Dr. Tara Narula

What is it that separates people when they face a challenge and one person sort of thrives and the other person really isn't able to?

What is that intangible quality of resilience?

And I've seen it, Tamsen, my whole life in every aspect of my life, in friends, in my family members,

as a journalist covering stories of people who've demonstrated resilience and in my patients.

And so when Simon and Schuster approached me and said they wanted to write a diet COVID book, what did I think about that?

I said, I mean, I could write that, but they said, what do you wanna write about?

And I said, I really wanna write about resilience.

And I had already started down this road of exploring this topic when I was at CBS News and I had done two stories on resilience and understanding the science of it.

So this was really the natural evolution of my love and passion

for this topic and really getting it out there.

And as I started to write it and I really realized this isn't just important for everyone, but I really recognize the gap in really educating people about how to build resilience in the medical field, that we just don't do a great job connecting the dots between psychology and physical health.

And too often patients are given a diagnosis and sent out the door.

And that is a form of trauma when you're told you have heart failure or you've had a stroke or you have breast cancer.

The reaction in the body and in people is the same as if they've suffered a collapse of their business or they've lost their home in a fire.

It is completely paralyzing for people.

And so my hope is that women and men are able to take this concept and hopefully hospitals and institutions hear it and they build resilience training programs.

It would be fascinating because that's not part of the prescription.

How do you define it?

That's a great question.

And I think there are a lot of different definitions out there.