Emotional Resilience
Emotions have a big impact on our health in times of stress. Use them to your advantage.
“Let’s not forget that little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.” — Vincent Van Gogh
The COVID pandemic had a silver lining: it gave us an insight into how emotions could enhance resilience to viral infections. The pandemic seemed like a bolt out of the blue to us but raging disease has been a constant fixture for all human history. There has never been a time when we weren’t hounded by pathogens.
Much of our shock about the pandemic is ironically due to our success in treating prior epidemics. With vaccines, we have wiped out smallpox and severely limited measles, polio, tuberculosis, and many other terrifying plagues. As for larger predators, we rarely run from lions, tigers, and bears anymore. Indeed, we turn them into stuffed toys for our children. By comparison to our loincloth-wearing ancestors, we have a pretty sweet deal. But human memory is short, and our victories have made us smug and complacent.
Shocking ourselves
Apparently, we need an occasional injection of harsh reality to keep us on our toes. Studies found that fans of horror, zombie, or alien-invasion movies displayed a greater resilience to COVID. People who like horror also seem better prepared for social disruptions than their more squeamish counterparts.
We seem to be seeking a side order of terror to go with our creeping contagions. It’s a primal reminder of the breathtaking dangers we left behind in our pre-medical past. With the tigers safely tucked into zoos, life is calmer. But instead of deadly predators, we must now endure the omnipresent stress of bloviating politicians, climate change, runaway diseases, and overbearing bosses. The problem is that we aren’t built for continuous stress.
Horror movies may provide a release, a kind of educational simulation, reminding us how to deal with apocalyptic circumstances. A fright night allows us to get terrified in a safe setting, giving us the opportunity to reflect upon our reactions in relative tranquility. Understanding the mechanics of fear helps to build up resilience.
Laugh it off
There is a happier alternative to horror: Humor can also help you cope with stress. As weird as it seems, a sense of humor can boost resilience.
Contagions are awful, but laughter is contagious too. Laughter is a time-honored way to cope with fear, and it has surprising medical effects on your health and microbiome.
Laughing lowers your cortisol levels, resetting the immune system and altering gut microbes which then secrete molecules that further improve your mood. While suppressing emotions lowers the diversity of microbes in the gut, positive emotions improve the abundance of beneficial microbes and metabolites like oxytocin and dopamine. The bacteria associated with positive emotions include Bifidobacteria, Lactobacillus, Faecalibacterium, Coprococcus, and Lachnospiraceae. A negative impact on emotion is associated with Collinsella.
Laughter can relax your muscles, helping to shed tension and lowering your blood pressure and heart rate. Laughter is also associated with an elevated pain threshold. Guffaws in particular increase endorphins, which help to numb pain and make you feel better. Those are a lot of cheerfully moving parts that can reduce your stress and boost your resilience.
The direction of a smile
Being happy, of course, can make you smile. The amazing thing is that it goes both ways: facial expressions can influence your emotions. Try it now: smile big, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how it makes you feel. This is called facial feedback. So, as with many other biological systems, even a smile is a two-way street. It’s unlikely to overcome depression, but it may help.
The key takeaway from these intriguing studies is that emotions and even facial expressions affect your stress-inducing cortisol levels. And that, through the magic of the gut-brain axis, can improve your gut microbiome and boost your resilience. Anything you do to improve your gut microbes (like a high-fiber diet) will further intensify the emotional payoff of your happiness circuits.
Whether you choose chillers or comedies, stimulating your emotions can shake you out of the doldrums and boost your resilience. That’s something to smile about, right there.
References
Fessell, David. “Laughter Leaves Me Lighter: Coping With COVID-19.” JAMA 323, no. 24 (2020): 2476–77.
Henkel, Dennis, and Eelco F. M. Wijdicks. “Cinema’s Terrifying Realities: Pandemics, Zombification, and SARS-COV-2.” Perspective. Clinical Medicine & Research 20, no. 3 (2022): 121–24.
imperialbiosciencereview. “Dissecting Fear and Anxiety: Why Do We Feel Scared?” Imperial Bioscience Review, June 4, 2021.
Ozturk, Fatma Ozlem, and Kader Tekkas-Kerman. “The Effect of Online Laughter Therapy on Depression, Anxiety, Stress, and Loneliness among Nursing Students during the Covid-19 Pandemic.” Archives of Psychiatric Nursing 41 (December 2022): 271–76.
Platts, Todd K., and Amanda Rutherford. “Panic Watching: On the Function of Consuming Fictional Pandemics During a Real Pandemic.” In Contemporary Horror on Screen: An Evolving Visual Narrative, edited by Sarah Baker, Amanda Rutherford, and Richard Pamatatau. Springer Nature, 2023.
For more information on psychobiotics, check out the Scanderson Labs website.
Really thoughtful piece, especially because you treat “emotional resilience” as a skill and a physiologic state, not a personality trait! Resilience is often less about “staying positive” and more about recovery kinetics: how quickly your nervous system returns toward baseline after stress. That’s regulated by very concrete inputs; sleep quality, glycemic stability, movement, social connection, and the story we tell our brain about whether a sensation is danger or discomfort. When those foundations are depleted, people don’t become “weak”; they become biologically overloaded. I also appreciate the practical throughline: resilience isn’t never breaking, it’s noticing earlier, naming what’s happening, and taking the smallest effective action that shifts state (a walk, a breath pattern, a boundary, a conversation, a pause before reacting). Those micro-interruptions look small, but they’re exactly how you retrain reactivity over time.
This writing helps people replace shame with agency, while staying honest about how human bodies actually work!
Really insightful breakdown of how smiling actualy works both ways. The facial feedback mechansim isn't something most people think about when they're trying to manage stress. I've noticed in my own work that forcing a quick smile during tough meetings genuinely shifts my mindset a bit. The gut-brain axis connection makes it even more interesting since its literally rewiring chemistry, not just psychology.