Invest in social resources as the highest-return resilience investment

Strong, diverse social relationships are the single most robust resilience resource across virtually all stressor types.

Why it works

COR theory’s cross-cultural and cross-stressor research consistently finds that social support resources — both structural (number and diversity of relationships) and functional (quality of support available) — are the most powerful predictors of resilience across disasters, illness, occupational stress, and bereavement. Social resources are particularly valuable because they are often accessible when other resources are depleted: when material resources are gone, relationships may still be available. The investment mechanism is straightforward: maintained relationships provide buffering when individual resources are insufficient.

How to do it

1. Audit your social resource base: number of close relationships, diversity of your network, and quality of support available from each.
2. Identify relationships that are deteriorating due to neglect during busy or stressful periods.
3. Make a minimum investment commitment to each important relationship: one real contact per month for more distant connections, one meaningful interaction per week for close ones.
4. Build social investment into the resource protection hierarchy: relationships are not the first thing to cut when time is scarce.

Evidence

Social support is one of the most robustly supported resilience predictors in stress research; COR theory provides the resource-based mechanism explaining why it is so consistently predictive. Ozbay and colleagues’ 2007 review traces social support’s protective effect from neurobiology through to clinical practice, adding a mechanistic layer to the buffering evidence for why relationships are the highest-return resilience investment. (observational)

Social support research is largely observational; the direction of causation (do relationships cause resilience or do resilient people build more relationships?) is a legitimate open question.

Sources

• Hobfoll (1989), "Conservation of resources", American Psychologist
• Cohen & Wills (1985), "Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis", Psychological Bulletin
• Cohen, S., & Wills, T. A. (1985). Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 98(2), 310-357.
• Ozbay, F., Johnson, D. C., Dimoulas, E., Morgan, C. A., Charney, D., & Southwick, S. (2007). Social support and resilience to stress: From neurobiology to clinical practice. Psychiatry (Edgmont), 4(5), 35-40.

Common mistake

Treating social investment as discretionary — the first thing to drop when time or energy is scarce — rather than as a primary resource that protects all other resources.