Psychologists have divided people into four types of experiences

A person’s ability to withstand the blows of fate, known as psychological resilience, plays a key role in maintaining balance. This has been especially evident in recent years, when the world has faced global challenges. It turned out that those who know how to adapt to change competently are much less likely to suffer from anxiety and despondency. However, until now, it has been little understood why people with similar experiences react so differently.

The authors of the initiative have developed a special 13-point questionnaire to assess the internal resources of a person. They were interested not just in the presence of fortitude, but in how it manifests itself in various areas: from physical condition to social connections and emotional control. The new approach considers resilience as a dynamic process consisting of four stages: anticipating a threat, trying to mitigate it, acting at the moment and then recovering, that is, “healing wounds.”

The analysis of the obtained data allowed us to identify four unique profiles, each of which predicts human behavior in a critical situation in its own way. The largest group, which included 46% of the volunteers, was characterized by poor insight and low willingness to face difficulties. Surprisingly, these people experienced almost no fear or depression, but they behaved extremely impulsively and often ignored security measures, living one day at a time.

The second category, which made up 37% of the participants, demonstrated average adaptation rates. Representatives of this category, on the contrary, often complained of nervousness and depressed mood, while showing the maximum propensity for risky actions. An even sadder picture was observed among 12% of respondents: they perfectly foresaw trouble, but they were completely unable to recover from stress, which is why their level of well-being was at the very bottom.

Only 6% of the lucky people with high resilience became the elite in this classification. It was they who demonstrated enviable composure, the absence of unnecessary worries and high efficiency in solving problems. These people were not only the best at coping with pressure, but also took a responsible approach to threat prevention, calculating the moves in advance.

Understanding what type of person a person belongs to opens the door to creating personalized help methods. Instead of general advice, therapists will be able to select strategies that hit exactly the target: some need to be helped to learn how to predict risks, while others need to recover faster from failures, which will make stress management much more effective.