When people talk about handling adversity well, the advice usually points toward finding the right coping strategy, stay positive, journal it out, talk to someone, exercise it off. Two large studies suggest the more useful skill isn’t picking the right single strategy at all, it’s the capacity to switch between different approaches depending on what a given moment actually calls for.
The clearest evidence comes from a 2014 meta-analysis by Cecilia Cheng, Hi-Po Bobo Lau, and Man-Pui Sally Chan, published in Psychological Bulletin, which statistically combined 329 effect sizes drawn from studies conducted between 1978 and 2013, covering a combined sample of 58,946 people. The researchers were testing coping flexibility, broadly defined as the ability to adapt one’s coping approach to fit changing circumstances, against measures of psychological adjustment. They found a significant overall link between flexibility and adjustment, and importantly, the benefit wasn’t just about having a large toolkit of coping strategies sitting unused. It came specifically from actually matching the strategy to the situation, and from a person’s own sense that they were able to adapt. Simply knowing many different coping techniques mattered less than being willing and able to switch between them as circumstances demanded.
A second study helps show what this looks like in a real, high-stakes moment rather than a general survey. In a 2004 study by George Bonanno, Anthony Papa, Kathleen Lalande, Maren Westphal, and Karin Coifman, published in Psychological Science, the researchers tracked New York City college students through their first two years of college in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. In lab sessions, participants were tested on their ability to flexibly enhance, suppress, or use their normal style of emotional expression depending on what was asked of them, rather than defaulting to one fixed approach. Even after statistically accounting for each student’s initial level of distress, motivation, and cognitive resources, the students who could flexibly move between amplifying and dialing down their emotional expression showed significantly less distress two full years later than students who rigidly stuck to one expressive style regardless of the situation.
Together, these two studies point toward adaptability itself, not any particular coping technique, as the real predictor of getting through hard circumstances well. Cheng, Lau, and Chan’s research shows this pattern holds up across a huge combined sample and a wide range of stressful life changes, the flexibility to fit the response to the situation outperforms simply having more strategies on hand. Bonanno and colleagues’ research shows the same principle playing out in a specific, severe real-world stressor, where the ability to shift between emotional expression and restraint predicted meaningfully better long-term adjustment than defaulting to one habitual style. Between the two, the capacity to adapt looks less like a soft personality trait and more like a specific, measurable skill with real consequences for how people come through hard times.
It’s worth being honest about what these two studies don’t establish. Cheng, Lau, and Chan’s meta-analysis is built from correlational studies spanning decades and different populations, and while the overall pattern is strong and consistent, the exact size of the benefit varies depending on how flexibility was measured in each individual study. Bonanno and colleagues’ research focused on one specific population, New York City college students, and one specific kind of stressor, so while the flexibility principle has shown up in related research since, this particular study’s numbers reflect that specific context and event.
Within those honest limits, the research offers a genuinely useful shift in how to think about handling adversity. The goal isn’t finding the single correct way to cope and applying it every time. It’s building the capacity to read what a given moment actually needs, sometimes pushing feelings down to get through the day, sometimes letting them out, and having the flexibility to tell the difference. That adaptability, more than any specific technique, is what the evidence says actually helps people conquer what comes their way.