In resilience research, a number keeps coming up, and it’s not very encouraging. Eighty-three percent of Americans think they are emotionally and mentally resilient. Only 57% of people actually score that way on tests. The discrepancy between our perceived toughness and our actual coping skills reveals something unsettling about how most people view their own well-being. It also brings up a question that scientists have been attempting to address for decades: what do resilient individuals truly do differently?
It turns out that the solution is not as dramatic as anyone had anticipated. Though those have their supporters, it’s not meditation retreats, cold plunges, or gratitude journals. Meaningful social connection is a practice that consistently appears across studies, continents, and wildly disparate populations. Having at least one person, sometimes just one, who gives you a sense of safety, support, and visibility. It sounds almost too easy to be taken seriously. However, the science is clear about this.
One of the first studies to document the protective power of close relationships was Emmy Werner’s seminal study on the children of Kauai, which began in 1955 and lasted for decades. Her team tracked almost seven hundred children from birth to adulthood, many of whom had unstable or impoverished upbringings. Even so, one-third of the children at the highest risk developed into capable, compassionate adults. A strong relationship with at least one supportive person—often not even a parent—was the single most consistent factor among them. a grandmother. a neighbor. A teacher saw them. Since then, that conclusion has been repeated so frequently that it hardly merits discussion. In 2026, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education stated unequivocally that nobody builds resilience on their own.
From a different perspective, education and psychology researcher Robyne Hanley-Dafoe, who has spent years interviewing survivors of extreme adversity, came to the same conclusion. She developed what she refers to as a framework for everyday resiliency, which consists of five characteristics that give people the best chance of persevering through adversity. The top item on the list was belonging. Having a few meaningful relationships where one can be honest, feel safe, and celebrate without putting on a show is more important than belonging in some abstract, philosophical sense. At a conference in Chicago in 2025, she stated, “If you get those right, you’re going to be able to weather whatever comes your way.”
However, the majority of Americans are engaging in less connection. Shorter conversations, fewer close friendships, and more time spent scrolling through numbing devices are all well-documented trends. Hanley-Dafoe herself brought attention to the issue of scrolling, which substitutes a thin haze of stimulation that appears to be engagement but isn’t for genuine emotional processing. People seem to have replaced intimacy with closeness and true belonging with digital presence, and the distinction is more significant than it may first appear.
The fact that the solution isn’t costly or difficult is what frustrates me. It’s grinning at someone as you enter a room. Instead of a two-second text, it’s a twenty-minute phone call. It is the colleague who poses a genuine query and genuinely awaits a response. Hanley-Dafoe explained it in a way that was purposefully straightforward: “Look happy to see someone when you reunite with them.” “The little things aren’t really that small,” she said.
The wellness industry may have made this more difficult by focusing on individual optimization, such as sleep trackers, supplement stacks, and biohacking regimens, while the most proven wellbeing practice necessitates the involvement of another human. Hanley-Dafoe stated that sleep deprivation is like stepping over hundred-dollar bills to pick up pennies, emphasizing how important rest is. However, when someone feels like they belong somewhere worth waking up for, even rest is more effective.
This is a recurring theme in resilience research that is almost unyielding. Perspective, humor, acceptance, and hope are among the tools people seek out, and they all seem to work best in a network of genuine connection. When that is taken away, they become personal coping mechanisms that are unanchored. It’s difficult to ignore the fact that modern life is subtly undermining the one thing that science continues to insist upon. For a long time, the data has been evident. The question of whether we’re prepared to take action on it is quite different.
