‘I was told to toughen up’: is academia getting resilience all wrong?

More than a decade ago, palaeoceanographer Summer Praetorius received some bad news: her mother had brain cancer. Praetorius was deep in her graduate studies at Oregon State University in Corvallis, but she somehow managed to juggle her mother’s care with her demanding workload. But in just a few short months, Praetorius’s mother died.

In the aftermath, Praetorius seemed like a picture of resilience to her colleagues as she continued to work and go to lectures. But beneath the surface she was torn between her grief and her desire to keep going with her graduate studies. The only way she felt she could stay on top of the demands of her studies was to shelve her emotions. “I often wanted to quit because I felt so run down and threadbare,” says Praetorius, who is now at the US Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. “But there wasn’t really the option.”

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Praetorius’s experience captures academia’s often misguided view of resilience — the ability to adapt and overcome challenges or adversity. Academia isn’t the only environment that encourages people to put on a brave face when the going gets tough — other workplaces show a similar cultural tendency. There’s no doubt that resilience is a necessary skill for dealing with the inevitable failure, rejection and fierce competition that comes with building a research career. Some institutions, including the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Imperial College London, are running courses that aim to help researchers to develop the resilience needed to navigate tough career challenges and maintain their well-being.

But some researchers say that the culture of academia is perpetuating harmful misconceptions about resilience, such as implying that researchers should ‘tough it out’ in a toxic environment. Others think that institutions need to do more to address systemic problems — such as low pay and a lack of inclusivity — before they place the onus on researchers to always weather the storm. “Instead of teaching people to dodge stones that we have thrown at them, it would be better not to throw stones from the very beginning,” says Roman Zviagintsev, an educational-equality researcher at the University of Vienna.

What resilience is — and isn’t

A simple definition of resilience is that “when something bad happens, it doesn’t derail you”, says David Yeager, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin. But this view has its limitations and underlies a lot of myths about resilience, such as equating it with suppressing negative emotions, adds Yeager. That approach, he says, often makes matters worse in the long run. “It’s a very poor emotion-regulation strategy,” says Yeager. Another harmful myth is that resilience is about continuing to work in environments in which inequity, disparity and bullying are rife, says Paul Seldon, a pharmacologist who runs an academic-resilience workshop at Imperial College London’s Early Career Research Institute (ECRI).

The expectation to live up to this version of resilience is familiar to Emily Wharton, a biomechanics researcher at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. On International Women’s Day in 2023, Wharton gave a presentation to her department about the issues students were facing regarding inclusivity, along with her own experiences. But a senior male colleague dismissed her concerns and struggled to understand where she was coming from. Although some other senior colleagues were supportive afterwards, most of them advised her not to share too much about her personal experiences. “I got told that I need to toughen up if I want to be in this world,” says Wharton. “Basically — I need to change,” rather than there being a shift in other people’s behaviour or the wider system, she says.

But true resilience isn’t about wearing a suit of armour to work or persisting with goals at the expense of mental health. Instead, it’s about making “calm, intentioned decisions in the face of setback and disappointment”, says Sharon Milgram, a biomedical researcher who heads the NIH’s Office of Intramural Training and Education (OITE) in Bethesda, Maryland. This often means setting boundaries and learning to say no to unreasonable demands or requests that don’t match a researcher’s values, she says. “It is the ability to know when to persist and when to pivot,” says Milgram.

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For instance, an early-career researcher might continue working with a bully who is an influential principal investigator because they see them as a necessary stepping stone in their career. But in this case, finding a way out of this toxic situation is healthier than sticking it out and putting up with abuse, say interviewees.

Resilience also isn’t a fixed trait that people are born with, but a skill that is developed and practised over time (see ‘How to become resilient, the healthy way’), says Dusana Dorjee, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of York, UK. A big part of building resilience involves reflecting on challenges rather than reacting to them, as well as considering failures as opportunities to learn. “These are habits that need to be developed all the time, so they are there when adversity strikes,” she says.