[Excerpted from, 9 Keys to Building Resilience: Health Psychology ©2023]

A third fundamental aspect of resilience is found in this key: having an adequate support system.

Humans are social creatures. While those among us who are more introverted, highly independent and self-motivated, and from an individualist culture may well endure hardship with minimal support from others, it simply isn’t the norm. Our best chance of recovery and thriving in the face of major adversity comes in the support of others – not always directly but also in the form of perceived social support – we feel supported.

This goes back to our earliest childhood. In the first few years of life, children in a healthy family dynamic develop basic trust and an unconscious belief in an essentially benign universe – that when stressors arise, they’ll be resolved and our comfort restored. As an infant, we wail in distress and someone makes things better, whether we’re lonely, hungry, or uncomfortable; before we can speak and long before logic and reason arrive, we develop a largely unconscious belief that stressors are short-lived and therefore manageable, a fundamental source of our resilience. Even if the family dynamic is less than healthy, or a child is neglected, just one caring adult in a child’s life is sufficient for basic trust to form.

At the same time, we develop an attachment style, a deeply embedded sense of whether we can rely on others to be present for us and meet our needs. Secure attachment, the norm, is essential to one’s resilience throughout life; we don’t need a large support system, nor even necessarily to call upon anyone for help in our time of need – merely to know that if we did need assistance, there are people we could call. This is part of our core security, one of the most basic human needs.

In January of 2020, I was in China – and as everything began to shut down across the country, I moved quickly over into Hong Kong, one of my former homes and more manageable. There longer than intended, as my multinational research itinerary began falling apart, by mid-March I crossed into India; the morning after my arrival, shutdowns began, forcing me once more to abort my plans and quickly depart for Istanbul, another part-time home.

In the first full lockdown, it occurred to me that I knew very few people in Istanbul, and might find myself in need of support at such a profoundly challenging time. I reached out via social media to women in my neighborhood, and formed a support group of now more than 40 women who live within walking distance of one another, which remains active to this day. As a few group members became infected with Covid, we made sure that each had what she needed; we communicated regularly, ran into one another at the supermarket, organized small gatherings when possible, and provided a very local safety net for one another.

Social belonging or bondedness is essential to our mental health and wellbeing, and mutual support, both giving and receiving, is critical to resilience. When in combination with compassion and kindness, the emotions and actions that create and reinforce such bonds, social support was seen to be protective against pandemic-related stress and conducive to posttraumatic growth – resilience, and thriving (Slavich et al., 2022).

Social bondedness has been strongly associated with posttraumatic growth, as demonstrated in a large-scale review of 217 studies totaling 47,940 participants (Ning et al., 2023). A biopsychosocial model for recovery following trauma, with a primary focus on resilience facilitated by social support, is proposed by Calhoun et al. (2022), to include both intra- and interpersonal coping skills alongside other factors such as biological stress response.

The wellbeing of nurses during the pandemic, one of the most highly stressed professions in a public health crisis for its ‘front-line’ nature, was of great concern around the world. The role of social support, in particular that among colleagues as many health care workers were isolated from their families due to the risk they represented, was demonstrated as essential to their resilience (Kilinç & Çelik, 2021). Nursing even at the best of times is considered a profession at high risk for burnout or mental and physical exhaustion; in a review of 6 studies among 4 countries across 3 continents, Galanis et al. (2022) found social support to be consistently protective of nurses’ resilience.

Disaster aid workers are another such high-risk profession, not only for the physical risks that must be taken but also for mental and emotional distress. As we saw most recently here in Türkiye when two major earthquakes [February 2023] resulted in more than 50,000 fatalities, countless injuries, and over 3 million displacements, disaster aid requires a vast amount of stamina both physical and psychological. A psychological concept analysis of disaster resilience undertaken by Mao et al. (2022), in a review of 26 studies, indicated protective factors of social support and coping strategies as well as personality, sense of control, and self-efficacy or perceived capability.

Young people, both adolescents and young adults, are also a high-risk group in the face of adversity. We often feel that youth brings resilience, but we must also consider the lack of emotional maturity and coping skills. I spent 10 years in South Korea, one of the highest in the world for adolescent suicide rates; the pressure on young people to succeed academically and professionally, coupled with a longstanding dearth of employment opportunities for new graduates, and the responsibility to family, create an undue degree of emotional pressure on young, still-developing brains.

Both social support and religiosity demonstrated significant correlation with resilience among adolescents in a group foster home, or state care, another risk factor (Arafat et al., 2022). It should be noted that the study took place in Indonesia, a deeply religious culture in which religiosity may not be able to be distinguished from social belonging, and indeed, significant correlation was also noted between these two variables as well as each individually with resilience.

Youth in relative isolation may be even more at risk. In a study of 354 rural young women in southeastern US, both family support and a sense of belonging were found significant to resilience in long-term stressors such as poverty (Abbott et al., 2021). In chronic illness, social support was demonstrated significant to resilience in a European study of 3 illness groups numbering 10,577 in total (Maguire et al., 2021); interestingly, positive social appraisals were associated more strongly with wellbeing, or thriving, than was the extent of social contact – that is, the positive opinions and assessments of others held more weight than the size and substance of one’s support system. (I must wonder if this is a byproduct of our technological, social media-driven age.)

The importance to resilience of social support and bondedness – feeling we have others who will support us, to whom we matter, and that we belong – cannot be overstated. We humans are social animals, after all, and while we may possess a high degree of self-efficacy, we can’t always ‘go it alone’ when facing severe adversity or crisis. Building that social structure, those relationships, in times of relative stability, then, is key to our resilience reserves, or capital.

And – don’t forget the element of touch. Kidd et al. (2023) have proposed that affective touch, the simple touching when emotion is also involved, i.e., touch of a friend or family member, may well be a critical factor in why social support fosters resilience. Kind or well-meant physical contact is essential to the development of our bondedness and social relationships throughout the life span – and also to that of our physiological systems for the regulation of stress.

Skinship, as it’s called in Korea, my once and former home…my favorite word.

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Exercises:

First: clarity. On a blank sheet of paper, draw a small circle in its center in which you’ll write your own name. (Make this circle just big enough to contain 3-10 other names.) Then, draw a ring around it; and, add two more. This target-looking shape is the beginning of your sociogram. In the center circle, around your name write the names of others you consider to be in your innermost social circle, placing the names close to yours or closer to the margin as you see fit. Then, do the same for each of the surrounding circles – and there may even be a few names outside of the final circle, truly on the margins of your life. Include only those with whom you have a relationship of any sort; acquaintances, however friendly, aren’t part of this. Once you’ve finished, reflect; are there names you wish were closer to yours? Further away? Names that aren’t here but you’d like for them to be? Other potential changes? This is a depiction of your social and support system – and, you can make changes to it where appropriate. Consider how.

Similarly, conduct a mind-mapping exercise beginning with the word ‘relationship’ or ‘connection’ in the center of a sheet of paper; fill the page quickly with any words that come to mind based on that original prompt, not names this time but concepts, and see where it takes you, drawing lines between words as you go to denote their relatedness. Afterward, reflect on what ‘relationship’ actually means to you. You can also engage in this as a journal entry, though the mind-mapping is more spontaneous and random, less controlled, and therefore has more potential for getting to your deep and true mind.

Make a commitment to prioritize connectedness in your life. If an extravert, this will likely include a lot of people (though focus primarily on that inner circle); if more of an introvert, perhaps you have a few meaningful relationships that you can make your priority. Reach out to people, connect regularly if only by messaging, meet in physical reality whenever possible.

If growing your social system is in order, consider joining a group that focuses on something you value – in which you’ll meet people who share that value with you. This could be a sport, a class, volunteering, indoor or outdoor hobby, political, religious, and many others; the list is endless.

Become more engaged on your social media platforms. Don’t just scroll past the posts of friends and family, or lurk silently in a group; contribute, like and share the posts of others, connect in a way that lets them know you care about them (even if you don’t care about the post itself). In our technological age, this too is social connectedness – but the trend of late is for broadcasting more than engaging, and for scrolling by, which isn’t connection at all.

Text or message people in your life just to say you’re thinking about them, or that they’re important to you. If that seems too emotionally expressive for you, text them just to say, ‘hey – you okay?’

Be sure to build your relationship with nature, too, with regular visits and deep engagement – the ultimate support system.

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References:

Abbott LS, Graven LJ, Schluck G et al. (2021). Stress, Social Support, and Resilience in Younger Rural Women: A Structural Equation Model. Healthcare 9:7, 812. https://doi.org/10.3390/healthcare9070812

Arafat MY, Netrawati N, Daharnis D et al. (2022). Youth Resilience review based on Religiosity and Social Support. International Journal of Applied Counseling and Social Sciences, 4:1, 8-14. https://doi.org/10.24036/005510ijaccs

Calhoun CD, Stone KJ, Cobb AR et al. (2022). The Role of Social Support in Coping with Psychological Trauma: An Integrated Biopsychosocial Model for Posttraumatic Stress Recovery. Psychiatric Quarterly 93, 949-970. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11126-022-10003-w

Galanis P, Katsiroumpa A, Vraka I et al. (2022). Relationship between social support and resilience among nurses: a systematic review. medRxiv. https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.09.04.22279592

Kidd T, Devine SL, and Walker SC (2023). Affective touch and regulation of stress responses. Health Psychology Review 17:1, 60-77. https://doi.org/10.1080/17437199.2022.2143854

Kilinç T and Çelik AS (2021). Relationship between the Social Support and Psychological Resilience Levels Perceived by Nurses during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Study from Turkey. Perspectives in Psychiatric Care 57, 1000-1008. https://doi.org/10.1111/ppc.12648

Maguire R, Hanly P, Maguire P (2021). Living well with chronic illness: How social support, loneliness and psychological appraisals relate to well-being in a population-based European sample. Journal of Health Psychology 26:10),1494-1507. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359105319883923

Mao X, Hu X, and Loke A (2022). A Concept Analysis on Disaster Resilience in Rescue Workers: The Psychological Perspective. Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness 16:4, 1682-1691. https://doi.org/10.1017/dmp.2021.157 

Ning J, Tang X, Shi H et al. (2023). Social support and posttraumatic growth: A meta-analysis. Journal of Affective Disorders 320, 117-132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2022.09.114

Slavich GM, Roos LG, and Zaki J (2022). Social belonging, compassion, and kindness: Key ingredients for fostering resilience, recovery, and growth from the COVID-19 pandemic. Anxiety, Stress & Coping 35:1, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1080/10615806.2021.1950695