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Adversity and Resilience

What You Should Know

  • Adversity is the hard or difficult things we face in life, and resilience is the ability to go through or “bounce back” from those difficult things.
  • How much resilience we have or don’t have, largely affects our relationship with adversity including how we react, respond, and recover.
  • There are things we can do every day to increase our resilience and overall well-being by engaging in spiritual, social, physical, cognitive, life-skill building, and service practices.
  • Pepperdine has its very own Resilience-Informed Skills Program
    • The Pepperdine RISE Program provides you with holistic, skills-based resilience training. Addressing the spiritual, social, physical, cognitive, life-skills, and service aspects of responding to challenges, the program is devised to enhance your resourcefulness and sense of well-being, both now and in the future.
    • Follow RISE on Instagram for more resilience contact!

Things You Can Try

  • Four Steps to HEAL: Follow the HEAL framework to cultivate resilience as a durable strength hardwired into your own brain.
    • Have a beneficial experience
    • Enrich it
    • Absorb it
    • Link it
  • The Three Secrets of Resilient People — Dr. Lucy Hone is a resilience expert who thought she found her calling supporting people to recover following the Christchurch earthquake. She had no idea that her personal journey was about to take her to a far darker place. In this powerful and courageous talk, she shares the three strategies that got her through an unimaginable tragedy⁠—and offers a profound insight on human suffering
  • Road to Resilience Podcast — Stories and insights to help you thrive in a challenging world. From fighting burnout and trauma, to building resilient families and communities, we explore what's possible when science meets the human spirit.
  • RISE Report — Subscribe to Pepperdine's Resilience-Informed Skills Education Program's bimonthly newsletter to stay in the know about RISE programming, workshops, and community-building opportunities.
  • 5 Science-Backed Strategies to Build Resilience — When the road gets rocky, what do you do?
  • Building Your Resilience - American Psychological Association — Life may not come with a map, but everyone will experience twists and turns. Each change affects people differently, bringing a unique flood of thoughts, strong emotions, and uncertainty.