FROM THE EDITOR

This month, we’re taking a close look at the idea of mental resilience. It was an idea inspired by a conversation I had with Prof Richard Wiseman on our podcast (go and subscribe!). We were discussing luck. Earlier in his career, Richard invited thousands of people who considered themselves lucky or unlucky to his lab. Over the course of a decade, he and his team studied these people closely. Of course, they found that there was nothing magical about the ‘lucky’ individuals, but there was something different about how these people saw the world. It seemed they had a different set of psychological processes shaping their perception and the way they made decisions. In a sense, these people made their own luck.

As well as creating better opportunities for themselves, these ‘lucky’ people were more resilient. They had skills that helped them to deal with what life threw at them, skills that could be taught to others. So Wiseman set up Luck School, and it worked: no one won the lottery, but the ‘unlucky’ people were given the psychological tools to deal with the stress and anxiety we all encounter at one time or another, and were generally happier as a result.

So it begs the question – why aren’t life skills like this taught in school? Changing your life or learning to deal with stress shouldn’t just be the reserve of self-help books, often touted by those relying on first-hand experience rather than scientific evidence. With that in mind and with uncertain times ahead, we asked our writers investigate the latest research around mental resilience and how to cultivate it (p70).