You're not resilient. You've been enduring.

"I'm the strong one." You've said it about yourself. You're the strong friend everyone leans on. Somewhere along the way, you forgot there was ever anyone underneath.

This episode is for the woman who has been praised for her resilience her entire life, and who is starting to suspect that what she's been doing was never resilience at all. It was endurance. Pushing through without processing. Absorbing without recovering. And while she was being admired for it, something inside her went quiet. The world calls this burnout. She calls it disappearing.

Dr. Amen Kaur names the difference between resilience and endurance, and explains why high-achieving women are culturally conditioned to confuse the two. You'll hear what the neuroscience says about how chronic endurance reshapes your nervous system over decades. Drawing on research from Porges, Gabor Mate, and the Mount Sinai resilience studies, the episode explains why rest doesn't help and why willpower stopped working. The spark didn't leave. You cut it off. Because the identity of the strong one required you to.

What's the difference between resilience and endurance? One restores your nervous system. The other quietly costs you it.

If you've been called resilient your whole life and you're now exhausted in a way rest doesn't touch, this one is for you.

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Starting Over, Being You with Dr. Amen Kaur, PhD. A research-grounded podcast for high-achieving women who have done the work and are still stuck. Built on the Human Intelligence Framework and the Five Intelligences. Return, not reinvention. New episode every Wednesday.

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About Dr Amen Kaur

Starting Over, Being You with Dr. Amen Kaur is the podcast for high-achieving women who have been quietly losing themselves inside the life they built. Dr. Amen Kaur, PhD, is a former scientist and former Partner at a FTSE 250 company with 20+ years of corporate experience. She teaches the Human Intelligence Framework, the Five Intelligences that orbit Your Self, and how to bring the integrator back online when it has stepped away from the seat.

Learn more at amenkaur.com/about

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Transcript

Resilient Or Just Enduring

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You've been called resilient by so many people in your life. Maybe your boss, maybe your parents, maybe even your therapist, your friends who you've told everything you've been through. They've watched you hold it all together, even through the things that should have broken you. And they've said that you're resilient as though you're strong and is a compliment that you can handle anything and that you can continue going forward when everyone else would have stopped. But there is something that nobody has told you, but you know deep down that it is having an effect. What if I told you it might not be resilience at all? What if you've been doing for years, maybe even decades? What if it's not resilience, but it's endurance? And what if your body is keeping an itemized bill of every single thing you've pushed through without stopping to feel? This is starting over being you. And I'm Dr. Emmancore. And today we're going to be talking about the difference between resilience and endurance. Because when we feel confused, a lot of the time it's because we're confusing these two. And that confusion can cost us so much more than we think. A lot of the time we've been trained to endure from a very young age. It could be we've seen our parents, our mothers, for instance, endure a toxic relationship and hence been taught how to endure one too. And also culturally, there might be the culture of you never ever leave. It's not good to be divorced. You just stay in the relationship and endure it. And as if that makes you a better person because you have. Or you're the person that works twice as hard as somebody else, but you're getting paid less than your colleagues, and you're praised for your work ethic, but you're not given the value that you bring. Or the mother that is holding it all together, maybe financially, emotionally, spiritually, everything. They're doing it all without any support. And people around you might say things like, Hey, I really don't know how you do it all. When we look at the stats, globally we know that women perform 76% of all unpaid care work. Four hours and 25 minutes a day compared to one hour and 23 minutes for men. So it's like we're taught to endure from a very young age. Another research found that combining work and caregiving is measurably more stressful for women than for men, even when doing the same amount of care. Now you might ask, well, why is that? It's because they're actually enduring it physiologically. There's a cost to the woman, and her nervous system is paying for it more than a man is. It's because we've been taught to endure rather than to build resilience. And resilience is very different, and we'll look into that. There's also the gender roles are learned from an early age through socialization cultures, where we are taught to be the caregivers at home and at school. So some girls are trying to be the strong one and are trained even before they can even spell their own name. That comment, I don't know how you do it, isn't actually a compliment when we really dig deep. And sometimes it doesn't land that way to us either. It's like we're not seen, we're not heard, we're not understood. And no one is really seeing the weight that we're carrying. They're just admiring the view, but we feel that disconnection from them when they're even saying those words. And this is the thing, by the time you get to say 40, you don't even see that you're enduring something. You see it as though it's part of your identity. I'm the one that holds it all together, the responsible one. And sometimes it's even younger than that. It could be even in your teens. That is conditioning. The best way I can describe it is imagine that you've gone out for dinner, or it's like Christmas, there's a lot of food, and you've gone out off an evening and you're wearing all these nice clothes, you've got these shoes that are really uncomfortable, might be high heels, and you're wearing tight-fitted clothes, and you're eating a lot, and your body feels uncomfortable, and you just can't wait at the end of the day. And you're just holding it all together, smiles, happy, and then you come home and you just can't wait to get into your pajamas and take those shoes off. That's what it's like, endurance. That's just for maybe an evening, but you're enduring it day in, day out, going to work and enduring that experience, just even going to work, where you're holding yourself in and you can't really breathe, you can't relax, you can't feel like you can really be yourself, your creative self. You're just getting through the day, and then when you get home, you're just recovering enough so that you can start it all over again. But over time, you get to a point where your body can't take it anymore. You find that your heart starts pounding, or you feel anxious, or you start worrying about how you're being perceived, or how someone saw you and gave you a little smirk or said something about your work. And then all of a sudden, you feel it hits you like a trigger in your body. Now, because of all the endurance that you've had to go through, you feel more sensitive to everything that's happening around you. And a lot of the time people mistake this and think, I've lost my confidence. But actually, what it is is that you've just endured too much and you're getting really tired. You've lost your spark, you've lost yourself along the way. And this is the most important thing. You're not enduring for enduring's sake, you're actually enduring because you're trying to preserve an identity. You have this identity now that has been conditioned into you, but you are believing that's who you are. And if you stop enduring, you lose that identity. Who am I if you're not the strong one or the problem solver for everybody else? Or the person that needs some help. Well, will that mean that I'm not good enough at helping everybody else? I'm not that good at enduring because I need a little bit of support too. But the truth is, the strong one isn't you. It's like a costume you put on. We're all human beings and we all are impacted on a day-to-day level. But the problem is, that costume that we've been putting on every day starts to feel like, oh, that's my skin. And if I take off my costume, oh my gosh, I'm really vulnerable. As if you're gonna be naked. That's why we feel we can't stop. Because you've forgotten to who you are underneath, and the cost of that costume is you can't feel alive, it's holding you in. You don't feel relaxed and free to be yourself and be excited to be alive anymore. And what's happened is restricted who you really are by this clothing, by this identity. We feel more brought in to actually enduring the identity because we believe that that is who we are. And that's why rest doesn't really help. It's because you get out of the costume for a little while, you have to get back in it. Sometimes it makes it worse because the whole thought of like, oh my gosh, I've got to get in back into that again. We start dreading it whilst we're even relaxing. It's like the thought of going back to work on a Sunday. Monday's not even here, but we're already dreading it. That can be something that we've trained into our body for decades. A lot of us have learned this from a young age. And that's what we learned to feel safe, to feel loved. We were praised to endure, not to get angry if someone does something to cross our boundaries, not to say anything when someone does something that hurts us, not to cry when someone hurts us either. And that no matter what is going on inside of us, we have to be seen as not being affected in any way. And that is really lonely. Having to pretend that we're okay all the time, that we're the strong one, and explaining what's happened to us and people not seeing the impact it's had on us, but instead telling us how strong we are and how resilient we are. It's as though it's a way of other people dealing with something that is so terrible without actually connecting to us and acknowledging how hard it's been. Six in ten women, senior women feel like they're burning out or they are burnt out. Six out of ten, and they are not fragile, incompetent women. No, they're holding it all together for everyone, making it look like it's easy, but no one's really understanding and seeing what's going on for them. So they're enduring the most and recovering the least, and being praised for their performance the most. It's no wonder we get to a point where we think there might be something wrong with me. But the truth is you're not broken, you're not weak, and you're not failing at a test. It's actually the opposite. Your nervous system has learned for a long, long time that if I stop, it's dangerous. Like I can't sit down because if I sit down, I might never get up again. Or I might feel what's going on, and it's gonna be too hard for me to continue. And it's been running that program for maybe a young age. And I'm gonna show you today how that happened and what science is telling you about the difference between endurance and resilience. What is resilience and how you can start to build your resilience and reduce your endurance? Research that's been published in the neuron in 2024 studied exactly what happens in the brain during chronic stress. And we all have some type of stress, but during chronic stress, they found that resilience is an active neurobiological process. So it's not the absence of collapse, it is a measurable set of neural processes where the brain engages with the stressor, processes it, and returns it to baseline. So let me explain. Resilience is something that happens in the brain where you actually face the stress, you process it head on, and then return back to your baseline of calm. The key finding in resilient brains is that the hippocampus, the part that learns, integrates the learning, and the amygdala, the part that holds the emotions, become more synchronized before making decisions. So basically, what they're doing is the emotions get processed, it gets passed over to the hippocampus, and they get synchronized so that then you can make a decision which is in the cognitive part of the brain. The brain is integrating the emotional data, so the information in the actual amygdala with decision making, it goes to the hippocampus and then back to the cognitive prefrontal cortex. Now, if the emotion is suppressed, say if we numb and we endure and we continue to carry on, the amygdala basically keeps firing this alarm system and says, hey, hey, hey, and it impacts your nervous system. So you feel on edge all the time, or you might feel exhausted, or you might feel this like low-level depression or shutdown or fight or flight, you might get annoyed a lot quicker or irritable a lot more, or you just want to get away and go on holiday and forget about everything and avoid it. And because the amygdala is firing this off, your prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of the brain, can't actually hear what is actually happening properly. It can't be engaged, it can't be present, it can't be in the now and feel like I can just be me. And the hippocampus becomes overridden, like you can't integrate that experience. So true resilience is when your brain can face something, it can feel it, it can process it, and it can come back to your baseline. What we may have been taught is to endure, so you see what you've got to face and you suppress it. And sometimes we're taught that being emotional or feeling something is like a negative thing, and you keep going and going. And what happens over time is you accumulate more and more unprocessed emotional data in the amygdala, and there's a cost to that. So every time you push through, it accumulates where you've got more and more that you haven't processed, where eventually you get to a point where you think, oh, I can't do this anymore. So it actually costs your resilience. So you're becoming less and less resilient in essence, but more and more able to endure. So that's the difference. So you're not becoming more resilient, you're actually able to endure more. It's a bit like jumping into a swimming pool and going deeper and deeper and deeper, down and down and down, and your body's saying, Hey, I need a breath, I need a breath. And instead of actually going back up, taking a breath and diving back down again, you just go, No, I'm gonna continue going down further, deep, deeper and deeper, deeper into the swimming pool until you can't breathe. That's what it means to push through and ignore the signal. And eventually you'll have these bodily sensations where your chest will tighten, you'll feel more exhausted, your heart will start pounding, you feel like you can't breathe, you feel like I can't continue this, and your lungs are saying, Go back up, go back up, get some air. And you keep swimming down, maybe for 20 years. And it's not about having a holiday, that's not your breath. It's about processing. That's where you really get that deep rest and ability to reset. Another paper in 2026 in the Frontiers Cellular Neuroscience confirmed that chronic stress without recovery leads to sustained amygdala hyperreactivity and immune. So we get ill over time, the more we just keep pushing through, and the more we endure. Our whole body becomes less and less resilient. And the problem is burnout has been linked to 21% increasing cardiovascular disease and 84% increased risk of type 2 diabetes. And this is the thing, right? Research shows that women's stress is neurobiologically different to men. Estrogen and progesterone create a different reactivity in the brain and also in our regulatory patterns. And then we've got different stages in our life, so that needs to be taken into account. And Porter's work confirms that if our body has always been in motion. So the moment we sit down, we feel like I feel uncomfortable not doing something. And it's not something that you consciously do, it's physiologically that's what happens to your body. That's why holidays don't really help. It's because our nervous system is trained that stopping is dangerous. Imagine resilience, like you're charging your phone overnight and it gets to 100%, and in the morning you've got a phone that's full of battery, and you can go about your day and you're all good. But endurance is when you're running on 8% battery all day, and the screen's dimmed, your apps don't work, you're you've got your low battery warning going on, you still power through at 8%, and you're making your calls and you're doing your all your activity. You can still function just about, and it can and you look like you're you're still a phone and you look like you're doing well. And every day you start with less charge than you did the day before, and you don't feel fully plugged in, you don't feel fully alive, like yes, I'm restored and reset for the day ahead. And this is the other thing: the more you're praised for endurance, the more we believe that this is a good thing. The more we are getting love for pushing through and ignoring our own body and not processing it. So we've been taught our brain is then now this is what we're meant to do. We're conditioned to it. That's why so many women ignore their own needs and just keep fulfilling what everybody else needs. 43% of women in senior leaderships report burnout compared to 31% of men at the same level. And the higher the position, the wider the gap becomes. So the more successful you become at endurance, the more likely you are to burn out. I thought I was resilient. I then other people said that to me as well. So many people said that to me. You're so resilient. But actually, it took me a long time to understand what resilience actually is. And when I saw it on a graph, I was surprised. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm not as resilient as I thought I was. And I need to rebuild that through facing and processing the emotions in my brain so that I can move forward again. And I realized that I had been trained to endure culturally. I'd seen so many women suffer in toxic relationships, for instance. They had endured so much their whole lives. But deep down, even though I used to get those compliments of like, you're so resilient, I never felt connected when people did say that. It was only when I connected to my vulnerability, when that old identity could finally fall apart. That's when in that vulnerability I really truly found my resilience because I was able to get vulnerable and to accept that it was hard. It was really hard. So true resilience is cognitive flexibility with emotional processing so that you return back to your baseline. Something happens, you face it, you face the feelings, the learning, and then you make decisions about what you're going to do moving forward, and then you come back to your baseline. Another thing about resilience is that it allows you to see things differently from what it was before. Even if you've got the same set of facts, your whole perspective changes. The woman had that setback, then she says, I've learned so much from that. I've become a better person because of that experience. So one system, the resilience, actually processes and integrates. The other, which is endurance, actually carries it and accumulates. So it's more like a story that you repeat over and over again. When you actually shift from endurance to resilience, you move out of survival mode as well. And you get into a place where you know you can meet whatever challenge comes your way. Because you've had that training and that spark returns in your belly. You feel it, you feel motivated to take action because your whole power is back. It's like your sovereign identity is now back online. So it might be then you decide, I'm gonna get out of this toxic relationship, or I'm gonna get out of this job, or I'm gonna ask for that pay rise. But when we're in endurance, we're staying in a position where it's a cost to us. It's slowly, slowly depleting us, and we're holding on to it because we believe that that is our identity. So here's what I really want you to watch this week. The next time you have a gap in your schedule, maybe it's a cancelled meeting or you've got a free space. Notice what's happening in your body. That feeling of I'm not being productive, I'm not doing anything. Is your body actually feeling that stillness as danger? Just don't fight it, don't fight it. Just don't force yourself to rest, just notice it. And allow those uncomfortable feelings to be there. And just say, ah, there is a program there. And that's enough for now. One more thing. If someone calls you resilient, notice the difference in the way you perceive that now. And just notice in your body does it really feel like a compliment? Or does it feel like you have to perform for this person? Is it like a permission to keep going as you are, but not actually getting close to what is really going on with you in terms of how you feel, how the vulnerability, the stress, what you've been through, how hard it's been. Just notice how that feels. If something in this episode really landed for you, if something made you just pause for a moment. I do have a free masterclass that can go deeper into the operating system that is running underneath all of this. I will put that in the show notes or the comment. It's there when you are ready. This starting over, being you, I'm Dr. Amin Kor. Please do share, like, and subscribe and comment. I really appreciate you supporting this show. And I'm sending you so much love. Till next week.