How to Stop Bouncing Back Into Broken Systems

I recently led a workshop with a group of senior executives—smart, seasoned leaders who’ve weathered a lot. We were talking about the future, but it didn’t take long before the present came crashing in.

Work Stress.

Source: Lindsey Godwin/Dall-E

The conversation shifted quickly into familiar territory: budget cuts, hiring freezes, policy changes, team restructures, supply chain meltdowns. The pressure to do more with less. A quiet kind of exhaustion settled into the room—the kind everyone feels but rarely names aloud.

Then came the question I hear almost every time in rooms like this: “How do we build more resilience?”

It’s a well-intentioned question. And on the surface, it makes sense. But the more I hear it, the more I wonder if we’ve taken a wrong turn. Resilience has become the motivational poster of modern life. We’re told to bend without breaking, to bounce back faster, to be the calm eye in a hurricane of chaos and capitalistic churn (Cabanas & Illouz, 2019). The underlying message? If you’re struggling, it’s probably because your internal shock absorbers are worn out—and you'd better fix yourself before the next storm hits.

But let’s get real:
You don’t need a stronger bounce.
You need fewer reasons to be constantly bouncing.

Maybe the problem isn’t that we are lacking in resilience.
Maybe the problem is that we’ve normalized too much nonsense.

It's Not You, It's the System

Psychologist Lucy Hone (2017), a resilience researcher, once wrote that true resilience isn’t about pretending everything is fine. It’s about being able to suffer well—and recover in ways that are honest and human. But what we’re sold is rarely that. Instead, we get its corporate cousin: the kind of resilience that expects us to smile through dysfunction and “pivot” our way out of burnout.

And so, we get better at breathing through broken systems.
We practice mindfulness in toxic workplaces.
We download gratitude apps while juggling three roles we never actually agreed to.
We’re praised for being flexible, adaptable, “such a team player.”

But the quiet truth is many of us are being resilient in situations we shouldn't have to be resilient in.

The Real Problem Isn’t Your Grit—It’s the Garbage

A 2021 report from the American Psychological Association confirmed what many of us already know: most sources of stress aren’t internal. They’re environmental. Chronic overwork. Caregiving with no support. Gendered expectations. Cultures that reward over-functioning and punish boundaries. It’s not that we can’t cope. It’s that we’re being asked to cope with too much, too often, with too little support.

I once worked with a woman who told me she was working on her resilience because she cried after every weekly staff meeting. Not during. After. Alone, in the car. She thought she needed therapy, meditation, maybe a better self-care routine. But the more we talked, the clearer it became: her team was dysfunctional, her boss was a bully, and her tears were not a sign of fragility. They were a signal. She didn’t need to “bounce back,” she needed out of that system.

This isn’t an anti-resilience rant. Resilience is key in our world today. And its relatives, grit and perseverance, are also valuable (Duckworth et al., 2007). But let’s not confuse these with a sustainable way of living. There’s a difference between managing stress and normalizing environments that create it unnecessarily.

What’s Actually Breaking Us? The Unnamed Nonsense

Here’s some of the nonsense I’ve seen dressed up as normal:

• “Let’s just hop on one more call…” after hours, again.
• “She’s just so good at holding everything together,” said of the person doing the emotional labor for an entire team.
• “You’re so resilient!” offered as a compliment to someone who’s clearly on the edge.
• “It’s not that bad, you should be grateful,” said to a woman managing invisible workloads at work and home.

Resilience has become the bandage term we slap over broken systems. The gold star we give people for functioning inside structures that should be reimagined, not endured.

So, What Do We Do Instead?

We don’t need to throw out resilience, we just need to remember what it’s about. Resilience shouldn’t mean “cope with anything, no matter how unfair or unsustainable.” It should mean having the capacity to recover from something hard—not bounce indefinitely inside something hard. As educator and resilience expert Dr. Sara Truebridge (2014) reminds us, real resilience begins with beliefs, especially the belief that things can change and that we are worthy of something better. Without that foundation, even the best coping strategies can turn into endurance tests instead of empowerment tools.

Resilience Essential Reads

The Surprise Mindset

Resilience and Reconstruction in Practice

Resilience still matters, but only when it’s pointed in the right direction. Instead of bouncing back into the same broken patterns, we can begin interrupting them by refusing to keep normalizing the nonsense. Even small, deliberate disruptions can create powerful shifts. That’s how real change starts. Not by bouncing back into the fire, but by creating the space to bounce forward into something better.

1. Name the Nonsense (Out Loud)
Broken systems thrive in silence. The more clearly you can name what’s not working, the less power it has over you.

Is it the “always on” expectation disguised as dedication?
A calendar full of meetings that could’ve been a memo?
The quiet pressure to smooth things over so others stay comfortable?

When we name the nonsense, we stop carrying it as a personal shortcoming and start recognizing it as a structural issue. You don’t have to fix the whole system. But you can stop pretending it’s fine.

2. Interrupt the Script With a Strategic "No"
You don’t have to burn it all down—but you do have to stop playing along. Saying no doesn’t make you difficult. It makes you discerning. Yes, it might feel uncomfortable at first. But that discomfort? That’s the sound of you exiting a story that was never yours to begin with.

Pseudo-resilience says, “How do I survive this?”
Liberation says, “What if I stop participating in this?”

You can’t change everything. But you can stop co-signing the dysfunction.

3. Redesign Inside Your Reach
Real change doesn’t always come from the top. Sometimes it starts with a single person saying, “This doesn’t work for me.”

That might mean changing how your team operates. Or resetting expectations with a client. Or rewriting your own rules about what success looks like. You’re not responsible for fixing every broken system. But you are responsible for not making them your home. Real resilience isn’t just bouncing back. It’s disrupting the loop. It’s choosing to stop adjusting to a system that was never designed with your well-being in mind—and using your influence to build something better.

You Are Not the Problem

If you take nothing else from this, take this: You are not broken. You are responding, beautifully and humanly, to a world that often asks too much and offers too little support (Maslach & Leiter, 2016).

You don’t need another journal prompt.
You don’t need a tougher skin.
You don’t need to bounce faster.

You need space.
You need boundaries.
You need less nonsense.

And maybe, just maybe, you need to hear someone say: You don’t have to keep being resilient in situations you shouldn’t have to survive in the first place.