Lifestyle
‘Bouncing back’ is a myth – resilience means integrating hard experiences into your life story, not ignoring them
Keith M. Bellizzi, University of Connecticut
How to Build Resilience
When Maria looked at herself in the mirror for the first time after her mastectomy, she stood very still.
One hand rested on the bathroom counter. The other hovered near the flat space where her breast had been. The scar was raw and angry. The loss was quiet but enormous. Her body felt foreign.
In moments like these, people are often urged to be resilient – which can feel like being told to show no weakness, to push through no matter what. Or they imagine resilience as bouncing back: returning somehow unscathed to be the person you were before.
But standing in that bathroom, Maria knew there was no going back. And toughness wouldn’t change what had happened. The real question was how she could move forward, carrying this experience into her new reality.
Maria’s story, one I came to know personally, is far from unique. Loss, trauma and illness often bring the same wrenching questions of identity and the painful uncertainty of what comes next.
I’ve spent more than two decades studying resilience, particularly among individuals and families navigating these kinds of life-changing events. I am also a four-time cancer survivor and author of a new book, “Falling Forward: The New Science of Resilience and Personal Transformation.” If there is one myth I wish society would retire, it’s the idea that resilience means “toughness” or “bouncing back.”
Rethinking resilience based on research
Moments like Maria’s reveal something important: The way people tend to talk about resilience often doesn’t match how people actually live through adversity.
In popular culture, resilience is often equated with grit, toughness or relentless positivity. People celebrate the warrior, the fighter, the triumphant survivor.
But across research, clinical practice and lived experience, resilience is something far more nuanced, raw and human.
It’s not a personality trait that some people simply have and others lack. Decades of research show resilience is a dynamic process. It’s shaped by the small, everyday decisions and adjustments individuals make as they adapt to significant adversity while maintaining, or gradually regaining, their psychological and physical footing over time.
And importantly, resilience does not mean the absence of distress.
Research on people facing serious life disruptions shows that distress and resilience often coexist. For example, in my study of adolescent and young adult cancer survivors, participants reported being upset about finances, body image and disrupted life plans, while simultaneously highlighting positive changes, such as strengthened relationships and a greater sense of purpose.
Resilience, in other words, is not about erasing pain and suffering. It is about learning how to integrate difficult experiences into a life that continues forward.
How resilience really works
At one point, Maria told me she had started avoiding mirrors, intimacy, even conversations that made others uncomfortable.
“Well, you’re strong,” people would tell her. “Just stay positive. This too shall pass.”
But strength, she said, felt like a performance.
What ultimately shifted for Maria was not an increase in toughness. It was permission to grieve.
She began speaking openly about the loss of her breast; not just as a medical procedure but as a symbolic loss tied to identity, sexuality and womanhood. She joined a support group. She allowed herself to feel anger alongside gratitude for survival.
This kind of emotional processing turns out to be central to resilience.
My colleagues and I have found that people who actively process loss, rather than suppress it, demonstrate better long-term adjustment. Tamping down negative feelings may provide short-term relief, but over time it is associated with greater stress on your body and more difficulty adapting.
In other words, resilience is not about sealing the wound and pretending it no longer aches. It is about learning how to carry the wound without letting it consume your entire story.
Neuroscience supports this integration model. When people engage in meaning-making – reflecting on their experiences and incorporating them into a coherent life narrative – brain networks associated with emotional regulation and cognitive flexibility become more active. The brain, quite literally, reorganizes as you adapt to new realities.
Maria described the change simply.
“I don’t like what happened,” she told me. “But I’m not at war with my body anymore.”
That is resilience.
Practices that help build resilience
If resilience is about integration rather than toughness and bouncing back, how can you cultivate it? Research across psychology, neuroscience and chronic illness points to several evidence-based strategies:
- Allow emotional complexity: Resilient people are not relentlessly positive. They allow space for the full range of emotions, such as gratitude and grief, hope and fear. Paying attention to your feelings through strategies such as reflective writing or psychotherapy have been linked to improved psychological adaptation.
- Build a coherent narrative: Human beings are storytellers. Trauma can shatter one’s sense of self, but constructing a narrative that acknowledges loss while identifying continuity and growth supports adaptation. The goal is not to spin suffering into silver linings, but to situate it within a broader life story. For example, someone might say, “Cancer derailed my plans and changed my body, but it also clarified what matters to me and how I want to move forward.”
- Lean into connection: Isolation magnifies suffering. Social support is one of the strongest predictors of how well people are able to cope and move forward after illness or trauma. For Maria, connection with other women who had had mastectomies normalized her experience and reduced shame.
- Practice deliberate pauses: Intentionally give yourself some time to breathe. Mindfulness and contemplative solitude can strengthen your ability to regulate emotions and recover from stress. Pausing allows experience to be processed rather than avoided.
- Expand identity: Illness, loss and trauma reshape how you think of yourself. Rather than clinging to who you were, resilience often involves expanding who you are becoming. Research on post-traumatic growth shows that people often report deeper relationships, clarified priorities and renewed purpose – not because trauma was good, but because it forced reevaluation. Maria no longer describes herself simply as a breast cancer patient. She is a survivor, yes, but also an advocate, a mentor, a woman whose sense of femininity is self-defined rather than dictated by her anatomy.
Moving forward
We are living in a time of widespread burnout and rising mental health challenges, where cultural pressure to appear strong often leaves people silently struggling. An insistence on grit and relentless optimism can backfire, making people feel inadequate when they inevitably feel pain.
Resilience is not about returning to who you were before illness, loss or trauma. It is about becoming someone new: someone who carries the scar, remembers the loss and still chooses to engage with life.
Maria still pauses when she sees her reflection. But she no longer turns away.
“This is my body,” she told me recently. “This is my story.”
Resilience is not forged in the denial of vulnerability, but in its acceptance. Not in bouncing back, but in integrating what has happened into who you are becoming.
And that, I believe, is where real strength lives.
Keith M. Bellizzi, Professor of Human Development and Family Sciences, University of Connecticut
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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child education
Toy Story 5’s ‘Lilypad’ is an indictment of the world that birthed the ‘iPad Kid’
Toy Story 5 introduces “Lilypad,” a kid-friendly tablet that sidelines Woody and Buzz—and spotlights how the “iPad kid” debate is less about bad parenting and more about work, childcare costs, and a broken social safety net.
Aarushi Bhandari, Davidson College
In the trailer for “Toy Story 5,” a little girl named Bonnie is playing with her toys when a package arrives in the mail.
She opens it to find Lilypad, a tablet for children.
The iconic toys from the series – Woody, Buzz Lightyear, the Potato Heads, Forky and Slinky Dog – then watch in dismay as Bonnie casts them all aside in favor of the bright tablet screen. Rex the dinosaur exclaims, “What? Extinction? Not again!”
The film zeros in on a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon: the “iPad kid,” a term used – often disparagingly – to describe a generation of children who grew up enchanted by screens.
A lot of the discussion around tablet use among kids shames parents, framing it as an example of lazy or bad parenting. Yet factors such as long working hours and lack of access to affordable childcare compel many parents to rely on tablets.
As a scholar of the attention economy – and also as a mom to a 4-year-old – I’ve noticed a disconnect between the resources U.S. society offers parents versus what’s expected of them in the digital age.
’ Woody, Buzz and the gang must prove that traditional toys still matter when Bonnie becomes captivated by a high-tech tablet named Lilypad.
The pandemic and the ‘square au pair’
When the first “Toy Story” came out in 1995, many single-income families could still afford to comfortably raise multiple kids. It was more common for new parents to live near their extended families, such as grandparents, to provide childcare support. Federal policies provided some low-income families with cash assistance that helped ease the cost of transition to parenthood.
Since then, parenting has become a lot more challenging. Single-income households with kids under 18 have steadily declined as wages have stagnated, forcing both parents into the workforce. At the same time, it’s harder to qualify for government benefits.
And even when moms do earn a paycheck, working moms experience what sociologists call the “motherhood penalty” – career disadvantages, such as lower wages and promotion barriers, due to childbirth – even as U.S. parental leave policies remain weak.
So it’s hardly a surprise that fewer Americans are choosing to become parents under these conditions. But those who did have kids in the years leading up to 2020 ran smack into the COVID-19 pandemic.
The lockdown that started in March 2020 following the outbreak of the pandemic led to closures of schools and many workplaces. Many parents either worked from home or provided critical work in grocery stores and hospitals. Kids stayed home and schools transitioned to remote-learning models.
It’s important to remember that many institutions with social legitimacy and authority encouraged the use of tablets during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.
School systems around the world normalized their use for remote learning. Children as young as 4 were given tablets, which gave their parents space to complete their own remote work and other household tasks, with some moms referring to it as “the square au pair.”
In this sense, the tablet became a form of school-sanctioned childcare.
Economic activity was minimally disrupted. Productivity hummed along. And the kids? Comfortably distracted.
For some households, there’s little choice
When lockdowns ended, tablets remained integrated into the education system. In 2021, 4 in 5 U.S. households with children had a tablet. Beyond schoolwork, kids also use tablets for activities, such as video games and watching TV.
The adverse impacts of excessive screen time in general has been well documented for decades. But scholars have only recently unpacked the specific harms of interactive tablet use among young children.
Children who use tablets are more likely to experience emotional dysregulation and dependency on screens. Researchers have also found tablet use among kids to be significantly associated with ADHD diagnoses.
At the same time, research shows screen time use among children is tied to social class.
Parents from working- and middle-class households are more likely to rely on screens compared to high-income parents, who can hire childcare services, such as full-time nannies.
Parental education is also a factor. Americans generally have little grasp of digital hygiene – knowledge about best practices to minimize negative effects of screens. But households with parents who didn’t graduate from college are even more in the dark.
And while schools hand out tablets, most of them fail to provide students and families with a comprehensive education on the adverse impacts of excessive screen time.
In other words, this isn’t a Generation Alpha problem. Most people – adults included, with or without children – aren’t properly educated and informed about their choices around technology use. Yet adults continue to be shamed if they hand their kid a tablet. All the while, parents navigate the added burdens of challenging the educational status quo around tablets.
Frankenstein’s village
When work is the only sturdy pillar in a society where government benefits for low-income people, family ties and community institutions have eroded, tablets replace the metaphorical village – the web of social support that helps families thrive.
In pursuit of jobs or affordable housing, many young parents move farther from their extended families and the communities where they grew up. The working parents who are forced to rely on daycare – sending kids as young as a few weeks old – end up spending an exorbitant amount of money on the service.
Meanwhile, the persistence of traditional gender roles ensures that many moms still go home to a second shift: Working women continue to disproportionately cook, clean and care for children. No matter how overworked or exhausted some parents are, they cannot afford to hire help as the inflation and cost-of-living crises hit historic highs.
Big Tech takes advantage of this crisis with a “solution” that ultimately treats children as products, manipulating their emotions and mining their data. As I argue in my book, “Attention and Alienation,” children’s dependency on screens is a key component of the attention economy.
The earlier a life is monetized, the longer it is profitable.
“Toy Story 5” and its critical take on the tablet may be helpful. But it will take more than a blockbuster movie to protect small kids from the harms of too much screen time. Instead, I think it will require strong parental leave policies, expansive and affordable childcare access, fair wages and shared household labor.
In other words, there needs to be a full rehabilitation of the village.
Aarushi Bhandari, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Davidson College
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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STM Blog
What is Nude Recreation Week?
Nude Recreation Week is a real event that promotes the idea of enjoying the outdoors without clothing.
Nude Recreation Week is a real event that promotes the idea of enjoying the outdoors without clothing. It is a week-long celebration of the human body and its natural state. The history of Nude Recreation Week is a fascinating one, with its origins dating back to the early 1970s.
The idea of Nude Recreation Week came from a group of naturists who wanted to promote the benefits of nudity in the outdoors. They believed that nudity was a natural and healthy way to enjoy the outdoors, and that it allowed people to connect with nature in a more meaningful way. The first Nude Recreation Week was held in 1976, and it has been celebrated every year since then.
There are many ways to celebrate Nude Recreation Week legally. Many naturist organizations offer events and activities that are open to the public, such as nude hikes, beach cleanups, and other outdoor activities. There are also many private resorts and campsites that cater to naturists, and they offer a variety of activities and amenities for those who want to enjoy the outdoors in the nude.
Nude Recreation Week – July 6–12
Nude Recreation Week celebrates naturism, body positivity, and the freedom to enjoy outdoor activities in a clothing-free environment. Observed at nudist resorts, beaches, and private spaces, it encourages self-acceptance and connection with nature. The week culminates in International Skinny Dip Day. Learn more about the history and celebration: National Today, National Day Calendar, American Association for Nude Recreation.
The opinions about Nude Recreation Week are divided. Some people believe that it is a healthy and natural way to enjoy the outdoors, and that it promotes body positivity and self-confidence. Others believe that it is inappropriate and offensive, and that it should not be allowed in public spaces.
On one hand, some people argue that nudity is a natural state for humans and that it should be celebrated. They believe that nudity is not inherently sexual or offensive, and that it is a healthy way to connect with nature and with other people. They also argue that nudity promotes body positivity and self-confidence, and that it can help people overcome body shame and negative self-image.
On the other hand, some people argue that nudity is inappropriate and offensive, especially in public spaces. They believe that nudity is a private matter and that it should not be displayed in public. They also argue that nudity can be sexualized and that it can lead to inappropriate behavior and harassment.
In conclusion, Nude Recreation Week is a real event that promotes the idea of enjoying the outdoors without clothing. It has a fascinating history, and it is celebrated by many people around the world. While opinions about nudity are divided, it is clear that there are many ways to celebrate Nude Recreation Week legally, and that it is a healthy and natural way to enjoy the outdoors.
https://nationaltoday.com/nude-recreation-week/
National Nude Day – July
National Nude Day celebrates body positivity, personal freedom, and self-acceptance—not sex. Observed by nudist and naturist communities, the day encourages people to embrace their natural form and challenge societal body shaming. Participants may visit naturist beaches or resorts or enjoy private time at home to connect with their body and nature. Learn more about the celebration and its history here: National Day Calendar, National Today, The Guardian on Naturism.
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home improvement
Sleep Better This Summer with Breathable Bedding
Breathable Bedding: If warm summer temperatures have you tossing and turning at night, you aren’t alone. Heat is a common culprit behind seasonal insomnia and can make it difficult to get a good night’s sleep. When the body struggles to cool down properly, it may lead to restlessness, night sweats, and disrupted sleep patterns.
Sleep Better This Summer with Breathable Bedding
(Feature Impact) If warm summer temperatures have you tossing and turning at night, you aren’t alone. Heat is a common culprit behind seasonal insomnia and can make it difficult to get a good night’s sleep. When the body struggles to cool down properly, it may lead to restlessness, night sweats, and disrupted sleep patterns.
Watch this video to learn more
Before you reach for the thermostat, though, take some time to examine your bedroom setup. Switching to breathable bedding, like Bedsure PureWoven Bamboo Sheets, can help your body regulate its temperature better overnight. Made with bamboo-derived fibers, the sets include sheets, pillowcases, duvet covers, and comforters designed to keep you cool and comfortable while you sleep. The bamboo viscose material is moisture-wicking and smooth, and you can choose from a variety of colors to match your decor.
In addition to choosing bedding made with soft, breathable materials like viscose derived bamboo sheets bamboo, try using fans to promote better airflow in your bedroom. You can also improve your overall sleep quality by winding down with soft, dim lighting as you prepare for bed, and using blackout curtains to keep your space dark overnight.
Making simple swaps in your sleep environment can help you stay well-rested throughout the summer. Learn more at bedsurehome.com or search “Bedsure PureWoven Bamboo Sheets” on Amazon.
SOURCE:
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