How Resilience Can Become Your Best Friend or your Enemy

11 Mar

Resilience has served me well in many ways. It's also nearly destroyed me.

This article is about the dark side of resilience that nobody talks about, and why being "too strong" might be the most dangerous thing about you.

What resilience actually is

I used to think resilience meant never breaking.

That the strongest people were the ones who could withstand anything without flinching. The ones who smiled through crises, powered through setbacks, and never showed cracks.

Then I broke. Completely.

And what I learnt surprised me: resilience isn't about not falling. It's about how quickly you get back up.

Resilience is your capacity to recover from adversity fast—to bounce back when life knocks you down, to adapt when circumstances shift, and to keep moving forward even when everything feels uncertain.

It's not about being unbreakable. It's about being bendable.

But here's what the research doesn't tell you: that ability to survive extreme adversity comes with a hidden cost.

When resilience is your friend

Daniel Goleman's work on Emotional Intelligence shows that resilient people handle crises better. They draw on self-awareness, relational skills and empathy to survive difficult situations. They know how to problem-solve and seek support when needed.

As a leader, this means you're better prepared to work under pressure, cope with uncertainty, and bounce back from failure.

So far, so good. So where's the problem?

The hidden cost: Emotional triggers

The reason you're resilient in the first place is that you learnt to cope with adversity in childhood or youth and still produced positive outcomes for yourself.

But if you didn't process the negative emotions from those difficult moments, they're stuck in your body as emotional triggers.

We all have them. They make us lose our balanced state—leading to defensive behaviour, poor decision-making, irrational thoughts and over-reactions.

The silent assassin: High pain thresholds

Here's the real danger: when you can cope with extreme adversity, your threshold to pain—physical and emotional—becomes too high.

You miss the alarm bells your body is sending you. You ignore the warning signs that you're operating beyond sustainable capacity. You keep pushing because that's what you've always done.

This is when resilience becomes gradually destructive.

Your body wasn't designed for this

Our fight-or-flight mechanism was designed for short bursts of danger—escaping predators, not navigating years of chronic workplace stress.

When cortisol and other stress hormones are released day in and day out, they impact your health in invisible ways. Most of us aren't even aware of the effects because we're completely disconnected from our body's sensations.

Here's what highly resilient people get wrong: being resilient doesn't mean you should just get on with it and ignore the impact stress is having on you.

Instead, you should organise yourself to function in a calm state most of the time, and only leverage your resilience for genuine high-pressure moments when they arise.

The turning point

Researcher Rutter discovered something hopeful: people who weren't resilient in childhood could develop it in adulthood through "turning point experiences"—coaching, mentoring, or new relationships.

This works both ways. People who are too resilient can use coaching to reconnect with their bodies and emotions, identify their warning signs, and learn to lower their stress threshold before it destroys them.

Which one are you?

Reading this, you likely identify as one of three types:

1. Not resilient enough You struggle with uncertainty and pressure. You want to develop better coping strategies and build more capacity.

2. Too resilient (This is the dangerous one) You're used to feeling under pressure all the time. Calm and relaxation are exceptions. You have continuous body tensions and aches that you've never connected to your emotional state.

3. Healthy balance You've identified your internal signals. You know when you're in your danger zone. You listen and adjust before you hit breaking point.

Your internal dashboard

You need to identify three states:

🟢 Green: Calm and flow: Your optimal operating state

🟠 Orange: Under pressure: Heightened but sustainable

🔴 Red: Danger zone: Unsustainable, destructive

You can work in the red occasionally when needed. Life and high-pressure jobs demand it.

But your body cannot sustain that state constantly without destructive consequences.

You can't change what you don't measure.

The real question: Are you resilient or are you just ignoring the warning signs that you're slowly burning out?

There's a difference between strength and denial.

Your Self-Reflection

• Which category do you fall into, not resilient enough, too resilient, or healthy balance?

• What are your body's alarm bells that you might be ignoring right now?

• What would it look like to work from calm and only use resilience for genuine emergencies?

I'm keen to hear from you. Does this speak to you? If so, how?

Follow me on LinkedIn, and visit The Self-Science Lab for more info.

Written by: Lauren Cartigny, Leadership Trainer, Executive Coach and Mindfulness Practitioner

Following a successful international corporate career in Sales for leading Tech firms, Lauren faced an unexpected burnout, life and health crisis. After re-building her life, transforming her career, and healing her body, heart and mind, Lauren has created transformative coaching and training programs to teach High-Performance from a place of Well-Being to prevent burnout, and employee churn in organisations.

Lauren Cartigny