Western culture today.

Is suffering relative?

Is there any objective standard for oppression and persecution?

Does every pain claim matter the same?

These are things I think about constantly. Today, I’ll try to represent suffering in “the West”, from the view of “the rest”.

The ease of modern life

As a relative outsider looking in on US culture for the last 20 years from the Middle East, I think the ease of modern life has drastically changed our definitions of what is “hard”. Lacking many experiences that would register as historically difficult, the West has “lowered the rim”, as it were, to give our current complaints the apparent elevation of historical struggles. But they are not the same.

Conservatives do it with cries of “religious persecution, " which always fall a bit short of the beheadings and crucifixions that defined the faith and convictions of the martyrs of old.

Liberals tend to claim a broader spectrum of identitarian suffering, using sleight of hand to insist that words and ideas are the same as sticks and stones and broken hearts are broken bones.

The progress we’ve made that has led to this ease of life is a good thing. Mortality rates are down. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. Legal protections have been secured for historically marginalized peoples.

But just as desk jobs and smartphones have weakened our bodies and left us in chronic pain from nothing more than sitting, our mental fortitude has atrophied, leading to claims of “violence” over nothing more than differences in values or convictions.

It’s a paradox, but ease does not make easy.

Making a mockery of violence

A friend recently mentioned how “violent” and “toxic” something was. But the offending behavior they were citing was about words—and not intentionally harmful words; just words that gave occasion for hurt to rise in the person who heard them.

In their shorthand, the presence of hurt was the presence of violence.

“I don’t know,” I said. “After 15 years of living around war, religious persecution, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, I have a very different definition of violence. I think the word is being thrown around way too liberally in the US. Because it’s not just words—even ‘silence is violence’ now.”

If everything is violence—if we walk around like life is taking place at threat level 10—we won’t have any headroom left emotionally or philosophically when things get really rough. You can’t turn up the volume any louder than “10” without things getting extremely distorted.

Can we do hard things?

“We can do hard things” is a phrase that became popular on Instagram over the past few years. And I couldn’t agree more. But, in a typical regression to the mean, the phrase came to be a mockery of modern life; less of a call to grit and service and more scorn toward aspiration itself.

“The laundry needs folding and the kids have piano lessons but #WeCanDoHardThings… Or I may just throw them all back in the wash so I don’t have to deal with them. 🤷 (The laundry, too!)”

As we sit here in the twilight of post-modernism waiting for something new to emerge, someone will certainly say, “Who are you to judge what someone finds difficult, calls violence, or experiences as pain?”

I have no interest in being the gatekeeper for pain. If you say it hurts or you say it’s hard, that’s great. In that sense, pain is relative. But if you say your lack of capacity to bear up under stress is someone’s fault other than your own, that warrants more discussion.

The question for me is not “Who gets to decide what hurts?” but “Who gets to define causation?”

The peacemaker accepts that life hurts. But the peacemaker cannot accept that all pain is bad or that someone always needs to pay.

Get stronger

I’ve borne witness to some of the worst of what humans can do to each other, and it has little to do with the casual offenses that constitute today’s workplace drama and online arguments. Yet, it’s precisely those slights that occupy Western minds.

I don’t want to see the pain of poverty, disease, famine, human trafficking, war, genocide, and displacement lumped in with the manufactured drama of Western activism. They are not the same.

But even if personal subjective experience was all that mattered, there would still be tremendous benefit to increasing our individual tolerance for disagreement, offense, and hurt.

So how would we accomplish that?

Today, I want to offer 9 things that can help you increase your stress tolerance, push through hard things, and raise the baseline on what you subjectively experience as objectionable.

9 Ways to Become More Resilient

1. Cold plunge

   It’s old technology, but there is something extremely invigorating about jumping into a tub of cold water to start your day. I haven’t worked my way down to the icy temperatures yet, but the mental fortitude that comes with choosing to get in and stay under something this uncomfortable to start your day has a direct transfer to every other area of life.

2. Lift weights

   The fastest growth in mental fortitude my family and I have ever experienced has come through lifting heavy things. We’ve never been quick to quit. But this discipline has taught us how to (a) purposefully add stress each day; (b) adapt to it so that it doesn’t hurt us the same next time; (c) and repeat. The things we used to find difficult are now surprisingly easy.

3. Do manual labor

   I’m the least handy person around. I did most of the other things on this list just so that I wouldn’t have to do manual labor. But if I was unwilling to do the other things here, manual labor would be my shortcut for building resilience. Concrete, wood, steel, hauling hay, milking cows, etc seem to produce people who can translate their grit across the realms of life.

4. Start a business

   Starting and growing a business is one of the hardest things you can do in life. It’s also one of the most rewarding. Most small business stories involve debt, scraping by, long hours, and extreme sacrifice. If more people were willing to undertake the work necessary to build, there would be a lot less willingness to burn things down.

5. Move to a new culture

   Want an adventurous way to reset your perception of pain? Moving to a new country, especially if you stand out in that culture, creates a range of experiences that raise the bar on what registers as stressful. In the early days, you may cry yourself to sleep over the way you are mocked on the streets, the difficulty of making new friends, or shopping in an open bazaar. But as you adapt, your brain will reset and you will have the opportunity to become increasingly unoffendable.

6. Learn a new language

   There is very little that we choose to do in life that is more humbling than learning a new language as an adult. To make yourself a child again is to invite laughter, misunderstanding, and offense. You will make offense. You will take offense. And there will be nothing you can do about it except keep showing up.

7. Live in poverty

   Nothing will raise the threshold of what you think sucks about this world more than living without electricity, water, heat, air, food, or sanitation. It’s also a great way to double down on some of the other things on this list, like service and gratitude.

8. Serve others

   A life of service is the best vaccine to the alleged “toxicity” of life. When you spend your life with those suffering from deadly diseases or refugees trying to rebuild, not only will your perspective change, but you will not have any energy left for the nagging inconveniences vying for the spotlight.

9. Practice gratitude

   Whether it’s prayer, silent meditation, or a journal, cultivating a gratitude habit is one of the best ways to continue to adapt to the heavy things of life. There’s plenty of critique to go around. But those who practice gratitude know that you’ll never get more out of life than what you put in. So if you want to be appreciated, constantly crying foul is not the way. Try being grateful for another day, and you can’t go wrong!

In many ways, the world is better than ever! And yet, we do need struggle. So as progress steals our vitality, we are guaranteed to manufacture stress and resistance one way or the other.

Will we decrease our frailty through the kind of living that unites the world around us, or will we be swept up in the false promises of drama and division?

Jeremy Courtney
Cofounder
HUMANITE

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