Russian Journalist Flees To France After Criticising Ukraine War

By Chris Ekeme

The phone slips from your fingers. A diagnosis echoes in an empty room. The email arrives, your position's been eliminated. And just like that, your world cracks open.

Life breaks us all eventually. Not in clean, perfect halves, but in messy, jagged pieces that cut our fingers when we try to pick them up. I've been there, standing in the wreckage, wondering how anyone rebuilds from this. Hell, we all have. The question isn't whether storms will come. They always do. The real question hanging in the air between us is simpler: What makes some people weather these storms while others get swept away?

Resilience isn't some magical trait you're born with or without. It's not some spiritual superpower reserved for monks and marathon runners. It's a muscle, raw, human, and entirely buildable. I've spent years studying how people bounce back from the unimaginable: survivors, fighters, ordinary people who walked through fire and somehow didn't burn. What I've found might surprise you.

Let me cut through the self-help noise and get straight to what actually works when life knocks you flat.

1. Build Your Emotional Vocabulary

Most of us have the emotional vocabulary of a toddler. Mad. Sad. Fine. How's that working out for us? About as well as trying to perform surgery with a butter knife.

Here's what happens when disaster strikes: emotions flood your body like a tsunami, cortisol and adrenaline coursing through your veins, thoughts racing, chest tightening. But if you can't name what's happening inside you, you become a hostage to it.

Take my friend Sarah. After her divorce, she kept saying she felt "bad." Just... bad. For months. But when I pushed her to get specific, things changed. Was it humiliation? Grief? Rage? Relief tangled with guilt? Once she could separate grief (about the past) from anxiety (about the future) from shame (about perceived failure), she could finally address each one.

"I'm not just sad," she told me later. "I'm furious at being betrayed, terrified about raising my kids alone, and somewhere underneath it all, there's this weird relief I've been afraid to admit." Naming these emotions didn't make them vanish, but it transformed them from a suffocating mass into separate challenges she could face one by one.

Try this: Next time you're emotionally flooded, close your eyes. Where do you feel it in your body? Your throat? Your stomach? Your shoulders? Then get ridiculously specific with your language. Not just "anxious" but "the creeping dread that I've disappointed everyone." Not just "angry" but "the hot flash of injustice that makes my jaw clench." The moment you name it, you start to tame it.

Studies from Yale and elsewhere have shown that precisely labeling negative emotions actually diminishes their power. Your amygdala—that primitive alarm system in your brain, calms down. The simple act of naming your feelings shifts activity from your emotional brain to your rational prefrontal cortex. It's like turning on the lights to see there's no monster under the bed, just a pile of laundry you forgot to put away.

I won't sugarcoat it. This feels ridiculous at first. I resisted it myself. But I've seen it transform people's relationship with pain. You stop running from the feelings or drowning in them. You start moving through them.

2. Cultivate Deliberate Discomfort

We've built a world designed to shield us from discomfort. Food delivery so we never feel hunger. Climate control so we never feel too hot or cold. Smartphones so we never feel bored. Then we wonder why we crumble at the first sign of adversity.

Resilience isn't born from comfort, it's forged in manageable discomfort that you choose before life chooses for you.

Last winter, I started taking cold showers. Not because I enjoy torturing myself, but to practice discomfort on my terms. Those first icy seconds, the shock, the gasping, the internal screaming, they teach you something critical about pain: It peaks, then passes. Your racing thoughts say "I can't stand this" while your body quietly adapts. After a few weeks, what felt unbearable becomes merely unpleasant. After a month, it's just your morning shower.

The science backs this up. Voluntary exposure to physical stress, whether through exercise, heat, cold, or fasting, triggers something called hormesis. Your body responds to these small stresses by growing stronger, more efficient, more resilient. It's not just physical. The psychological benefits spill over.

But here's what matters: You don't need ice baths or ultra-marathons. Small, consistent steps into discomfort zones matter more than occasional heroics.

Maybe it's speaking up in meetings when your heart pounds. Taking a class that scares you. Having that conversation you've been avoiding. Walking instead of driving. Fasting until lunch once a week. Deleting social media from your phone for weekends.

Start small. Discomfort, like anything else, requires practice. The goal isn't suffering, it's expanding your capacity to function under stress. When real crisis hits, you'll have built the inner knowing that discomfort won't destroy you.

I've watched people transform through this practice. My colleague who feared public speaking gave himself the challenge of speaking up in every meeting for a month. "The first time, my voice shook so badly I could barely finish my sentence," he told me. "By week three, I still felt nervous, but I knew I would survive it." Six months later, he gave a presentation to the entire company. Was he still nervous? Hell yes. Did it paralyze him? Not anymore.

Build your discomfort muscle now. Don't wait for life to force your hand.

3. Master Your Narrative

Stories aren't just what we tell around campfires, they're how we make sense of our lives. And the stories you tell yourself about your challenges will either liberate you or trap you.

After my own career meltdown years ago, the one where I lost a job I'd shaped my entire identity around, I spent months telling myself a story of failure and humiliation. I was finished. Exposed as a fraud. Each morning, I'd wake up and silently narrate another chapter in my epic of professional doom.

I didn't realize I was authoring my own suffering until a mentor called me out. "That's one story," she said. "But it's not the only one. And it's certainly not the most useful one."

She challenged me to tell three different versions of what happened: a victim story (already had that one nailed), a growth story, and a contribution story. Same facts, radically different narratives. In the growth story, losing my job forced me to develop strengths I'd neglected. In the contribution story, my departure created opportunities for others and eventually led me to work that helped more people.

Was one story more "true" than the others? Not really. But the stories we choose shape what happens next.

Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, found that people with pessimistic explanatory styles, those who see setbacks as permanent, pervasive, and personal, recover more slowly from adversity. Those with optimistic styles, who see setbacks as temporary, specific, and not entirely their fault, bounce back faster.

Let me be crystal clear: This isn't about denial or toxic positivity. It's not pretending everything's great when it's not. It's about finding meaning and possibility within reality, not instead of it.

Try this exercise from psychologist James Pennebaker: Write about your struggle for 15 minutes a day, four days in a row. Don't just vent, explore different perspectives. How might this challenge look five years from now? What strengths is it forcing you to develop? What doors might it open that you can't see yet?

I've seen this simple practice help people find their way through grief, job loss, divorce, and illness. The shift happens not because circumstances magically improve, but because they reclaim authority over their story.

You can't control what happens to you. But you can absolutely control the story you tell about it.

4. Build Your Response Flexibility

Most of us have exactly one way of responding to stress. Some shut down. Some lash out. Some overthink themselves into paralysis. Some numb with whatever's handy. We treat these reactions like fixed personality traits rather than habits we can change.

Resilient people have what psychologists call "response flexibility", a toolbox of different ways to deal with challenges. They can shift strategies when one approach isn't working.

I learned this lesson from Jake, a veteran I interviewed who survived multiple combat tours. "In the field, soldiers who could adapt survived," he told me. "The ones with only one way of operating, they were the most vulnerable."

The same principle applies in civilian life. When facing adversity, can you:

• Confront it directly when that's appropriate?
• Temporarily step back when you need perspective?
• Seek support when you need reinforcement?
• Find humor when it might break tension?
• Accept what can't be changed?
• Take action on what can?

Most of us default to just one or two of these strategies, regardless of what the situation actually calls for.

I worked with a woman who approached every problem with aggressive action, a strategy that served her well in her career. But when her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, this approach crashed into a wall of futility. No amount of doing could solve this problem. She needed to develop new responses, acceptance, presence, emotional processing that didn't come naturally to her.

Start building your flexibility by asking: "Is my default response helping or hurting in this specific situation?" If it's not working, experiment with a completely different approach. If you normally withdraw, try reaching out. If you normally overthink, try physical action. If you normally rush to fix everything, try sitting with the discomfort of not fixing.

It feels awkward at first, like writing with your non-dominant hand. But with practice, you'll develop range. And range is what saves you when Plan A fails.

5. Create Connection Rituals

Humans are pack animals mistakenly convinced we need to handle hardship alone. This delusion is killing us.

The longest study on human happiness, running for over 80 years at Harvard, found something surprising: The single strongest predictor of who weathers life's storms wasn't wealth, IQ, or social class. It was relationship quality. People with strong connections literally suffered less, both physically and emotionally, when faced with painful life events.

Yet when we're struggling, many of us retreat. We put on a brave face. We don't want to "burden" others. We wait until we've "got it all figured out" before reconnecting. This is exactly backwards.

After my father died suddenly, I made every mistake in the book. I isolated. I pretended I was fine. I changed the subject when friends asked how I was doing. My grief festered in that isolation.

Recovery only started when I created connection rituals I couldn't easily abandon, a weekly walk with my oldest friend where we talked about everything except work, a monthly dinner with people who knew my dad, a regular check-in with a grief counselor who didn't let me hide.

The science on this is clear: Social support isn't just nice to have, it's as essential to survival as food and water. When we connect with others, our bodies release oxytocin, which directly counters the effects of stress hormones. Our nervous systems literally calm down in the presence of safe human connection.

But here's the catch, connection doesn't just happen, especially in our isolated modern world. You need rituals and structures to ensure it happens regularly, not just when everything's going well.

Some practices that help:

• Schedule non-negotiable time with people who energize you
• Join communities based around shared interests or challenges
• Create check-in partnerships where you mutually commit to regular, honest communication
• Practice asking for specific help rather than vague support
• Offer support to others (which benefits both of you)

The most resilient people I've studied aren't lone wolves, they're masterful at both giving and receiving support. They know interdependence isn't weakness; it's human survival strategy.

6. Practice Tragic Optimism

There's a middle ground between naive optimism that denies reality and bitter pessimism that sees no point in trying. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps, called it "tragic optimism", the ability to maintain hope and find meaning in life despite acknowledging inescapable pain, loss, and suffering.

This isn't about putting on a happy face or searching for silver linings in catastrophe. It's deeper and more sustaining than that. It's about finding purpose within suffering rather than trying to escape it.

I met a woman whose son died from an opioid overdose. The pain was beyond anything I could imagine. She didn't deny this reality or pretend it was "all part of a plan." Instead, she channeled her grief into creating support systems for other families facing addiction. "I couldn't save my son," she told me, "but his life and death have purpose through how they've changed me and what I do now."

This is tragic optimism in action. It doesn't require believe that everything happens for a reason. It requires believe that we can create meaning from whatever happens.

Research confirms that finding meaning in suffering is one of the strongest predictors of post-traumatic growth rather than post-traumatic stress. People who can construct meaning from their worst experiences are less likely to develop depression and anxiety, and more likely to experience positive transformation.

How do you practice this? Start by asking better questions when facing hardship:

• Instead of "Why is this happening to me?" ask "What possibilities does this open up?"
• Instead of "How can I get through this?" ask "How can I grow through this?"
• Instead of "When will this be over?" ask "What can this teach me that I couldn't learn any other way?"

Again, this isn't about denying pain or rushing to positivity. It's about expanding your view to hold both the tragedy and the possibility of something meaningful emerging from it.

I practice this imperfectly myself. Some days, when challenges hit, my first reaction is still frustration or fear. But I've developed the habit of pausing and asking: "What strength might this be building in me? What path might this be clearing that I can't see yet?"

This isn't magical thinking, it's a practical tool for navigating reality's roughest waters.

Building Your Resilience, Starting Today

Resilience isn't a destination, it's an ongoing practice. Like physical fitness, you can't just work at it once and expect results for life. It requires consistent attention and care.

Start small. Pick just one of these six areas to focus on this week. Maybe begin naming your emotions with greater precision. Or intentionally do something uncomfortable every day. Or examine the story you're telling yourself about your current challenge.

The great paradox of resilience is that it requires accepting vulnerability. We get stronger not by pretending to be invulnerable, but by acknowledging our wounds and working with them rather than against them.

I won't promise these practices will make life easy. They won't. What they will do is make you harder to break and quicker to recover when the inevitable storms come.

Because they will come. For all of us. The question isn't if you'll face hardship, it's how you'll meet it when it arrives.

Will you be caught completely unprepared? Or will you have been quietly building your capacity to bend without breaking?

I believe in your ability to grow through whatever you're facing right now. Not because I know you personally, but because I've seen the remarkable capacity for resilience in even the most seemingly broken people. The human spirit has survived unimaginable horrors throughout history. Your ancestors weathered wars, plagues, famines, and heartbreaks so that you could exist.

That same resilient force runs in your veins.

Hard times reveal who we already are. Start building your resilience today, not despite your wounds and struggles, but through them. The world doesn't need more perfect people. It needs more whole ones, who have transformed their pain into wisdom that lights the way for others.

What first small step will you take today?