True vs Toxic Resilience
You can be resilient and still be badly burned out.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, a Harvard Medical School stress expert, distinguishes true resilience from toxic resilience. True resilience is your innate biological ability to adapt, recover, and grow, and it honors boundaries, rest, and self-compassion. Toxic resilience is the societal distortion of the word into productivity-at-all-costs, mind-over-matter endurance, the Energizer Bunny or keep-calm-and-carry-on mentality. The dangerous result is the resilience myth: believing you cannot be burned out because you are so resilient. The corrective is to lean into true resilience and recognize the brain needs rest to be productive.
Origin
Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, a stress expert at Harvard Medical School, shared this framework with Hala to dismantle the culturally toxic version of resilience that leaves entrepreneurs unknowingly burned out.
Core principles
- 01Resilience is an innate biological ability to adapt, recover, and grow.
- 02True resilience honors boundaries, human limits, and self-compassion.
- 03Toxic resilience is productivity at all costs and mind-over-matter tolerance of discomfort.
- 04The resilience myth is believing you can't be burned out because you're resilient.
- 05The brain needs rest and recovery to function at its optimal level.
How to run it
- 1
Recognize the resilience myth
Understand that being resilient does not make you immune to burnout; believing otherwise is the myth.
Pro tip If hearing 'be resilient' makes you cringe, you're likely living toxic resilience.
Watch out Toxic resilience is a manifestation of hustle culture, not a virtue.
- 2
Separate true from toxic resilience
True resilience honors boundaries and recovery; toxic resilience is all-systems-go, productivity at all costs.
Pro tip True resilience needs a little healthy positive stress to show itself, not constant overload.
- 3
Lean into rest and recovery
Treat rest and recovery as biological necessities for the brain to function and be productive.
Pro tip Recovery is essential to avoiding burnout, not optional.
In the wild
Nerurkar points to the Energizer Bunny in the US and 'keep calm and carry on' in the UK as every society's version of toxic resilience.
→ Recognizing these cultural scripts helps people see the discomfort-tolerance they mistake for strength.
Common mistakes
Wearing burnout as resilience
Assuming you can't be burned out because you're resilient keeps you pushing through toxic resilience until you collapse.
Equating resilience with tolerating discomfort
We're taught from a young age that resilience means enduring a lot of discomfort, but that is not true resilience.
Is it for you?
Best for
High-output entrepreneurs and creators proud of their hustle who dismiss their own burnout.
Not ideal for
Those who use 'rest' as an excuse to avoid necessary early-stage effort entirely.
From the transcript
“you can be resilient and still be much more burnt out than you think you are”
“we've moved away from True resilience towards toxic resilience”
“your brain really needs rest and Recovery to be productive”
From the episode
Dr. Aditi Nerurkar: How to Rewire Your Brain to Stress Less and Relax More
Dr. Aditi Nerurkar