Thanks for listening to The Fat Psychologist Podcast. Join me to decode wellbeing research so it can have a real impact in our lives. Let's make decisions based on information we understand, not based what others say we should think of ourselves. I will explore themes that have been important in my life, as I search for happiness and belonging. This is our journey, I would love you to contribute too!

The Fat Psychologist Podcast

Bouncing back: Rethinking resilience and wellbeing

It is not only the help of our friends, but knowing that they are there to help.

Season 1 Episode 4

In this episode

In this episode of the Fat Psychologist Podcast, Ninna explores the concept of resilience, rebranding it as 'bouncing back' from adversity, failure, and trauma. She critiques the traditional view of resilience as a personal trait, advocating instead for a process-oriented perspective that includes social and environmental factors. Ninna delves into recent wellbeing research, including systematic literature reviews, and highlights the importance of social support and positive psychology. She argues for group interventions and a holistic approach to creating environments where individuals can thrive. Ninna also emphasizes the role of counseling and positive relationships in fostering resilience.

Guests

Ninna Makrinov, aka The Fat Psychologist, is a teacher, trainer, coach and the author of The Fat Psychologist Podcast. A critical thinker by nature, Ninna is an activist who questions knowledge from a feminist, fat inclusive, disability informed, anti-racist perspective. By day, Ninna works as Assistant Professor (Research Methods) at the University of Warwick and Chair of Governors in two Birmingham Primary Schools. She has been an academic in Chile, Mexico and the UK. Ninna is passionate about the development and well-being of people and the organisations they are part of.

Ninna is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She holds a BSc Psychology and Professional Title in Organisational Psychology from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, an MSc in Occupational Health Psychology from The University of Nottingham and a Masters in Business Administration from Tecnológico de Monterrey. She has most recently completed the Postgraduate Award (PGA) Curriculum Design in Higher Education and the PGA Technology Enhanced Learning at The University of Warwick.

Show Notes

In this episode, I talked about:

Popular science
Sutton, J. (2016). Martin Seligman's positive psychology theory. In PositivePsychology.com

Academic articles
Bazargan-Hejazi, S., Shirazi, A., Wang, A. et al. (2021). Contribution of a positive psychology-based conceptual framework in reducing physician burnout and improving well-being: a systematic review. BMC Medical Education, 21, 593. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-021-03021-y
Chmitorz, A., Kunzler, I., Helmreich, O. et al. (2018). Intervention studies to foster resilience – A systematic review and proposal for a resilience framework in future intervention studies. Clinical Psychology Review, 59, 78-100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2017.11.002.
Hollaar M.H.L., Kemmere B., Kocken P.L. and Denktaş, S. (2025). Resilience-based interventions in the public sector workplace: a systematic review. BMC Public Health, 25 (1), 350. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-024-21177-2

Schäfer, S.K., Supke, M., Kausmann, C. et al. (2024). A systematic review of individual, social, and societal resilience factors in response to societal challenges and crises. Communications Psychology, 2, 92. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-024-00138-w

Plain transcript available in the show notes

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Fat Psychologist Podcast. Join me to decode wellbeing research so it can have a real impact on our lives. Let's make decisions based on information we understand and question and not on what others tell us we should think of ourselves. In this episode, I'm going to be thinking about the concept of resilience once again. Listen to my previous episode with Angela Mae Morrison for an introduction. I have called this episode Bouncing Back, and that's because I don't really like the term resilience, and we all need to sometimes bounce back from things that are not great or from failure or other issues. I also like the word bouncing 'cause it brings me back to, trampoline days and.

[00:00:48] Nowadays, discrimination can't go to a trampoline park because they're not strong enough for me. However, when I was younger or when I had a trampoline at home, I actually had a lot of fun jumping [00:01:00] around. So that idea that in that environment where we are in a trampoline and we're protected and we can fall and get up again without breaking most of the time, is a really good metaphor to me of what this idea of resilience in some of psychological research is.

[00:01:25] So let's think then again about the definition of resilience. And when I'm thinking of resilience in the context of today's episode, I'll be thinking about this ability to bounce back from adversity or to deal with failure. That's really important because I'm taking an approach that is very positive, which probably aligns with the way probably many people. Many of you might have heard resilience in context. Now, going a little bit into research, 'cause that's what I [00:02:00] want to do in this podcast, I've started looking at various systematic literature reviews. If you don't know what I mean by that systematic literature reviews are organized ways to evaluate and summarize published literature.

[00:02:16] Hence a well conducted review can give us very good quality information, and these are to me, some of the top articles to look at when we are thinking of what evidence do we have on an area. The first one I want to look at is by Andrea Chmitorz and their colleagues, which was a study published in 2018, so a few years old, done in Germany, and it's called Intervention Studies to Foster Resilience, a Systematic Review and Proposal, etcetera. why I'm bringing this one up today?

[00:02:57] It is because it's very important that we [00:03:00] understand what we mean by resilience. And there are three ways in which people and researchers have thought about resilience. Probably the one you're most aware of and how we might think about resilience a lot of the time is this idea that resilience is a trait.

[00:03:21] So a personal characteristic or an ability, again, very personal. So it's something I have. I am a resilient person so I can then deal with, adversity. Now the issue is that there's very little evidence that that is the case and that's how resilience works. And what I want us to think about in this challenging, what we're being told is the fact that to me, resilience and to not just me, but to researchers resilience is different and much more than that. Now, [00:04:00] current research tends to agree that resilience is actually a process. So it's that whole process of going from, considering my whole life having a stressor, so something that didn't go well, or even trauma, so something really, really, really bad, and then the process of recovering.

[00:04:31] From that and getting again into, level of emotional wellbeing. And if we think of that, then actually it gives us a lot more in terms of storytelling and the importance of our stories in thinking of resilience, where if we are surviving and we're alive and we are relatively stable in our mental health.

[00:04:58] We would be then [00:05:00] resilient, which is very different to this other approach that requires us to be resilient for things to happen. Now there's still issues there, but it helps, I think. Because again, not everyone should behave or be resilient in the same way. There were other concepts that I thought were really interesting when looking at process approaches of resilience.

[00:05:28] One of those is this idea of post traumatic growth. Some authors have said that if we're facing adversity, we might, through reflection, use that adversity to grow further. Now, that doesn't mean that we need to face adversity to be better people. That's not what I'm trying to say. However, what we can do is that if we have faced difficult [00:06:00] situations, failure, even trauma, it can be helpful if we haven't yet recovered to make sense of that experience, maybe with the help from a therapist to then be able to grow from that trauma.

[00:06:19] And then another concept that's really helpful in terms of this process, and you might have heard of before, is coping or the use of coping strategies and the American Psychological Association, define these as using cognitive and behavioral strategies to manage the demands of a situation when these are appraised or evaluated as taxing or exceeding one's resources. So what happens is that when we are functioning in the world, we have certain resources ourselves, and I will go to that in a bit. The environment that I [00:07:00] can draw on to function, to do what I want to do or what others expect of me to do, or whatever it is you want to do.

[00:07:09] In a basic model of stress that I studied like 30 years ago, but it still holds what we have is that when we have certain demands, things that we need to be achieving or we want to be achieving, and we have then this same level of resources, then we cope. But if the demands go high and we just don't have those resources, then we experience stress, which is not a good thing.

[00:07:40] So stress not good. Some people again go like, oh, stress is really good for you because challenge is very good for us. Boring can also be stressful. Stress not good in psychological research, or at least in the psychological research I agree with. We can then learn coping [00:08:00] strategies and also find other sources of, or resources like social support that can help us perform better in different situations. And I think that's really important because although I don't agree that we should all be resilient in terms of these personal characteristics, which means that we should have had experiences of huge adversity, we all, at some area of our lives, we experience failure, we experience loss.

[00:08:32] So it might be something really simple. We're going to cook for the first time and we are trying to do sunny side eggs, and that's not an easy task. And when we do it, it breaks, that's a failure and we try again. And we might try again until we get that learning, and that's part of our normal learning.

[00:08:51] So again, a baby who is learning how to walk, we have fallen many times now. I think [00:09:00] for most of us, getting a broken egg or having fallen when we were learning to walk if we can walk are not things that caused us trauma. So we would rarely talk about that as being resilient. 'cause we expect many of us to have done these kind of things.

[00:09:18] However, I believe that. Those same skills are the ones we use in any scenario. So we can think about coping strategies and how we then deal with failure at any level, and that can help us be better able to move around the world. However, I still believe that we need the world to provide an environment where we can be safe to grow and thrive. hence my love and hate relationship with this word resilience. And why I prefer to use the word bouncing back.

[00:09:59] [00:10:00] A final definition of resilience, which is probably the definition that mostly fits with what in my head resilience is, and hence why I don't like it so much, is this idea that resilience is actually an outcome. Is this, yes, you survived. Something horrible happened to you, but you survived, and you are well enough, which I hope that most of us wouldn't have to get to that level of, yes, I survived a really horrible, traumatic experience and when I say I would never want to be resilient ever again, it's because of that. Because I don't want to be surviving. I want to be in a protected environment where we all care for each other and.

[00:10:50] Yes, things will happen, because life happens. We might have loss or we will have failure. I mean, [00:11:00] I have failed miserably many times. But we can pick up from there. And what's important in this definition, and it's what I'm going to be focusing on in this episode, is that this outcome, this ability to survive, this ability to cope with stress is mediated by factors that help us survive. So in that relationship that I was talking about just before, where we have our demands and our capacity, then the old model, and actually still like that one, our ability to control the situation, for example, is a very important factor that helps us be protected.

[00:11:49] And when we are thinking of current research on resilience factors. Then what I really like is that we are looking at both internal, [00:12:00] so some things we have ourselves as individuals, but also external factors. And the most important of all of those in all of the literature in stress is social support. So being part of communities where we belong or we feel we belong.

[00:12:19] We'll talk about belonging at some point 'cause that's such an important element too. And having or or knowing that others will be there to help. Actually, on my book of quotes, and I don't have it here with me, but I have a little quote that said something like, again, translating from Spanish, it's not the help from your friends that helps, it's knowing that they're there to help. And I think that is true in my experience many times where just knowing that I could ask for help has helped me achieve something even if I never actually went and asked for that help. Although it's also important to be able to ask for help when we need it.[00:13:00]

[00:13:00] Um, that can be slightly hard for me sometimes, but I'm learning.

[00:13:04] in thinking then about those protective factors, I really, really like the approaches taken by positive psychology. Now positive psychology is the scientific study of human flourishing. I love that. Flourishing. Such a lovely word. Martin Seligman in the US is.

[00:13:28] Widely considered one of the starters of positive psychology like that, of positive psychology. I always think that things are never out of one person, and these things have existed around the world for a really long time, and we give too much credit to American authors. But I think it's important to know about this.

[00:13:48] I'm picking this from an online article by Jeremy Sutton published in 2016 that I will put on the show notes as I do every reference that I'm using in [00:14:00] my podcast. So if you want to go further, you can.

[00:14:04] The other thing I really like about positive psychology is that as we move forward, positive psychology has moved beyond looking at individuals, and we think about the positive aspects and strengths of individuals and communities in that path to wellbeing. Seligman proposed one specific model that has developed a little bit over time in terms of what those factors that make us be well or make us be happy are, and those are summarized by the acronym, I think it's called an acronym PERMA, so P-E-R-M-A, and lately H at the end.

[00:14:51] Now those are: one it's positive emotion for the P, so. We need to feel positive emotion. [00:15:00] They talk about awe, joy, contentment, I would say love. Now, I will get to that in a different episode. I have huge issues with talking about positive and negative emotions. I think personally all emotions are positive.

[00:15:16] Now E, engagement in activities that give life meaning and purpose, whatever those are to you. So for me, my work super important, this podcast is one of those things I'm doing because it gives me joy. And when we look at other areas of positive psychology, there's another concept called flow. Again, I would love to explore that one.

[00:15:42] Where is that experience when we sometimes have, we're so deep into an activity that we are completely there, completely focused and super enjoying it, and it's different for all of us. So for me, teaching or being in a public speaking sphere where I'm sharing [00:16:00] ideas gets me into flow. There's much research on people who do this in sports, for example.

[00:16:09] What are those things that make you flow? I'd love to know. Give me information in the comments or contact me on my website. Then the R is for relationships. it's about having, again, this idea of positive relationships with others, and again, we could discuss what we mean by positive.

[00:16:30] The M stands for meaning to find meaning and fulfillment in the things we do. So again, that's the element of reflection. What are we bringing in? Who are we? And then finally, the A, is about seeking and savoring accomplishment. And I think, at least for me, that's something that I find really hard. Someone told me the other day, I push myself super hard and learning to celebrate the great [00:17:00] things I already do can be really helpful.

[00:17:02] even with small things like housework, I hate housework. So having a list of this is the things I did today helps me more than having a list of all the things I haven't done. In some later models, there's this H added and that stands for health. health measured in different ways. It's coming up in many of the episodes, and in this scenario it can either be objective health, so some kind of health measurement. But what I think is a lot more important, particularly from the perspective of me as a fat person, because from objective measures, I might not be considered healthy in many ways. It can also mean adopting healthy lifestyles, which we've talked about before, or our own perception of being well. For example, if we [00:18:00] think that we have enough vitality and energy to perform our daily activities and what our daily activities are, it can be set by ourselves.

[00:18:09] So I feel that I'm really healthy in most ways now, although I'm also very tired in my body. There's something happening that I'm finding doing really hard. even doing simple things like cooking gets me really tired. I had some illness in October and I'm not fully where I was before yet, but I still feel that I'm healthy 'cause I'm still doing everything I need to do or just letting it go and not feeling guilty about it. To me, that's super healthy. Now my issue with this model is that the model here sees resilience again as a personal characteristic, and I genuinely believe that that's not the case. They also think [00:19:00] about other areas that they call character strengths, and these include, for example, grit or gratitude. So think about PERMA. Does it help you consider what we might need to be doing or what we might want? I hate when we say need, 'cause that feels like, oh, pressure. Pressure. So what of those things would you like more of in your life, and how do we prioritize then those issues? give ourselves the chance to do those things We enjoy.

[00:19:34] To be with the people we love, I think is really important. And sometimes I haven't done it enough. And if that need and that enjoyment comes from sleeping all day and watching tv, I. I mean, I think if we're doing it all the time, it's not great for our mental health 'cause it's very isolating, but doing it once in a while or more than once in a while is totally fine.

[00:19:56] So what is it that we or each of [00:20:00] us really need? That's, I think, the key message of PERMA.

[00:20:12] Let's think about some of the reasons why I think resilience as a personal characteristic is a really bad idea in terms of what we know. Sarah Schafer and colleagues from Germany, published a study in 2024 that is called a Systematic Review of Individual, social and societal resilience factors in response to challenges and crises. Now, unsurprisingly, to me, completely unsurprisingly to me, what they found is that the aspects that related to more resilient responses were things that we, most of us have very little control of, and they're [00:21:00] not things that are personal characteristics.

[00:21:03] So those are higher incomes, socioeconomic status and perceived social support, and many people might say higher income, just earn more. It's not that easy, as it really?

[00:21:25] With social support. What I find interesting in this study, it's talking about perceived social support. So that idea that I said before, it's about knowing that there's someone to help rather than necessarily being helped, which helps. What do you think about that? Now there are some individual factors too that were found important in this study, such as emotion regulation.

[00:21:52] So when we can regulate our own emotions, and that requires for us to name the emotion and then act [00:22:00] on the emotion in a regulated way that we have control of, rather than the emotion having control over us. And again, that doesn't mean that we should never be angry. Anger's good. I think all emotions are good. Or sad, sadness is good. It's just that we can regulate how that is done so it's potentially socially acceptable in certain environments or in an environment where we know we're protected and we're safe to show the emotions that we are going to show.

[00:22:36] I've shared that at some point in my life, I have felt that I don't belong or didn't belong because I was fat. That was very much out of my control. I mean, what I was trying to do was get thin so I would be accepted. That wasn't helping 'cause I wasn't feeling love or loved. However, when we think about now, I [00:23:00] actually feel very supported.

[00:23:03] that might be because I changed the environment where I was. It might be because I have a different group of friends. It might be because I have grown and changed perceptions and I trust that I have that support more than I used to. I don't know. We need to think about that deeper in every person's lives.

[00:23:24] Another thing that's very important to consider is that, although you might have heard people go, okay, I have the answer in health, or I have the answer on resilience, actually Schafer and colleagues found that most of the studies they found and reviewed were not great studies, so they were not designed very well. They, for example, have conveniece samples, that means that some people, some groups, particularly those that are not in the west, might not have been [00:24:00] represented in these studies. So if I just put, say a survey out to think about resilience, it will be my contact networks or people who are similar to me, maybe who will then be able to respond.

[00:24:18] And then what happens with, say, those who do not have access, if I do it online or what happens with those who are in different locations or who cannot read what I put out, those might not be represented. I don't know exactly what happened in these studies, but there is a huge issue here, and that meant that the findings were very mixed.

[00:24:41] We don't really know much about this even now. So, if anyone tells you I have the answer, be careful. We don't have the answer. there will be good guesses and decent evidence for many of these things. However, [00:25:00] I don't think there's a one answer that fits all.

[00:25:05] Then I also looked at another article by Malin Hollaar and colleagues, which was just published. It's not even in print yet, but you can find it online. These are authors from the Netherlands and again, a systematic literature review that looked at resilience based interventions in the public sector workplace. What they found is that even when authors or people agreed that resilience is not a trait. Most interventions still focus on the individual. So if we go to work or we go anywhere and we're going to a training on resilience, what we will tend to get is how can you be more resilient as a person?

[00:25:59] But [00:26:00] if resilience is more than just that, then. Is the training really doing what it needs to do? So it will do some things, but will it really develop resilience? Is a key question. When they looked at what people are doing in the public sector, in this case to improve resilience, most of the activities that were done were training interventions focused on the individual. So I'm telling you how to be more resilient. It could be tools such as mindfulness or it could actually be talking about resilience. So there were also very varied approaches. So there's not one way resilience draining out there. Which makes a lot of sense.

[00:26:51] So maybe we need to think back at how can we develop those resilience factors rather than [00:27:00] developing resilience and also encouraging those who attend training. And I think that's what I want to encourage you to do, to consider not only. My personal characteristics, but also the environment I'm in because I really think that we need to change environments.

[00:27:18] We need to change the world and sometimes change ourselves too, but the world needs to change so we're all accepted, we're all happy, and we're not all challenged. I mean, I don't know if we can get to that level of loveliness, but that we're not all throughout challenge to be dealing with trauma. In life, let's, let's be kind to each other, I suppose, and to ourselves.

[00:27:42] What was I thought really interesting in this study is that what they found was that group interventions that were done in person were effective [00:28:00] and much more effective than all of the interventions they looked at that were online and individual. So what I, this makes me wonder is going back to this idea of social support and belonging, is it that rather than the content of the training.

[00:28:25] Was the improvement in resilience part of having been connected to colleagues and discussing with colleagues important issues in our lives that might make us feel, again, more. As we belong, might it be that that builds social support and social networks as well, and that it is that experience of [00:29:00] belonging to a group rather than the content of any training we might have that makes us more resilient or feel more resilient?

[00:29:09] I think that's a key question to me, and I wonder if that's something you'd like to reflect on as well. I also think, and this is,

[00:29:24] I also think, and this is very much something that I haven't read around in a really long time, but in terms of one-to-one support, so I believe. Counseling is amazing as a tool, so if we ever need support and we need to go through difficult times, I believe counseling can be amazing in doing that. I also believe, and this is what I heard like 30 years ago, so things might have changed that based on my personal experience of [00:30:00] having attended counseling, I really believe that it's a space where I can be held nonjudgmentally by someone else.

[00:30:11] That helps me improve. So again, that belonging, non-judgment and support is really important. And when I look at these studies too, I also need to say that the onlines not bad either, but again, it's the online belonging rather than going and learning only online. I. So learning online can be really helpful for learning.

[00:30:39] However, it will not individually learning online, develop those social relationships and. I hope that by listening to my voice and hearing what I'm saying, you can feel some connection with me [00:31:00] because that can be protective for you. And also let me know if it is because that's protective for me. Knowing that something I shared might be useful to you will help me too.

[00:31:15] I really look forward to continuing to maybe work together, maybe meet each other. Do contact me on my website or on Instagram @thefatpsychologist if you want to be part of this adventure with me.

[00:31:37] This episode was produced, recorded, unedited by Ninna Makrinov.

[00:31:42] Please follow the podcast to see what's coming next. Show social support by following me on social media or on wherever you listen. And if you'd like to support my dream of making this podcast work, you can also find information on my [00:32:00] website. You can just buy me a coffee or even better if you or someone else you know would like to sponsor me. I am actively looking for sponsorship for the podcast. See you.