Advancing the Study of Resilience to Daily Stressors

Abstract

Historically, studies of childhood and adult resilience have typically focused on adaptation to chronic life adversities, such as poverty and maltreatment, or isolated and potentially traumatic events, such as bereavement and serious illness. Here, we present a complementary view and suggest that stressors experienced in daily life may also forecast individual health and well-being. We argue that daily process approaches that incorporate intensive sampling of individuals in natural settings can provide powerful insights into unfolding adaptational processes. In making this argument, we review studies that link intraindividual dynamics with diverse health-related phenomena. Findings from this research provide support for a multiple-levels-analysis perspective that embraces greater unity in pivotal resilience constructs invoked across childhood and adult literatures. Drawing on insights and principles derived from life-span theory, we conclude by outlining promising directions for future work and considering their broader implications for the field of resilience.

Keywords: accelerated recovery; daily stress; dampened reactivity; resilience; richness; toughening.

Fig. 1.

A visual representation of resilience operating across different timescales, including both short-term dynamics (intraindividual variability) and long-term changes (intraindividual change). Dynamic resilience processes are characterized as intensive “bursts” of measurements and depicted in magnified circles A (dampened reactivity), B (accelerated recovery), C (toughness/inoculation), and D (richness/balance). The solid line connecting the bursts represents long-term intraindividual-change processes (e.g., development) that accrue with advancing age. The dashed line indicates each person’s mean level of the attribute. Figure based on figures in Nesselroade (1991b), Ram and Gerstorf (2009), and Benson and Ram (2018).