The resilience myth: why more toughness is not the answer

‘We need more resilience in the team.’

That is the sentence I have most often gone into pre-calls with in recent months. Executive leadership says it, HR says it, sometimes the department head says it themselves, having just returned from three weeks of sick leave. It is well-meaning and at the same time the wrong term for the actual problem.

What we observe when we listen carefully is not a resilience deficit. It is a chronic activation surplus. Those are two different problems with two different solutions.

Resilience as a myth

The term resilience suggests that there is a quality some people have more of and others less. Whoever has more of it withstands pressure better. Whoever has less tips earlier. From this it logically follows: we train more resilience, then the team withstands more.

That is the story many resilience programmes sell. It is not wrong, but it is too narrow. What research over the past 20 years around polyvagal theory, allostatic load and stress physiology has shown is: what we call ‘resilience’ is in reality the capacity for regulation, that is, the capacity of the nervous system to come back into recovery after activation.

This capacity is not character. It is training. It is lost when the system stays in activation mode long enough, and it returns when the system is again given the experience that recovery is safe.

What happens when regulation is chronically missing

Whoever lives for months or years in elevated activation does not build resilience. On the contrary. The system learns that activation is the default mode and forgets that there is another way. Concretely we observe this in four patterns:

• Recovery no longer works. Weekends are nice but bring nothing. Holiday sometimes brings even less than a normal weekend, because the re-acclimatisation activates the system once more.
• Reactivity rises. Reactions come faster, harder, less filterable. ‘I’ve been so thin-skinned lately’ is the typical self-perception.
• Decision fatigue without objective load. Even small decisions become exhausting, the system is permanently on standby and has no reserves left for routine.
• Sleep deteriorates, energy goes flat. Classic: you sleep enough but don’t wake refreshed, because the body has to maintain activation even during sleep.

At this point the system is not less resilient. It is over-regulated in a direction that works short term and tips over long term.

Why resilience trainings rarely solve this

Classical resilience trainings work with reframing, with beliefs, with self-efficacy. They say: change your assessment, then your experience changes. That is in principle correct, but has two preconditions that are no longer met in the over-activated state.

First: the system must be at all able to absorb new assessments. With chronic activation, cognitive processing itself is impaired, new content lands superficially.

Second: the system must also be able to translate the new assessment into a different bodily response. With chronic activation, exactly this translation mechanism is blocked. You can say ‘I am allowed to relax’ a hundred times, if the body is stuck in ‘stay alert’ mode, nothing happens.

That is not failure. That is physiology. And it explains why teams after an expensive resilience workshop often report for three weeks that it helped, and then are back in the old state.

What works instead of resilience training

What works is regulation work. That is in principle simple and in practice unfamiliar. It means: giving the nervous system, over short, conscious practice moments, again and again the experience that recovery is possible and safe.

That happens through breath, through perception of the body in space, through conscious pause points in the day, through small movement sequences. Not two hours of yoga at the weekend. Instead: 60 seconds before each difficult meeting. Six times a day five seconds of perception.

That sounds banal but is operational. Studies on vagus nerve activation, on HRV variability, and on stress recovery show relatively consistently: short, frequent regulation moments are more effective than long, rare ones. That is the information missing from many classical programmes.

What this concretely means for teams

Whoever wants to establish regulation practice in the team needs two things. First: the format has to fit into daily work, not stand next to it. A workshop day once a quarter can be an initial spark, but structurally changes nothing if it doesn’t take place in daily work afterwards.

Second: leadership has to lead the way. If executive leadership has no regulation practice itself, the message to the team is ‘you go ahead, I don’t need this’. That doesn’t work. Credibility comes from one’s own doing.

Concretely in the engagement model I work with: we start with the executive leadership, establish a small regulation routine over three to six weeks, and only then go into the team. This sequence is non-negotiable if the format is to work.

When the diagnosis in the team is ‘resilience missing’

My reframe after 800+ hours in this work is always the same. The question is not ‘how do we make the team more resilient’. The question is ‘why is this team’s system so over-activated that it tips over despite objectively normal load’. When this question is honestly answered, structural answers often emerge: meeting density, reactivity of leadership, break culture, expectation climate.

Only when these structural levers are considered alongside does regulation coaching pay off. Otherwise it is plaster on a wound. More on this in the Nervous System Regulation pillar.

Whoever is currently stuck: a 30-minute first call is usually enough to sort out whether it is a coaching topic or a structural topic or both. The first call is free and without a pitch.

Patricia Lützen accompanies executive teams, leadership teams and whole workforces in the DACH region. Focus areas: regulation work at nervous-system level, reactivity in leadership, burnout prevention. First calls free, online or on-site in Hamburg. Send a no-obligation enquiry.