In contemporary psychology, resilience has become synonymous with strength—the celebrated capacity to recover from adversity and preserve mental equilibrium in the face of disruption. Defined as the process of adapting well to significant stress, trauma or adversity (American Psychological Association, 2020), it has often been portrayed as the antidote to psychological vulnerability. Nevertheless, underneath this valorisation is a growing paradox: The effort to hold oneself together and maintain continuity in the face of repeated stress can become an exhaustion all its own. The cultural myth of the “unbreakable self” conceals the quiet exhaustion of merely surviving at an expectation rather than an event.
Read More: Expectations and Their Impact on Life
The Shadow Side of Resilience
This tension, or shadow side of resilience, is garnering increasing attention in contemporary psychological literature. Research supports that resilient individuals are generally more emotionally stable, and quite good at regulating their own emotions to cope adaptively to life’s stressors. And while these are indeed positive traits embedded in resilience, they may potentially conceal more insidious costs, like chronic physiological arousal, numbness to emotional experience and cognitive exhaustion (Bonanno, 2021). Over time, the same adapted mechanisms that muffle the effects of stress, such as prolonged and heightened surveillance, self-regulation, and sustained goal orientation, can ultimately diminish well-being if repeatedly activated without their complementary processes of recovery (Ong et al., 2006). In fact, our body’s adaptive systems, when engaged chronically, incur allostatic load, which can contribute to biological wear-and-tear, as well as emotional fatigue, even within individuals regarded as “well-adjusted” (McEwen & Stellar, 1993).
Psychologist George Bonanno (2021) refers to this as the resilience paradox; the capacity to adapt can, at times, result in hidden costs, conceal vulnerability, and at times, sustain harmful systems. While resilience is a common phenomenon, predicting who will sustain it remains elusive (Bonanno & Diminich, 2013). Conceptually, resilience is now understood less as a fixed trait and more as a dynamic, context-dependent process, one in which strategies adaptive in one environment may become maladaptive in another (Troy & Mauss, 2011).
Read More: Five Pillars of Resilience, According to Psychology
When Resilience Masks Suffering
Resilience can conceal internal distress, physiological wear and structural harm, revealing the “dark side” of adaptation (Kalisch et al., 2017).
1. Masking Psychological Distress and Vulnerability
People with a “resilient personality prototype” may report low distress but demonstrate increased physiological reactivity, suggesting self-deceptive adjustment rather than actual recovery (Coifman et al., 2020). In the context of resilience, self-ratings may yield high levels of resilience, but momentary assessments reveal negative affect along with congruence increases and reliance upon emotional labour. (Hou et al., 2020). Characteristics like optimism or self-enhancement can assist with maintaining personal functioning while also facilitating emotional suppression over time (Bonanno et al., 2005).
Read More: Masculinity and Emotional Suppression
2. The Burden of Being Strong
In modern culture, resilience has become moralised into an expectation to endure and smile through fatigue. When resilience is considered an expectation, it transfers the burden of responsibility from structural conditions to the individual. Thus, burdening the overburdened and marginalised population with emotional labour with little recognition or reward (Suslovic, 2023). The concept of resilience represents the factors that are invisible to the naked eye and fall within the physiological, psychological and social aspects of existing while others are failing to do so (Kalisch et al., 2017).
As such, once resilience demonstrates its place within a cultural ideal, it could lead to the stigmatisation of vulnerability, as well as a stoic standard. Those who fail to “grow” from trauma may internalise failure (Southwick et al., 2014). Moreover, excessive use of the term dilutes its scientific precision. When everyone is “resilient,” the concept loses meaning (Bonanno & Diminich, 2013). Its glorification in heroic narratives perpetuates a culture that romanticises endurance while ignoring exhaustion.
Read More: Understanding and Overcoming the Over-Responsibility Trap
The Hidden Cost of Coping
1. Physiological and Energetic Costs
Coping causes biological wear due to the persistent activation of the body’s adaptive systems referred to as allostatic load (McEwen & Gianaros, 2011). Adaptive processes burn energy in order to cope via allostasis and energy expenditure due to stress; staying in these states due to chronic stress results in biological exhaustion. Since energy budgets are limited, chronic
Coping diverts energy and resources allocated to growth, repair, and maintenance, leading to accelerated ageing via biological processes such as telomere shortening and reduced cellular turnover (Ellis et al., 2022; Juster et al., 2010).
There are empirical examples of this cost: resilient low SES African American youth with high self-control demonstrate strong psychosocial promotion but poorer physical health, including hypertension, obesity, and accelerated ageing by young adulthood (Miller et al., 2011; Chen et al., 2020). Lastly, studies with adults who cope with adverse contexts show that those who cope later lead to worse long-term health outcomes than those who never had the exposure to adversity. To clarify, even if we were to cope to buffer against harm, ageing doesn’t take away the physiological residue of the threat through an experimental study (Kalisch et al., 2015).
2. Cognitive and Psychological Trade-offs
Resilience entails trade-offs—one dimension of resilience may mean a strength becomes a weakness in a different context (Kalisch et al., 2017). An individual’s emotional numbing, for example, can protect from stress. But this emotional numbing dampens the ability to positively or effectively engage in experience (Waugh et al., 2008). Neural adaptations (calmness) provide some resiliency to distressing situations, but unfortunately can also result in dampening positive affect, so that a resilient individual may look stable from the outside but experience fatigue or disconnection from inside.
Additionally, strategies like self-enhancement or unwarranted optimism have the capacity to mitigate short-term adjustment while obscuring any signs of stress/disengagement (Bonanno et al., 2005). Overreliance on self-coping resources also has the potential to create a version of “negative resilience” where perseverance becomes unsustainable (Bonanno, 2021).
Read More: Resilience: Adjusting Focus From Where You Can’t Do To What You Can
3. Societal and Structural Costs
The focus on the individual coping process ignores the systemic factors that underlie such distress (Joseph, 2013). Personal narratives about simply coping through almost any circumstance, at worst, begin to normalise systems and processes of inequity and shift the responsibility for social change to the individual coping process (Bottrell, 2009). Further, a coping paradigm for marginalised groups suggests that they are “resilient” and coping through harm rather than seeking empowerment. The Superwoman Schema of Black women exemplifies this: the survival coping process through self-reliance of emotional suppression occurs. But heightens the likelihood of stress-related illness and burnout (Woods-Giscombé, 2010).
The Coexistence of Growth and Wear
Adaptation is a product of a combination of growth and deterioration; that is, psychological growth and a depletion of biological resources. Post-Traumatic Growth denotes the experience of a perceived change or development following adversity. Allostatic Load reflects the biological cost of maintaining resilience to adversity through stress on the body of some kind (Kalisch et al., 2017).
1. The Co-Occurrence of Post-Traumatic Growth
Post-Traumatic Growth (PTG) is a term to denote psychological growth or change after traumatic events (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). However, the literature provides some evidence that reports of such growth can co-occur with ongoing suffering. For example,
Longitudinal studies reveal poor correlations between reports of transformation and actual transformation, suggesting that reports of PTG reflect more of a reconstruction of narrative than an indicator of actual growth (Infurna & Jayawickreme, 2019). Next, framing experiences of suffering accompanied by redeeming qualities can help facilitate salience in meaning, but individuals who are not able to align with these narratives can experience poorer adjustment (Southwick et al., 2014). Ultimately, growth can be an emotion-laden process when it is authentic, resulting in a cost-benefit analysis of suffering and transcendence (Glück et al., 2022).
Read More: Beyond Trauma: Illuminating the Power of Post-Traumatic Growth
2. The Biological Balance: Growth with Maintenance
The energetic model of allostasis explains how staying in stability and chronic stress is simply energy that is diverted away from growth and repair processes, resulting in early ageing and chronic health issues (McEwen, 2016; Juster et al., 2010). The evidence shows that this paradox exists among resilient young people who demonstrate competence. And self-regulation, in addition to higher blood pressure and accelerated epigenetic ageing than their peers (Chen et al., 2020). Hence, resilience is positively associated with psychological growth among individuals but may further expand quantitatively physiological capacity.
3. The Flexible Trade-Offs of Adaptation
Resilience comes with costs, which refer to the balance between beneficial adaptation and the strains to a physiological system. Flourishing in one area of one’s life, like work or school, may come at the expense of another area of one’s life, like family relationships or health. Ongoing adaptation requires flexible regulation, which is also an energetically costly process that contributes to wear (Kalisch et al., 2017).
Where the dynamic balance of growth and wear coexist as two interrelated signals of adaptation: a psychological sign of growth, and a physiological sign of wear and tear. To grow through hardship is to also pay the price of enduring the associated wear elsewhere; in other words, survival and transformation come from the same finite reserve of energy over time.
Conclusion
Resilience was once viewed as the highest form of human adaptability, but it is now showing a quieter irony: in trying to remain unbroken, we may be breaking in inconspicuous ways. The available psychological and physiological evidence builds to one conclusion— adaptation, when repeated, comes at a cumulative cost. What begins as protection may, over time, become depletion. The same systems that result in resilience, bolstered self-regulation, increased vigilance and emotional suppression, simultaneously erode the very systems that provide vitality and joy (Bonanno, 2021).
Read More: Why Childhood Trauma Can Lead to Obsessive Thinking and Perfectionism
When Strength Turns into Strain
The irony of resilience is not simply that it hides suffering but that it converts survival into expectation. Resilience develops into practice rather than repair and, in doing so, may harden into self-neglect. The capacity to cope turns into a quiet compulsion to perform strength, even as the body tyres and emotions flatten. Psychological growth and biological wear are not opposing outcomes but coexisting realities of adaptation, the human cost of maintaining balance in an unbalanced world (Chen et al., 2020).
To “bounce back” indefinitely is to deny the organism’s need for rest, rupture, and renewal. A more humane psychology of resilience shifts from mere endurance to an ethic of restoration. Allowing individuals to pause, soften, and seek help without shame. Real resilience is not about being free from vulnerability but about integrating it. Resilience can introduce the ability to bend but not break and rest without guilt.
References +
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