Are you resilient?
By: Mia Eisenstadt
Tags: Mental Health, Mental Wellbeing, Protective Factors, Resilience, Mental Health Awareness

Why should you care about protective factors

Humour contributes to resilience. Credit: Kate OSeen via Unsplash

By Mia Eisenstadt

If you imagine any adverse event, such as being caught in a natural disaster or enduring a years of brutal bullying by peers; afterwards, some of us will move forward with our lives, relatively unscarred. Others will not be so lucky. Some people may be haunted by the experience for years to come, or maybe develop a condition, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) (involving flashbacks or numbing) or develop other conditions, such as anxiety or depression.

Researchers have studied the phenomenon of why some people bounce back from adverse events and others do not. Careful study has enabled the identification of what separates resilient individuals from those that are less resilient. Those who overcome adverse events positively tend to have the presence of particular protective factors. Those that bounce back easily may have also had less difficulties (or factors that increase risk) in their lives at the time of the event (or over the course of their development) described as risk factors.

What are protective factors?

Protective factors are factors that increase our mental well-being or mental health positively or those factors that reduce the risk of developing any mental heath condition (such as PTSD, anxiety, depression) or reduce the risk of a negative outcome, such as alcohol addiction.

A range of protective factors that increase mental wellbeing and mental health positively have been discovered. Protective factors include having high levels of optimism or positive self-esteem. Within our lifestyles, protective factors include having a committed romantic partnership or engaging in regular exercise.

Some protective factors begin in childhood, such as having a close bond with parents, as well as growing up in warm, and loving family climate. Or, growing up having grandparent support. Renowned psychologist and pioneer of attachment theory, John Bowlby (1969, 1988) formulated the notion that a child needs to be able to find a “safe haven” in her relationships with her parents. Bowlby hypothesized that from this supportive parental base, a child is able to explore the world. Since Bowlby’s period, substantial evidence has supported the ideas of secure and insecure attachment. For example, children that are not securely bonded with their parents are more likely to have depressive symptoms both in childhood and adolescence.

Growing up in the context of close and warm parental relationships is good for mental health. Credit: Bruno Nascimento via Unsplash

During my PhD research at the Evidence Based Practice Unit, I’ve had the opportunity to interview early adolescents (aged 10–13 years)as part of the evaluation of HeadStart. Through listening to young people’s perspectives, I’ve tried to understand young people’s lived experience of protective factors in relation to everyday and severe difficulties that they describe. The young interviewees talked about various factors that helped them to manage stress and difficulties. Protective factors included cuddles with a beloved pet, confiding in a peer mentor, spending time with close friends after school and both deep breathing and counting to 10 to release angry feelings. Many more factors were described too, and exactly what factors were helpful and how were unique to each individual. To know more about what we found, you can read more about these factors and coping strategies through these hyperlinks.

However, it’s important to point out that we don’t all start out on a level playing field. Some individuals may have experienced more difficulties than others. By way of contrast, a child that has lost a parent to bereavement or abandonment living with a single father on a council estate, will likely have a very different experience of childhood compared to a young person that grew up in a leafy suburb with two married parents that had an absence of stress. There is a vast array of situational characteristics (parenting style, parental monitoring, parental health issues, family financial standing, presence or absence of harsh discipline, presence of or absence or maltreatment, availability of social support, housing quality, neighbourhood characteristics) that contribute to each individuals’ unique combination of risk and protective factors. These parental factors occur as an additional setting before an adolescent’s own personality and character traits is added to their capacity for resilience. Incredibly, some of the risks a child will face is set in motion before a child is born from the environments they are born into.

What influences how resilient we are?

Resilience is widely agreed to refer to the capacity of an individual or a system to bounce back from an adverse event and adapt positively. There are many influences on our levels of resilience. Factors are neurobiological, genetic, temperamental, and environmental.

It is difficult to consciously alter the neurobiological and genetic factors that we are born with. It is also difficult to change the experiences of parenting we may have experienced growing-up. Studies have shown that growing-up with experiences of harsh and rejecting parenting, is likely to negatively affect mental health in adulthood. Difficulties in early life is studied as adversity or Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES). The more ACES a child endures, the higher the likelihood that they will developing a mental health disorder, an addiction or even a physical health condition in adulthood. Comparison of the number of ACES reported as experienced compared with health outcomes in adulthood has demonstrated this link. For instance, a key study by Vincent Felitti found that American adults who reported four adverse childhood events were 390% more likely to have Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) than a person with an ACE score of zero.

However, adverse experiences cover a specific range of experiences that may narrower than the full range of difficulties that adolescents experience. Another approach is to examine all possible risk factors that may not be adverse, but, statistically change the odds of a particular outcome occurring. For example, being female can increase the risk of developing anxiety and depression. Or, being male can increase the risk of internet addiction and being female can increase the risk of smartphone addiction, research finds.

Fortunately, whilst adversity changes the odds of physical and mental health conditions, it do not determine them. Further more, there are factors that can be changed both in childhood, adolescence and adulthood that can boost our resilience.

What can we change?

Some protective factors are highly specific to a social group. For example, the protective factors to lower the risk of depression for low income African American mothers (such as access to quality housing and food security), will be different to those for affluent American white women. It is important to remember the specificity of protective factors.

However, there are a number of factor that even if they vary by ethnicity or gender to some extent, they are relevant to us all. A recent study by Zimmerman et al (2020) found protective factors that can be changed included social support, coping, and physical activity, as well as seeking help from a professional for other psychological problems. Vigorous physical activity was found to lower anxiety symptoms more than light physical exercise (e.g. walking). This means these are all things we can actively do to reduce the risk of depression. However, the authors suggested that more research is needed to understand which risk factors can be changed and have an impact.

Other factors that can boost resilience include:

Self efficacy. This refers to an “individuals’ beliefs in their capabilities to mobilize the motivation, cognitive resources, and agency to exert control over a given event”

This refers to an “individuals’ beliefs in their capabilities to mobilize the motivation, cognitive resources, and agency to exert control over a given event” Self awareness. This refers to awareness of self and emotions

This refers to awareness of self and emotions Optimism. This refers to our beliefs about a positive future for one’s self.

This refers to our beliefs about a positive future for one’s self. Gratitude. This refers to being thankful for aspects of life.

This refers to being thankful for aspects of life. Humour . This refers to jokes and the capacity to draw humor from circumstance

This refers to jokes and the capacity to draw humor from circumstance Religiosity or Spirituality. This refers to an individual’s belief in a higher power, spiritual belief system or religious belief system.

This refers to an individual’s belief in a higher power, spiritual belief system or religious belief system. Life satisfaction. This refers to an individual’s positive assessment of their quality of life.

This refers to an individual’s positive assessment of their quality of life. Social support . This refers to “the extent to which an individual believes that his/her needs for support, information, and feedback are fulfilled” (Procidano & Heller, 1983, p. 2).

. This refers to “the extent to which an individual believes that his/her needs for support, information, and feedback are fulfilled” (Procidano & Heller, 1983, p. 2). Psychological flexibility. This idea refers to accepting emotions adjusting needs and desires in light of situational demands (Hayes et al., 2006)

Key take away

The good news is that we can influence our mental health outcomes. It is helpful to know about research on protective factors so that we can modify them. Boosting protective factors matters, particularly in the context of adversity. Whilst it is true that some people are born more with more natural extroversion and a more cheerful demeanour than others (that can be protective), we are each situated in a unique intersection of risk and protective factors. We can identify factors that we would like to increase, either through therapeutic interventions, working with a therapist, or our own efforts at self-directed learning and personal growth. For children, protective factors can be increased by the people who care for them, or through parents modifying behaviours, through parenting programs.

Protective factors matter, they can change how we may respond under stress. In fact, increasing the protective factors associated with resilience, may be more impactful than decreasing risk factors. A study led by Ji Hee Lee at Korea University found that some factors: such as positive emotions, self-efficacy, optimism, social support, self-esteem, and life satisfaction, had a bigger effect on an individual’s resilience than other factors such as risk factors and sociodemographic factors.

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