Resilience describes a person's ability to stay mentally healthy and return to their own balance despite crises. Resilience is often seen as a fixed characteristic – a type of super strength that you either have or you don't. Michèle Wessa has a critical view of this interpretation: "resilience is not an unchangeable property, it's a dynamic process. It isn't a disposition that keeps people healthy, but rather resilience is an interplay of skills and experience, and we can learn and train it over the course of our lives." It's not about building a shield that everything negative can bounce off, leaving us invincible. Even resilient people are stressed, exhausted, or doubtful, but they find ways to maintain their mental health despite the stress or bounce back quickly after crises. The term originally came from material research and describes substances that return to their original form after pressure has been applied. "In the same way, people can find their inner balance again after crises. Unlike the resilient material, though, they never return to the 'original condition' exactly, since of course crises change people too," explains Wessa.
Things have come full circle
In 2024, Michèle Wessa returned to the place that she herself describes as the cradle of her academic career: the CIMH. She has been Head of the Department of Neuropsychology and Psychological Resilience Research at the CIMH and the Cancer Survivorship and Psychological Resilience department at the DKFZ-Hector Cancer Institute at the University Medical Center Mannheim and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg since October 2024.
"Coming back to the CIMH, in other words coming full circle, that really was a wonderful opportunity," says Wessa. She herself sat in the rooms as a young researcher where her employees now work. She gained her first insights into clinical psychology here as an intern. She later graduated from the Institute for Neuropsychology and Clinical Psychology under renowned pain researcher Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Dr. h.c. Herta Flor. After working in France and Heidelberg, her path took her to the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in 2013. She worked there as a professor for eleven years and founded the Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research with other experts.
Today, around 20 years after graduating, she is now back working at the CIMH again with Herta Flor. "The fact that we're researching together again is really special and I'm immensely grateful," says Wessa.
What drives Wessa in her work is the feeling that she is doing something that is genuinely meaningful. She wants to create prevention services that help people to stay healthy. "Everyone goes through difficult times in their live," she says. "The more we find out about what keeps us healthy despite this, the better we can pass on this knowledge and help others." Lots of people don't even know what inner resources they have or how they can use them. "It's therefore important that on the one hand we research these resources but on the other hand we teach people and society what actually keeps us healthy."
Resilience can be trained
Genetic preconditions do affect stress regulation, but it is critical to note that resilience can be trained. Wessa, who also does research in the field of sports psychology, explains it like this: “obviously not everyone can become an athlete because we all have different skills and talents, but training makes a big difference. In sports, we can see that people with different preconditions ultimately achieve the same feats, because maybe some people are able to train with more discipline while the others bring their own particular strengths to the table. It's the same thing with resilience.”
Research has now identified key resilience factors that can be strengthened in a targeted manner. This includes, for example, an optimistic mindset, self-efficacy, social support, acceptance, or self-compassion. There are often specific experiences behind these terms that you have over the course of your life and that can help you to adjust to stressful situations.
Optimism means seeing the positive even in difficult times and looking more carefully for it. The feeling of self-efficacy grows when we have the experience of being able to actively impact our own lives. Social support helps us to share stress, open up, and get new perspectives.
Acceptance does not mean helplessly resigning yourself to something, but rather recognizing that something difficult and unpleasant is currently part of your life. Only when we stop focusing on the question of "why" do new treatment options open up for us. Finally, self-compassion means being as kind to yourself as you would to a good friend. Sometimes it's enough to just ask the question "what would I advise my friend to do in this situation?"
Wessa is researching which resilience factors play a particular roll in situations of extreme mental load, whether this is as a result of stress or a disease, and how they interact with one another for various areas of life. A key aim of her research is to decode the underlying adjustment processes. New preventative methods to prevent stress-related mental illnesses could then be developed to strengthen people who are in or about to face stressful life circumstances. Two of her current areas of research focus are the resilience of cancer patients and the resilience of nurses.
Cancer research as a new challenge
In Germany, around 500,000 people fall ill with cancer each year. Being diagnosed with cancer is a shock for most people. Their lives change radically from one day to the next. The disease suddenly shapes their thoughts and their day-to-day lives. At the same time there are countless questions: how do I deal with my fear? Can I still make plans for the future?
How do people manage to maintain inner stability and stay mentally healthy despite this significant mental and physical load? This is the question that Wessa is looking at in her research at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). "I believe it is very important that we don't just think about resilience in the context of healthy people who are learning resilience to be equipped for crisis situations. We also need to ask the question of what resources people who are or were mentally or physically ill have and how they can use their resources to protect themselves," says Wessa. The employees in the research department Cancer Survivorship and Psychological Resilience are investigating which psychological and neurobiological mechanisms contribute to cancer patients and long-term survivors of cancer maintaining their quality of life. For Wessa, cancer research is an entirely new field and this is precisely what motivates her. "Taking on this challenge and pushing myself a little more and building a new area of research focus – I couldn't resist." This is how she explains why she accepted the call to take on the Hector professorship.
Improving the resilience of nurses
Nurses are often under pressure: a lack of staff, increasing demands, and high levels of stress at work shape their everyday working lives. On top of this, they are regularly faced with the crises that their patients are experiencing. The physical and emotional strain is significant. Lots of nurses develop stress-related illnesses as a result, such as depression, anxiety disorders, or sleeping problems. Resilience is therefore particularly important in the nursing profession. It protects against mental overload and forms the basis for a long working life.
In the European XR2ESILIENCE project, Wessa and her team are looking at how extended reality applications can improve nurses' resilience. The project uses virtual reality to develop training modules that reconstruct stressful situations in a realistic way. The goal is to simulate typical stressors and provide nurses with specific coping strategies.
However, before these training modules are created, there is one fundamental question that needs to be asked: what exactly makes up the resilience of nurses? To find this out, the research team accompanies nurses over a period of two years. They record both the stresses of everyday working life and the factors and mechanisms that promote resilience. Effective training sessions can only be designed once these critical factors are known.
Bringing knowledge into the everyday
For Wessa, teaching knowledge in an understandable manner that is as close as possible to everyday life is a key part of resilience research. Wessa and her team work directly with those affected to make the services as practical as possible. "We develop ideas, but then sit down with people and discuss things such as what does an exercise need to be like for people to actually do it? And how can it be integrated into everyday life?" explained Wessa.
It is particularly important to her to reach those who have had barely any previous access to topics such as mental health or who have a low level of health literacy. "Interventions in simple language have been much too rare, but they are essential for some," Wessa tells us. "At the moment, I feel like we're accumulating knowledge primarily from people who already know some things anyway, and the gap is becoming wider. It is imperative that we counteract this," she emphasizes. There are various ways to bring resilience into different living environments: online training sessions or apps can create rapid access, but not everybody can be reached digitally. The press, television, and places where people come together, for example at street festivals, in schools, or in sports clubs, are suitable for teaching knowledge with a low threshold and creating suitable services. "Ultimately it's about arousing curiosity and going into people's living environments instead of waiting for them to come to us."
Michèle Wessa has already done a lot in her career and will continue to do so in the future. With her team, she is researching topics that are important for our society and affect us all. Life does not always go in a straight line. Wessa's work shows that we can learn to handle this, discover our strengths, and find ways to stay healthy even in difficult times.