I don’t know about you, but everything feels a bit much at the moment. Global conflicts. The impending AI apocalypse. Elon Musk’s smug face. The guy at the wine bar talking loudly and obnoxiously about it all. Who needs any of that? Not me, and probably not you.
There’s no wonder that more and more of us feel increasingly on edge, and increasingly unable to cope. The data makes this plain to see: According to the American Psychiatric Association, 48% of Americans reported feeling more anxious in 2026 than they did in 2025. Meanwhile, 62% of Americans polled on behalf of the American Psychological Association cite societal division as a cause of worry, and of the 1,000 Americans recently polled by BasePoint BreakThrough, a whopping 86% said rising living costs have reduced their optimism about the future. Yeah. People are going through it.
It isn’t just the big-picture stuff that’s getting to be too much. It’s the everyday things, too. My own feelings of helplessness tend to manifest in small but significant ways. A rude comment from someone in the street weighs on my mind for days. An email from a boss asking me to redo a bit of work can send me spiraling into a pit of self-doubt. A difficult conversation with a partner sometimes leaves me questioning my self-worth.
There is a solution, though. We can’t control massive, world-altering events like the war in Iran and climate catastrophe, but we can control how we respond to everything else. According to experts, actively boosting your mental resilience is the best place to start.
What Is Mental Resilience?
Forget the cliche of the alpha male who never opens up. This is 2026, and according to Raj Bassi, a cognitive behavioral psychotherapist at Midland Health in Birmingham, England, mental resilience doesn’t mean internalizing everything. It’s “your ability to adapt to stress, recover from setbacks and continue functioning when life becomes difficult.”
Sounds pretty useful, right? And it doesn’t have to be an innate personality trait; Bassi says that mental resilience is something we can all build up over time.
“For me, resilience is not pretending everything is fine or being unaffected by difficult experiences. It is our ability to adapt, recover and continue functioning when life doesn’t go according to plan,” adds Cassandra Sonma Ukaobi, a mentor and life coach.
Resilient people experience setbacks just like everyone else, but they don’t let them determine their reactions or resulting moods. “You can absolutely struggle and still be resilient,” says Ukaobi. “Sometimes resilience is simply being able to say that something has affected you, but it doesn’t have to define what happens next.”
It Could Change Your Life
On a practical level, mental resilience can help us cope by not allowing one difficult experience to overwhelm every other area of our lives. It can influence how we respond to workplace stress, criticism, relationship difficulties, financial pressures and major life changes. “In day-to-day life, mental resilience can help us manage anxiety and stop small stressors from building and becoming something that feels unmanageable,” says Bassi.
A 2024 study in the journal BMJ Mental Health looked at more than 10,000 American adults and found that higher psychological resilience was associated with lower all-cause mortality, even after researchers adjusted for a number of health and lifestyle factors. Those with the highest mental resilience were more than 50% less likely to die over 10 years than those with the lowest.
Another study, in the journal Current Gerontology and Geriatrics Research, found that resilience becomes even more important as we get older — meaning that the best time to start building resilience is today.
The Trip Wires of Modern Life
Some tech experts have estimated that the average human now takes in 74 gigabytes of information each day. If you’ve ever spent 30 seconds on the internet, you know that much of that information is provocative and pointless.
But here’s the thing: even as our daily behavior has changed so dramatically, we as humans haven’t changed. We’re still biologically the same human beings we’ve been for thousands of years, even as the world around us is in a constant state of evolution. “Our brains haven’t changed fundamentally, but modern life now activates them in different ways,” says Bassi. The brain’s threat system is designed to detect and respond to perceived danger, and prolonged or repeated stress can leave us in a more heightened state of alert.
“Studies have found that, when stress becomes prolonged, it can affect the parts of the brain involved in concentration, emotional regulation and decision-making,” Bassi continues. The result is that we may become more alert to potential threats, more likely to dwell on negative information and less able to put problems into perspective. Which can make everyday setbacks feel harder to manage.
I Am the Low-T Man
The manosphere is missing the point: getting older means learning to loseBoth Bassi and Ukaobi point to real-world human connection as a way of reducing this stress, and building our resilience through building community bonds. Social support gives us a space to process difficult experiences, while isolation is associated with a greater risk of anxiety and depression.
This rings true to me. I work from home, alone, every day. Often, when I notice that I’m off, making plans to see friends in the evening helps me from going down a rabbit hole of worry. Whether they’re listening or not, I like to vent about the day’s frustrations, which suddenly don’t seems quite so bad as they did at 3 p.m. — when I was sitting alone, staring at my laptop screen. Simple, but effective.
Don’t Forget About “Self-Efficacy”
Humans learn by experience. When we’re struggling mentally, it can be a huge help to remind ourselves that we’ve lived through certain situations before. Part of this involves building up self-efficacy — the belief in your own ability to succeed — which Ukaobi calls a “powerful tool.”
This is why, if you see a therapist, you may have heard them talk about concepts like catastrophizing (thinking everything will be terrible) and mind reading (imagining we know for certain what others are thinking). By recognizing certain patterns of thinking, we can tell ourselves: I recognize this situation, and remember how to find a way through it.
“When we practice self-efficacy, previous experiences become evidence,” Ukaobi says. “When something difficult happens, instead of immediately asking yourself whether you can cope with it, you can think about what you have already learned from previous experiences that proves you are capable of getting through it. Sometimes resilience means accepting that an experience has changed you, and deciding intentionally who you become afterwards.”
5 Ways to Build More Mental Resilience
Because mental resilience can be built, and because it becomes more important as we age, it pays to add it to your daily wellness practice alongside eating well, hitting the gym and focusing on sleep. The two experts I spoke with offered a similar approach to building your own sense of resilience, so here are five tips from Bassi — strategies that will help you transform into that hard pebble in the stream that the stresses of life simply flow around.
1. Challenge unhelpful self-talk
“Try to stop yourself from using absolutist language like ‘I can’t’ or ‘I always.’ It makes negative thoughts stick in our brains and can be hard to correct. Celebrate your successes and reframe setbacks as learning opportunities, rather than getting bogged down in negativity.”
2. Stretch your comfort zone
“Stress becomes a lot easier to manage when you regularly step out of your comfort zone in small, manageable ways. It can be as simple as talking to someone new or traveling a different way to your destination. Breaking repetitive patterns makes change a lot less scary.”
3. Protect your well-being
“Protect the basics. Aim for sufficient sleep, regular movement, balanced meals and rest. None of these things will remove life’s problems, but working on them can increase the mental and physical capacity we need to deal with pressure.”
4. Ask for support
“Whether it’s friends, family or a professional, talking about your stressors and concerns can take a huge weight off your shoulders and allow your brain to process situations without getting overwhelmed.”
5. Build evidence that you can cope
“Resilience grows through experience. When you face something difficult and get through it, take a moment to recognize what helped you cope. Keep a mental or written record of situations you have managed, decisions you have made and challenges you have overcome. When the next difficult situation arises, you then have real evidence to remind yourself: I’ve handled difficult things before, and I have strategies I can use again.”
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