Stress affects people in all different ways – or at least, different people respond to it very differently. For some, it rolls off quickly, and they rebound in a reasonable amount of time. For others, it “sticks” and it takes much longer to recover, if ever. This is because people’s mental “resilience” varies enormously, which itself is based on both genes and environment. For people who aren’t so good at coping with stressors, it may be that they’ve never been particularly good at it—or it could be that they were once good, but the losses and blows of life have worn their resilience away over time. Luckily, it’s possible to build resilience back up.

“We all experience terrible loss and hurdles at some point in our lives; the death of a loved one, a divorce or painful breakup, being fired from a job, suffering from an illness, or any number of life events that can be overwhelming and terrifying to confront,” Shannon Kolakowski, PsyD, author of When Depression Hurts Your Relationship. “Some people are better able to bounce back, whereas others struggle longer, with higher incidences of depression, anxiety, and long term effects of stress that take a toll on their lives.”

Whatever the reason, the good news is that resilience is in large part learnable. It may take a lot of practice and a number of different strategies (and perhaps work with a psychologist), but it can be improved upon over time. If you’re among the crowd who’s feeling less-than-resilient right now, knowing that youcan “grow” your resilience may be the first step in doing so.

Stretch your mental muscle

People often have a go-to coping method, which may or may not be effective in every life event. The thing that resilient people know is that different challenges require different strategies. So learning how to pick and choose your response in a given situation is key. “People who are resilient have an ability to adapt to all kinds of situations that life throws at us,” says Kolakowski. “Flexibility means you approach any given hurdle with a variety of strategies. Sometimes you need to lean on others and get emotional support; other times you need to give yourself space to heal or grieve or let things cool off; and other situations need swift and strong action to advocate for yourself or confront a situation head on. You can practice this by noticing your go-to method of coping, and then deliberately taking a step back. You’re then in a better position to chose how you move forward with a conscious plan of action.”

Most people know at least intellectually that first reactions aren’t always the best ones—it usually takes some space to fully digest the situation before you can settle on the best response. Make sure you give yourself adequate time to do this, so that you can come up with the best method, rather than just using the first one that comes to mind.

Train your mind to see positive AND negative

The meditation-and-the-brain research has been rolling in steadily for a number of years now, with new studies coming out just about every week to illustrate some new benefit of meditation. Or, rather, some ancient benefit that is just now being confirmed with fMRI or EEG. The practice appears to have an amazing variety of neurological benefits – from changes in grey matter volume to reduced activity in the “me” centers of the brain to enhanced connectivity between brain regions. Below are some of the most exciting studies to come out in the last few years and show that meditation really does produce measurable changes in our most important organ. Skeptics, of course, may ask what good are a few brain changes if the psychological effects aren’t simultaneously being illustrated? Luckily, there’s good evidence for those as well, with studies reporting that meditation helps relieve our subjective levels of anxiety and depression, and improve attention, concentration, and overall psychological well-being.

Meditation Helps Preserve the Aging Brain

Last week, a study from UCLA found that long-term meditators had better-preserved brains than non-meditators as they aged. Participants who’d been meditating for an average of 20 years had more grey matter volume throughout the brain — although older meditators still had some volume loss compared to younger meditators, it wasn’t as pronounced as the non-meditators. “We expected rather small and distinct effects located in some of the regions that had previously been associated with meditating,” said study author Florian Kurth. “Instead, what we actually observed was a widespread effect of meditation that encompassed regions throughout the entire brain.”

Meditation Reduces Activity in the Brain’s “Me Center”

One of the most interesting studies in the last few years, carried out at Yale University, found that mindfulness meditation decreases activity in the default mode network (DMN), the brain network responsible for mind-wandering and self-referential thoughts – a.k.a., “monkey mind.” The DMN is “on” or active when we’re not thinking about anything in particular, when our minds are just wandering from thought to thought. Since mind-wandering is typicallyassociated with being less happy, ruminating, and worrying about the past and future, it’s the goal for many people to dial it down. Several studies have shown that meditation, though its quieting effect on the DMN, appears to do just this. And even when the mind does start to wander, because of the new connections that form, meditators are better at snapping back out of it.

Its Effects Rival Antidepressants for Depression, Anxiety

A review study last year at Johns Hopkins looked at the relationship between mindfulness meditation and its ability to reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, and pain. Researcher Madhav Goyal and his team found that the effect size of meditation was moderate, at 0.3. If this sounds low, keep in mind that the effect size for antidepressants is also 0.3, which makes the effect of meditation sound pretty good. Meditation is, after all an active form of brain training. “A lot of people have this idea that meditation means sitting down and doing nothing,” says Goyal. “But that’s not true. Meditation is an active training of the mind to increase awareness, and different meditation programs approach this in different ways.” Meditation isn’t a magic bullet for depression, as no treatment is, but it’s one of the tools that may help manage symptoms.

Meditation May Lead to Volume Changes in Key Areas of the Brain

In 2011, Sara Lazar and her team at Harvard found that mindfulness meditation can actually change the structure of the brain: Eight weeks of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) was found to increase cortical thickness in the hippocampus, which governs learning and memory, and in certain areas of the brain that play roles in emotion regulation and self-referential processing. There were also decreases in brain cell volume in the amygdala, which is responsible for fear, anxiety, and stress – and these changes matched the participants’ self-reports of their stress levels, indicating that meditation not only changes the brain, but it changes our subjective perception and feelings as well. In fact, a follow-up study by Lazar’s team found that after meditation training, changes in brain areas linked to mood and arousal were also linked to improvements in how participants said they felt — i.e., their psychological well-being. So for anyone who says that activated blobs in the brain don’t necessarily mean anything, our subjective experience – improved mood and well-being – does indeed seem to be shifted through meditation as well.

Just a Few Days of Training Improves Concentration and Attention 

Having problems concentrating isn’t j