I have lived in the Burlington, Vermont area for over 20 years and find Vermonters a generally resilient species. The problem is most people think it is a purely mental trait you either have or you don’t.  With my professional training as a chiropractor, having studied the nervous system for over 40 years, I believe there is a strong physical component that is often missed and that if applied can be regarded as a bio-hack for resilience.

What is it that separates a resilient person from someone who wishes they were?

We can get conceptual, or we can get real. When I say real, I mean Physical.

“Physical resilience refers to the body’s capacity to adapt to arising challenges, maintain stamina and strength in the face of demands, and recover efficiently and effectively when acutely damaged or besieged by microbes.  If health is the body’s natural state, ‘resilience’ simply refers to the body’s ability to realize and express its true power and always return to that state. “~ Gill Mathias

I want to explore the idea that resilience in a person is not just a state of mind, but can be founded in their physiology. Although resilience may suddenly appear to be demonstrated in a dramatic moment where demand is high and the moment is met, matched and mastered, resiliency is something that is built over time, not from a single big event. It springs from consistency in the 10,000 choices we make every day.

Much discussion of resiliency is in the mental emotional realm. Certainly we think of the brain as the organ in charge of mental processing. So much of the brain’s performance comes from responding to the experiences we have. The brain is a use-dependent organ. Resilience is developed and learned over time from being exposed to challenging – but manageable – experiences. It is a set of skills that can be developed.

Learning for the body means experiencing. Having experiences outside your comfort zone expands the brain and neural pathways. If you want to build resilience, get comfortable being uncomfortable.

 Like an athlete that trains, they get stronger, faster, and more accurate the more they train. Weight training produces strength from pushing the muscle to the point that it breaks down and then rebuilding the damaged fibers to be ready for the next bigger challenge or stress. This is what healthy living systems are designed to do. They adapt.

I once met an old-timer who had been a body builder professionally and it was quite sad that his muscles had been worked so hard to develop bulk that he was unable to scratch the back of his own head and had difficulty dressing himself. How could this happen? The bulk was developed without keeping the muscle stretched and supple. Although he won competitions, in his real life, his bulk made him very vulnerable because he lacked the range of motion to be able to readily and appropriately adapt to varied circumstances.

So it is with resilience. To be effective, there must be strength AND flexibility to provide the full range of adaptability that offers greater choice in any given moment, whether it is mentally or physically. Be flexible. Trees and shrubs that don’t bend in the wind will break.

I believe we are born with a certain degree of innate resilience. Life force itself naturally strives to maintain life. Living systems are adaptable by definition.

As Hans Selye, the pioneer explorer of the effect of stress on health said: “Stress is not necessarily bad for you. It is also the spice of life, for any emotion, any activity causes stress…the same stress that makes one person sick is an invigorating experience for another…Complete absence of stress is incompatible with life since only a dead man makes no demand on his body or mind.”

 A toddler learning to walk keeps getting up and trying again demonstrating the natural resilience all living things possess.  Did you ever notice that toddlers have amazing posture because if they don’t their large head will bring them toppling over? Once they have mastered walking, they are soon off running. This is healthy normal. So what happens to that innate superpower over time? At what point do we begin to lose our innate resilience? I believe a key factor that begins to drain our energy is physical. And I believe the earliest sign of decline is seen in our posture. When our posture starts to slump it is an indicator of overload… survival posturing. But is it just the evidence of lost resilience or is poor posture contributing to a downward spiral of compromised adaptability? In my 37 years of practice I have witnessed a decline in posture that is starting younger and younger. There is a direct correlation between poor posture and degenerative changes in the spine. 40 years ago, one would expect to see degenerative arthritic changes starting in middle aged folks. Recent research in the last 5 years is now showing degenerative changes in 9% of 10 year olds. This next generation is in trouble.

Posture is an indicator of the degree of resilience. I remember a Charlie Brown comic strip of Charlie standing with his head slumped over, depressed, talking with Lucy at her psychiatry booth. He said that the only way to get satisfaction from being depressed was to hold his head down, because if he stood up with great posture he no longer felt depressed…

So how does this work? How can our emotions be related to our posture and our posture to our resilience?

Candice Pert, PhD, the discoverer of neurotransmitters, describes them as the molecules of emotion. The limbic system is the part of the brain where we process emotions. It turns out there is more limbic tissue in the spinal cord than the brain. Watch my quick video for a better understanding of the spinal cord in relation to health.