6 Ways to Measure Your Resilience Score and How to Up It

A mature woman is struggling with influenza.

Source: fizkes / Shutterstock

It was completely predictable—at least my health tracking ring predicted it, but I didn’t listen. After months of intense work, my health tracker began to show my resilience slipping—going from high “exceptional” to “strong” and then “solid.” That still sounded pretty good, and I needed to make that last push to travel to a book signing for my new book, Well at Work: Creating Wellbeing in Any Workspace. You’d think that the writer of that book would listen to her own advice. But we all fall off the wagon sometimes—and this was my time.

I had planned to rest after all the events had settled down, but my body decided to shut down on its own schedule.

No sooner had I returned from travel than I came down with a viral bronchitis that quickly turned into pneumonia. When I got sick, my resilience plummeted even further. I had no energy or willpower to do anything; my mood was low even after the antibiotics kicked in. The resilience scale on my health tracker had totally predicted my pneumonia. Not so much the level of resilience when I got sick but how rapidly it had declined and stayed low compared to my previous high.

Health tracker showing resilience falling from Exceptional to Solid.

Source: Esther Sternberg M.D.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from any bodily insult that stresses the body, whether physical, emotional, or infectious. It can be calculated in several ways. It includes your stress levels during the day, how quickly your stress levels return to baseline during restorative periods, and how many rest periods you take during the day.

It also includes your stress level while you sleep, which is derived in part from the point in the night when your resting heart rate bottoms out. Your heart rate should nadir at the midpoint of sleep—if your heart rate takes too long to fall, it means your stress response is working overtime. It also includes your heart rate variability throughout the night, which reflects the balance between your stress and relaxation responses. Overall sleep quality is another important measure of how stressed or relaxed you are while you sleep: how many times you wake, how quickly you fall asleep, how long you sleep, how much you move, and how restless you are.

Resilience scales can also include movement and posture. If you think about how you move—or, more accurately, don’t move—when you’re sick, you know that you lie in bed a lot, you move far less than when you’re well, and those movements can be jerky and slow.

How much blood flows to your fingertips is another measure of stress. Think about it. When you are stressed, your knuckles go white, and your hands get cold and clammy. This can be measured by the temperature of your fingers—as with my ring health tracker. In the lab, it can be measured with skin conductance—basically, the lie detector test that detects an electrical current when your palms get sweaty. Putting all those variables into the hopper, researchers have come up with algorithms to put a number on resilience.

The precipitous fall in my resilience score told me that I hadn’t listened to my own advice—whether you get sick from a virus and how sick you get depends on three things: dose, duration of exposure, and your own resilience.

So, how can this be fixed? I considered the seven domains of integrative medicine: sleep, environment, movement, relationships, spirituality, nutrition, and resilience, which includes stress reduction. I chose the low-hanging fruit—the few that would be easy to implement.

To reduce my stress, I started a strict regimen of absolutely no work: no responding to or looking at e-mail. I slept in every morning as long as possible and took naps during the day when I felt tired. I began to eat small amounts of chicken soup augmented with fresh kale and broccoli. (If you’re vegetarian, miso soup is a good substitute.) I rested outdoors in the sunshine, then in the lukewarm pool water for a few minutes a day, and then gradually shifted to gentle swimming. If you don’t have access to warm weather or a pool, you can just sit in your bathtub—which has the added benefit of warm vapor keeping your mucous membranes hydrated, helping you clear the mucus from your sinuses and lungs. You can substitute swimming with very gradual increments of gentle exercise, like walking.

Health tracker showing resilience rising from Solid to Exceptional

Source: Esther Sternberg M.D.

Those of us who are workaholics may find this regimen hard to enforce, but what helped me keep at it was seeing the gradual daily resilience score improve on my health tracker. Like Pavlov's dog, the resilience score gave me the positive feedback I needed to stay on track. People have asked me when to go back to work after being sick. Besides going back when you feel better, go back when your resilience score tells you your body is fully recovered.

So, if you’ve pushed yourself too hard and gotten sick, or if you have a chronic illness, try doing what your body will make you do anyway: shut down and reboot with lots of sleep, gradual increments of gentle exercise, outdoors in nature if possible, a healthy anti-inflammatory diet and a strict work holiday: no internet and no e-mail. Watch your resilience score improve, and soon, you’ll be back to your healthiest self.