A fascinating question sits at the intersection of aging, psychological resilience and the work I have spent much of my career doing with people struggling with anxiety and OCD:

What happens when we spend our lives trying to avoid discomfort?

We tend to talk about stress as though there are only two possible outcomes.

Either it harms you.
Or it makes you stronger.

The truth, of course, is more complicated.

The same experience can strengthen one person, overwhelm another, and affect the same person differently depending on when it occurs, what else they are carrying and what resources they have available to help them recover.

This is why I find the concept of hormesis so interesting:
Hormesis describes a biological phenomenon in which a manageable dose of stress can trigger adaptation, while excessive exposure to that same stressor becomes harmful.

In other words:
The dose matters.
The context matters.
The capacity of the system matters.

And I think these principles have something important to teach us about psychological resilience.

For years, I have worked with children, adolescents and adults struggling with anxiety and OCD.

And much of that work has involved helping people do something that, at first glance, can seem counterintuitive:
We help them move toward the very things they have been trying so desperately to avoid.

Not recklessly.
Not all at once.
Not without support.

But gradually and intentionally.

Because avoidance is extraordinarily persuasive.

It tells us:
Don't have the difficult conversation.
Don't feel the uncertainty.
Don't go into the situation that makes you anxious.
Don't touch that.
Don't take the risk.
Don't make the mistake.
Don't let yourself feel uncomfortable.

And in the short term, avoidance often works.

You feel better.
Your anxiety comes down.

Your brain concludes: Good. We escaped. That must have been dangerous.

The problem is that the relief is temporary, while the lesson can become permanent.

Every time we avoid something and immediately feel better, we may unintentionally strengthen the belief that we could not have handled the thing we avoided.

This is one of the reasons exposure therapy is so central to effective treatment for anxiety and OCD.

We don't simply tell people, There's nothing to be afraid of.
We help them gather new evidence.

Evidence like:
I can feel anxious and stay.
I can tolerate uncertainty without needing to solve it immediately.
I can have an intrusive thought without doing something to neutralize it.
I can make a mistake and survive the consequences.
I can feel uncomfortable without immediately needing to make the discomfort go away.

And perhaps most importantly:
I can do hard things, and I can recover from doing them.

That distinction has stayed with me far beyond the therapy room.

We often try to make ourselves—or the people we love—feel confident before asking them to do something difficult.
But real confidence rarely works that way.

Confidence is not usually something that arrives first.
More often, it comes afterward.

You do something you weren't sure you could do.
You tolerate the discomfort.
You survive the uncertainty.
You recover from the disappointment.

And afterward, you have something reassurance could never give you: evidence.

Evidence that says: I didn't think I could handle that. But I did.

Not perfectly.
Not without anxiety.
Not necessarily gracefully.
But I did.

That is where something important begins to change.

Perhaps the most useful belief is not: Everything will be okay.
Because, if we live long enough, we discover that sometimes things are not okay.

Perhaps the more useful belief is: I can cope with things that are difficult.

I think this distinction may matter enormously across an entire lifetime.

When we look at research exploring resilience and well-being among very old adults, what emerges is not a picture of people who lived perfectly protected lives. Their stories include loss, illness, change and significant challenges. Yet resilience research with the “oldest old” has identified themes of adaptation, continuity of identity, meaning and a capacity to cope constructively with life's challenges.

And there is something I find profoundly moving about that.

By the time someone has lived into their nineties or beyond, they have accumulated a lifetime of evidence.

Evidence that they have survived things they once thought they might not survive.
Evidence that they have adapted to versions of life they never would have chosen.
Evidence that they have endured loss, disappointment and uncertainty—and still found reasons to continue.

Perhaps one of the gifts of living a long life is not simply accumulating years.
Perhaps it is accumulating evidence of one's own capacity.

This is where I want to be very careful.

I am not arguing that trauma is good for us.
I am not suggesting that people need adversity in order to grow.
And I certainly do not believe that every hardship becomes meaningful simply because we survived it.

Some experiences overwhelm our capacity to cope.
Some experiences leave lasting wounds.
Some environments are not “growth opportunities.” They are harmful, exploitative or unsafe.

And sometimes resilience language can become dangerous when it is used to tell people that they simply need to tolerate more.

That is not what I mean.

The goal is not to become capable of enduring anything.
The goal is to become increasingly wise about the difference between:
a challenge that stretches us,
a challenge that requires support, and
something we do not need to keep tolerating.

That distinction may be one of the most important forms of psychological maturity.

There is another mistake I think we make when we talk about resilience.
We focus entirely on the challenge.

Stretch yourself.
Get outside your comfort zone.
Do hard things.
Build grit.

But challenge without recovery is not resilience.

It is simply accumulated stress.

The demand is only half of the process.

Adaptation happens in the recovery.

Can you rest?
Can you ask for help?
Can your nervous system come down after something difficult?
Can you recognize when you are being stretched—and when you are becoming overwhelmed?
Can you stop equating your ability to carry something with a requirement to keep carrying it?

This last question feels particularly important for high-functioning people.

Especially high-achieving women who have become extraordinarily good at holding everything together.

Sometimes what looks like resilience from the outside is actually chronic overfunctioning.

Just because you can carry something does not mean you should carry it indefinitely.

Capacity and overcapacity are not the same thing.