In 1986, an epidemiologist named David Snowdon walked into a Catholic convent and asked 678 nuns if he could study them for the rest of their lives. They said yes. They also agreed to donate their brains.
The School Sisters of Notre Dame have all passed away now, and the 30-year analysis was published not that long ago.
When researchers examined the brains after death, some of the sisters had advanced Alzheimer's pathology. By every measure we have, these brains should have produced full-blown dementia symptoms, including significant memory loss, confusion, and difficulty recognizing the other sisters and family members.
But they hadn't. These women were teaching, joking, remembering, fully present right up to the end. Their cognitive tests were excellent. The disease was unmistakably there, but the symptoms weren't!?! The researchers call this cognitive resilience, and they admit, thirty years in, they still don't fully understand what causes it.
But what they suspect is the part I can't stop thinking about. (And telling clients about.)
It’s fascinating to me because the protective factors aren't what you'd think. It’s not crosswords, learning a new language, vitamins, or even genetics, although that plays a role. The strongest associations seem to be with the things you'd consider least medical: richness of language, depth of connection, sense of purpose, and engagement with meaningful work. Basically, all the things that create a rich inner life.
Which is to say: how these women had been living, loving, and thinking seemed to be more powerful than what was visibly happening in their brains!
I was sold!!!
In all my years of being a coach, I've watched thousands of people receive all kinds of hard news. A diagnosis, a betrayal, or some loss they didn't see coming. And one of the patterns I've noticed is this: the news itself is rarely what determines the outcome. What determines it is how the person had been living before the news arrived.
Some people get knocked completely off course. Others, facing the same exact thing, somehow stay themselves. Sadder, maybe. Quieter for a while. But still recognizably them.
It's not that the second group is stronger or smarter or luckier. It's that they'd been doing the quiet, daily work for years. Connected relationships, meaningful work, and an inner life that they actually paid attention to. Love poured into themselves and others on ordinary Tuesdays when nothing felt urgent.
The truth is, if you spend your days marinating in negative thoughts and avoiding real connection, you're not going to suddenly summon resilience when you need it. Resilience isn't a thing you generate in the hard moment. It's the slow, cumulative result of how you've been living all along.
You can't choose some of what hits you. Most of us can't. But you can absolutely choose how you're living right now.
You can choose to invest in the relationships that are actually feeding you. To do the work that means something. To pay attention to your inner life like it's worth paying attention to. To keep your mind alive by asking real questions and staying curious. To love the people in your life out loud and on purpose.
The Nun Study is showing us, slowly and over decades, that the way you live every ordinary day is the resilience strategy. You're not preparing for a bad season. You're not bracing for the next blow. You're just living a life you actually want to be living, and that life is what holds you up when something hard arrives.
How can you change the way you think, live and love?
