The thin line between resilience and self-sabotage
When applied blindly, resilience can do real harm to our health and our ability to change broken systems.
by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
For years, I prided myself on being resilient. As a founder and a neuroscientist, I wore my capacity to endure like a badge of honor. I learned to push myself further, work longer hours, and absorb pressure without showing cracks. Each time I hit a wall, I adapted, trying to become tougher — until my body stopped cooperating.
While working at Google, I developed a blood clot in my arm — a condition that, in someone my age at the time, doctors associated with chronic stress. It forced an uncomfortable question: What if my resilience wasn’t protecting me, but delaying the moment I had to admit something was wrong?
We tend to treat resilience as an unqualified good. We praise the quality in entrepreneurs, caregivers, students, and leaders. Resiliency has become a moral injunction — a signal of maturity and strength. But a growing body of research suggests that resilience, when applied blindly, can do real harm to our health and our ability to change broken systems.
The resilience paradox
Psychologist George Bonanno, one of the leading researchers on resilience, has argued that resilience is not a fixed trait but a pattern of regulatory flexibility — the ability to choose different strategies depending on context. The paradox appears when resilience gets mistaken for a single strategy: to endure and keep going. This turns resilience into a rigid form of grit.
In several studies, people with higher grit were more likely to persist at tasks that were objectively unwinnable. They played longer, invested more effort, and lost more money. The same quality that helps those people finish hard things also makes them slower to abandon unworkable ones.
A similar misreading happens in how we interpret adversity. One of the most widely cited findings in psychology is a U-shaped curve: People who have experienced some adversity report better long-term well-being than those who’ve experienced none or a lot.
Resilience stops being a positive when it keeps people tolerating what should be fixed.
This nuance is often flattened into a slogan — “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” — which ignores the steep drop-off in well-being at high levels of adversity. Even more dangerous is when organizations take a descriptive finding and turn it into a prescription: Adversity is character-building. The data doesn’t say that.
At the physiological level, the costs of rigid grit can be severe. A systematic review of the evidence shows that, in contexts of chronic stress and limited control, this coping style is linked to worse cardiovascular outcomes. In systems that don’t yield to sustained effort, blindly enduring leads to wear-and-tear.
Even our stories of growth can dangerously color our relationship to resilience. Research finds that self-reported post-traumatic growth is often exaggerated. Saying “this made me stronger” can help us function socially and emotionally in the short term, but it can also keep us from acknowledging our struggles.
This is the resilience paradox: Resilience stops being a positive when it keeps people tolerating what should be fixed.
How to practice mindful resilience
Resilience is not a virtue but a strategy, and like all strategies, it has some failure modes. So, instead of applying it blindly and rigidly, here are five evidence-based ways to practice resilience without letting it backfire:
Distinguish between challenges and traps. Challenges are temporary obstacles with clear pathways forward; traps are situations where more effort yields diminishing or negative returns. Before doubling down, ask: “If I keep going like this, is the situation likely to improve?” If the answer is no, being resilient in that situation is not strength — it’s inertia.
Monitor your body’s veto power. Chronic fatigue, persistent anxiety, or recurring illness aren’t signs you need more resilience; they’re signs you need different strategies. Instead of pushing through, listen to physical symptoms and treat them as data.
Practice strategic quitting. We train people to endure but not to know when to exit. Yet changing paths when costs outweigh benefits is a core component of emotional agility. Sometimes, the most resilient thing you can do is walk away.
Separate your worth from your resilience. When resilience becomes an identity, struggling might feel like personal failure. Your value isn’t measured by how much you can bear, and you’re more likely to have a positive long-term impact if you take care of your health.
Look for systemic solutions. If possible, try not to pay a personal cost for a collective problem. Sometimes, the most effective response to adversity is working to eliminate its source rather than learning to tolerate it better.
Resilience is a powerful human capacity. But like any tool, it has a proper range of use. Beyond that range, it can become dangerous. That’s why the most resilient people are not those who suffer quietly but those who adjust quickly: those who know when to rest, when to push, when to change course, and when to walk away.
This article is part of Big Think’s monthly issue The Roots of Resilience.
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Really like the core idea here. Resilience doesn't just mean push harder, and sometimes stepping back or changing how we relate to difficulty is the right move.
At the same time, I wonder how far this framing holds in situations where people have very little real control—like war or displacement. In those cases, resilience can be less about choice or mindset and more about survival under severe constraint.
I think the concept still works, but it feels important not to universalize it in a way that hides those limits of agency.
I think the uncomfortable part isn’t that resilience can turn into self-sabotage — it’s that the shift happens silently. We start by enduring, and before we notice, we’ve built an identity around tolerating misalignment.
I’d put it this way: resilience should keep you alive long enough to choose differently, not become the reason you never do. At some point, the real strength isn’t pushing harder, it’s admitting the direction itself needs to change.