Within psychiatry, resiliency is oftentimes framed as an ability to go through a traumatic experience without developing a trauma- or stressor-related disorder, the most well-known of which is posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It turns out, most people are resilient in this regard. Within the United States, an estimated 82.7 percent of individuals live through a traumatic experience, but the prevalence rate of PTSD is estimated to be closer to 6 percent. People exhibit resiliency for various reasons that I’ve written about before.

However, there is a more casual kind of resiliency that comes from coping with difficult situations that do not quite rise to the level of traumatic but, instead, are instances of adversity, which has been defined as “a perceived discrepancy between the situation an individual is confronted with and a desired conception of reality specified by their goals, needs, investments, and aspirations for the future.” Those who exhibit such resilience can respond to adversity in healthy and constructive ways rather than by giving up, throwing a tantrum, or pursuing some kind of “nuclear option” every time they are met with impediments to their goals.

In many ways, it’s the inverse of a term in psychology known as mental rigidity.

Mental rigidity is a tendency to resist changing one’s beliefs, habits, or routines. It is a psychological coping mechanism to avoid dealing with excessive or overly complex stimuli. One learns to tune out the........

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