Is Resilience About Enduring More - or Needing to Endure Less?

When Words Begin to Trap Us

BrainLatam Special Series — SBNeC 2026

Imagine two people working in the same hospital.

Both face long shifts.

Too few professionals.

Responsibility for lives.

Interrupted sleep.

Difficult decisions.

Pressure.

Fear of making mistakes.

One manages to go through months while maintaining emotional balance, social relationships, and performance.

The other begins to experience exhaustion, sleep disturbances, irritability, and difficulty concentrating.

It is tempting to conclude:

the first person is more resilient.

Perhaps.

But there is a prior question:

Why are we measuring only how much each Body-Territory can endure, rather than how much that environment is demanding that it endure?

This distinction profoundly changes the way we think about resilience.

Resilience should not mean enduring anything

In Neuroscience, Psychology, and Medicine, resilience generally refers to the capacity to maintain or recover functioning in the face of adversity.

That matters.

An organism incapable of adapting to change would struggle greatly to survive.

We need to be able to face:

loss;

change;

frustration;

threats;

illness;

conflict;

uncertainty.

But there is a risk when a scientific word leaves the laboratory and enters culture.

Resilience can stop describing a capacity and begin prescribing an obligation.

“You need to be more resilient.”

“Learn how to deal with pressure.”

“Control your anxiety.”

“Sleep better.”

“Think positively.”

“Exercise.”

“Meditate.”

All of these may help certain Body-Territories.

But none of them necessarily answers another question:

Did the pressure need to be that intense in the first place?

A Brazilian hospital reveals the paradox

In 2022, researchers studied 321 Nursing professionals at a Brazilian general hospital.

Most showed moderate or high levels of resilience.

At the same time, 73.5% were at risk of occupational stress exposure.

The results also showed relationships with psychological demands, control over work, social support, professional category, and daily working hours.

This produces a simple question:

If resilient people remain exposed to highly stressful environments, to what extent is increasing resilience even further the correct intervention?

Perhaps part of the answer lies within the individual.

But perhaps another part lies in:

work schedules;

organization;

staffing levels;

autonomy;

predictability;

social support;

income;

rest.

The resilience of a Body-Territory does not automatically make the territory in which it functions healthy.

Even highly resilient people can reach burnout

A more recent study conducted in four public hospitals in Fortaleza assessed professionals working in intensive care units.

Among 194 workers, 62% showed general symptoms of burnout.

As expected, greater resilience was associated with lower burnout.

But an important detail appeared:

about one-third of the professionals with the highest resilience levels still experienced burnout.

This does not reduce the importance of resilience.

It shows its limits.

An organism may have excellent adaptive resources and still face a burden that continuously exceeds those resources.

Perhaps the question should stop being:

How do we make this person strong enough for this environment?

and become:

What kind of environment would allow that strength to be used for living, creating, and caring — rather than merely enduring?

The body adapts. But adaptation has a cost

Here, the concept of allostasis helps.

An organism does not maintain stability by remaining still.

It constantly modifies:

heart rate;

hormonal activity;

metabolism;

attention;

immune responses;

behavior.

It anticipates needs and adjusts its functioning.

That is extraordinary.

But repeated adaptation has costs.

In 2024, Latin American researchers proposed an integrated view of allostasis for health and development in Latin America. The study highlights how children and populations across the region may simultaneously face violence, food insecurity, pollutants, urban inequalities, limited access to green spaces, and other exposures that accumulate over development. The authors argue that public policy and interventions must incorporate social and environmental conditions, rather than focusing only on individual characteristics.

This changes our spiral.

We do not have only:

threat → brain → response.

We also have:

urban planning
↓
housing
↓
pollution
↓
violence
↓
parents’ working conditions
↓
food
↓
sleep
↓
development
↓
stress systems
↓
cognition and behavior.

And there is also a path in the opposite direction.

The Body-Territory participates politically in the society that will continue producing these conditions.

Perhaps what we call fragility is greater exposure

Imagine two children.

One lives in a territory with:

predictable food;

green space;

a nearby school;

parents with stable working hours;

safe transportation;

access to healthcare;

time to play.

The other lives with:

food insecurity;

nearby violence;

long commutes;

precarious housing;

unpredictable income;

fragmented sleep;

exhausted parents.

Years later, we submit both to the same “resilience” test.

We may be measuring an individual characteristic.

But perhaps we are also measuring completely different histories of exposure.

A 2024 review on adolescents exposed to social inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean found consistent associations between socio-structural difficulties and lower well-being, emotional problems, and barriers to accessing mental healthcare.

Therefore:

Before asking why one Body-Territory endures less, we need to ask how much it had already been required to endure before reaching the experiment.

Territory leaves marks on the trajectory of brain health

This does not mean:

“inequality determines the brain.”

Much less that there is a biologically inferior or inevitably vulnerable Latin American brain.

The evidence suggests something different:

brain-health trajectories are sensitive to the conditions in which life takes place.

In 2025, a study published in The Lancet Global Health analyzed a Brazilian cohort of 9,412 people alongside additional databases from Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, and Uruguay.

Factors related to social and health inequalities had strong relevance for cognition and functional ability, with distinct profiles across countries. In Brazil, education appeared particularly relevant to cognitive outcomes; in other Latin American contexts, mental-health symptoms carried greater weight.

This detail is fundamental for Decolonial Neuroscience:

Even within Latin America, we should not assume that the same variable has the same weight in every territory.

Brazil is not Chile.

Chile is not Colombia.

A peripheral neighborhood in São Paulo is not the Javari Valley.

A neighborhood in Bogotá is not an Andean community.

The biological mechanism may be shared.

The ecology that recruits it may be different.

Body-Territory: resilience is not only inside the individual

Perhaps we need to replace a representation.

Instead of:

PERSON → RESILIENCE

we can test:

BODY-TERRITORY ↔ RELATIONSHIPS ↔ ENVIRONMENT ↔ INSTITUTIONS.

A longitudinal study with Brazilian healthcare professionals showed that, beyond individual factors, workload emerged as a risk factor for burnout, while good family relationships, well-being in the workplace, and adequate sleep acted as protective factors.

In other words:

resilience is not necessarily an individually produced shield.

It may also emerge from:

relationships;

control;

predictability;

security;

support;

recovery time.

This difference is political.

Science: how do we do it?

In the BrainLatam analogy:

Science → Doing → Executive.

If we want to understand what really produces resilience, we need to test more than individual interventions.

We can compare:

breathing training;

physical activity;

psychotherapy;

meditation;

biofeedback;

sleep interventions;

with:

shorter working hours;

greater schedule predictability;

more autonomy;

better team relationships;

higher pay;

food security;

access to green spaces;

reduced daily commuting.

We can measure:

HRV;

cortisol;

breathing;

sleep quality;

attention;

memory;

EEG;

fNIRS;

absenteeism;

burnout;

relationships;

quality of life.

And then ask a more complete scientific question:

Is it more effective to increase the adaptive capacity of the Body-Territory or to reduce the burden requiring continuous adaptation?

Perhaps the answer is:

both.

But we need to measure.

Politics: how much suffering do we judge acceptable?

In the BrainLatam analogy:

Politics → Opinion → Judgment.

Here there is a decision that no brain image can make for us.

Imagine that we discover someone can work 60 hours a week without showing measurable deterioration.

Does that mean they should work 60 hours?

No.

Science can help us estimate consequences.

But we still need to decide:

What kind of world do we want to share?

What level of occupational stress do we consider acceptable?

How much time do we want to allocate to work?

How much should remain for:

family;

rest;

art;

contemplation;

political participation;

relationships;

the Biome?

These are political decisions.

Science informs.

It does not replace collective judgment.

Religion: can we imagine a world that requires less endurance?

In the BrainLatam analogy:

Religion → Transcending → Legislative.

Religion here does not need to mean an institution.

We are talking about the capacity to represent something that does not yet exist.

While discussing resilience, we may be trapped inside a silent belief:

The environment will remain as it is; therefore, we must adapt people to it.

But that too is a choice.

We can imagine another possibility:

What if we change the environment?

This movement is transcendent in the BrainLatam sense.

Before they exist:

a different working day;

a different income;

a different city;

a different relationship with work;

a different care policy

must first exist as representable possibilities.

Then they can be judged politically.

Then they can be executed and tested.

This is our spiral:

Transcend → Judge → Do → Observe → Transcend again.

When resilience becomes an instrument for maintaining the system

Here a risk appears.

A society can become excellent at teaching people to endure what it cannot — or does not want to — transform.

The worker becomes ill:

resilience training.

The teacher is exhausted:

mindfulness.

The healthcare professional is burned out:

self-care program.

The adolescent sees no future:

think positively.

None of these tools is necessarily bad.

The problem appears when they replace structural questions.

Why is there exhaustion?

Who defined this workday?

Who receives the value produced?

Who absorbs the physiological cost?

What rule made this condition normal?

Who has the power to change it?

At that point, “resilience” begins to trap us.

A word created to understand adaptation can become a way of avoiding changes to the source of the burden.

The reverse spiral

Neuroscience often starts with the organism:

stress
→ physiological systems
→ brain
→ behavior.

BrainLatam proposes the opposite path as well:

State
↓
labor legislation
↓
company
↓
working hours
↓
income
↓
housing
↓
commuting time
↓
sleep
↓
physiology
↓
brain.

Now a different question appears:

How much of what we call individual resilience is produced — or consumed — by the political architecture organizing life?

We do not fully know.

That is precisely why we should investigate it.

And what about the Biome?

The spiral must continue.

Imagine a region whose economy depends on:

increasing extraction;

long working hours;

increasing production;

increasing consumption.

Society may simultaneously ask:

the worker to become more resilient;

the forest to become more resilient;

the river to become more resilient;

the city to become more resilient;

the climate to become more resilient.

Perhaps we are using the same word to avoid another:

limit.

Resilience does not mean infinite capacity.

Not for an organism.

Not for a collective.

Not for a Biome.

A policy oriented toward Body-Territory and Biome would need to ask not only:

How much more can we extract without collapse?

but:

How much do we actually need to produce in order to live well without demanding permanent adaptation from the bodies and territories sustaining that production?

Biome Income as a hypothesis

This is where Biome Income can reappear as a BrainLatam proposal.

Not as a treatment for burnout.

Not as a neuroscientific conclusion.

But as a hypothesis for reorganizing the ecology.

If part of economic security can be linked to maintaining and regenerating the conditions of the territory itself, we can test:

whether it reduces pressure to accept excessively degrading work;

whether it changes income predictability;

whether it modifies family stress;

whether it changes available time;

whether it alters the economic relationship with environmental exploitation;

whether new forms of cooperation emerge.

Perhaps it works.

Perhaps it creates new problems.

Science begins precisely when we accept both possibilities.

Resilience for what?

Perhaps this is the question that was missing.

Do we want resilience so a person can:

continue doing more of what exhausts them?

Or so they can move through unavoidable adversity while still retaining enough energy to build a meaningful life?

There is suffering we cannot eliminate.

Losing someone.

Aging.

Encountering limits.

Living with uncertainty.

Dying.

The capacity to move through these experiences will remain profoundly human.

But other forms of suffering are produced by:

rules;

wages;

working hours;

inequalities;

urbanization;

violence;

economic decisions.

Perhaps it is a mistake to treat all of them as if they were natural storms that each individual simply needs to learn how to endure.

BrainLatam Question

Before teaching a Body-Territory to endure more, can we discover which parts of what it is enduring could simply cease to exist?

Recent references with a Latin American focus — post-2021

Ribeiro RP et al. (2022). Resilience and the reduction of occupational stress in Nursing. Revista Latino-Americana de Enfermagem, 30. Brazilian study with 321 Nursing professionals examining resilience, psychological demands, control, and social support.

Rosales Vaca KM et al. (2022). Mental health of healthcare workers of Latin American countries: a review of studies published during the first year of COVID-19 pandemic. Psychiatry Research. Review of Latin American studies on anxiety, depression, and stress among healthcare professionals.

Migeot J et al. (2024). Allostasis, health, and development in Latin America. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. Proposes an integrated framework connecting allostatic processes, development, inequality, environment, and Latin American public policy.

Sánchez-Castro JC et al. (2024). Mental health among adolescents exposed to social inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean: a scoping review. Frontiers in Public Health. Review of 42 studies on social inequality, well-being, and mental health among Latin American and Caribbean adolescents.

Moser CM et al. (2024). Beyond the Pandemic: Longitudinal Lessons on Social Support, Sleep Quality, and Burnout Among Healthcare Workers. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Brazilian longitudinal study highlighting workload as a risk factor and sleep, relationships, and organizational well-being as protective factors.

Da Ros LU et al. (2025). Social and health disparities associated with healthy brain ageing in Brazil and in other Latin American countries. The Lancet Global Health. Analysis involving Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, and Uruguay, showing the relevance of social and health inequalities for cognition and functional capacity.

Burnout and resilience among intensive care workers facing the end of the COVID-19 pandemic (2025). Study conducted in four public hospitals in Fortaleza, Brazil. It found an inverse association between resilience and burnout, while also identifying burnout among some individuals with high resilience.

Origin of the series

The XLIX Annual Meeting of SBNeC 2026, held from September 30 to October 3, 2026, proposes a program spanning Systems Neuroscience, Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, Clinical and Translational Neuroscience, and Neuroscience and Education — allowing us to connect brain mechanisms with the concrete conditions in which organisms live.