The Bedrock of Resilience
It's (More Than) OK to Feel Good Amid All the Bad
Bill was everyone’s favorite uncle. Amid all the serious and sometimes grumpy adults, he was a very smart man who often played the goofball—willing to do almost anything to make others laugh.
One day, I came home from school, and my mother told me he was dead. He’d undergone heart surgery and not survived it.
The next night in the funeral home, I heard someone laughing. Rage shot through me like a geyser. Laughter seemed so disrespectful in that context. With histrionic teenage flair, I turned to see who it was and give him my best glare. It turned out it was his brother, cut from the same cloth.
I could not have known it then, but I most assuredly know it now:
How we relate to the good in bad times matters greatly.
Why It’s the Bedrock of Resilience
Cultivating positive experiences is “the bedrock of resilience,” Fred Bryant, Loyola University Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology, told me last week.
Bryant is known as the father of savoring, the psychological process that underlies positive experiences. He, in collaboration with the late Joseph Veroff, was the first to name it, measure it, and show it can be taught.
“Savoring is the bedrock of resilience in the face of challenge,” Bryant explained, “because when you’re underwater, when you’re fighting fire, if that’s all you have, it depletes you psychologically.”
Sound familiar?
If you care about—and especially if you work on behalf of—the climate, democracy, equality, the economy, or peace, you have likely felt both challenged and depleted.
Gallup provides numerous glimpses into this for the population at large:
Nearly 40 percent of people report being very worried about the state of the world, according to their 2025 State of the World’s Emotional Health report.
Optimism slumped to a record low in the United States in 2025.
Only one-third of workers described themselves as thriving, according to the latest State of the Global Workplacereport —and engagement, says Gallup, is “on the brink.”
What We Do When We Can’t Control Events
When bad things happen in our world, we usually first assess whether we can control those events. And if not (as feels to be the case with so many things right now), we turn to controlling our responses to them.
Maybe we try to come to a kind of acceptance. Put things in a larger context. Look at the event as a growth opportunity. Find support in connection. Or try to get away from it all through one of the many available distractions.
But these coping strategies, as Bryant observes, only tap half the universe of options available to us: namely, managing the negative side of the ledger. What they omit is the wide array of positive experiences that serve as a counterpoint, strengthening our capacity.
“Coping is a necessity in terms of leveling the playing field,” says Bryant. That is, it lifts us from an inability to function to a kind of baseline. But it’s not enough to help us get above the line and perform or live at our best. For that, we must also give the positive its due.
“We have to find a reason to cope, and that’s the positive,” Bryant says. “You can realize that life goes on and even in the midst of the mud and the chaos and the tragedy, there’s something good, and there always will be.”
Ignoring the positive, he suggests, is like only exhaling and never inhaling.
The Power of Countering the Outsized Pull of the Negative
What makes bringing the positive into the equation so important—especially in tough times—is that we’re wired to give the negative disproportionate attention, and it can easily overwhelm us.
“What’s going on is so extreme and dangerous now that it swamps our field of vision. It will predominate and take every waking moment of our attention if we allow it,” says Bryant.
That leads to a sense of diminished control, which research shows contributes to greater stress, lower motivation, and increased disengagement.
In contrast, increasing our sense of control over our responses tends to lower anxiety and depression, improve stress regulation, and fuel persistence and improved problem-solving—in short, the staying power we need to keep meeting today’s challenges.
The Proof Is in the Brain Scans
“I’m working now on the neuropsychology of this,” Bryant shared, adding that he’s not a neuroscientist but is collaborating with some of the best in the world.
“There is great data that reveals that if you show people a picture of something positive and tell them not to savor it, and then you show them that same picture a day or so later and tell them to savor it, the brain just fires up. It explodes.”
Other data, he adds, shows that setting aside times to savor positive experiences—while going through hard times—is associated with even better outcomes than under more ordinary circumstances.
Quite simply, in Bryant’s words, “The practice of savoring is an extremely adaptive tool in handling stress and strain.”
Scaling Up Staying Power to Keep Advancing Good Work
My work focuses on bringing savoring practices to leaders and organizations—as the first step in a research-based framework to unlock and strengthen capacity.
Developing perspective, presence, and power to meet ongoing, outsized challenges is also essential. (Learn more here.)
But here’s one simple practice Bryant recommends that you could try today.
A Practice for Today
Here’s what Bryant suggests:
Set aside a fixed amount of time to worry.
Then set aside an equivalent amount of time to find something to savor. You can bask in accomplishment. You can luxuriate with a bar of chocolate. You can give thanks.
Finally, consider savoring the fact that you are someone who wants to be a positive force in a world that needs plenty of us.
Lisa Bennett is the author of the forthcoming Savor the World and coauthor of Ecoliterate with emotional intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman. She is the creator of the Staying Power workshop series, which helps mission-driven and purpose-led leaders and organizations strengthen the capacity to advance critical missions in today’s challenging world. If you’d like to learn more, please reach out.