"History is the dynamic of challenge and response."
That was the theme of a course I taught to Canadian students for over a year, about two decades ago. A nation's history, I told them, is shaped not by the crises it encounters but by how it responds to them.
Take the Joseon dynasty. As the Ming dynasty weakened and the Jurchen tribes to the north grew stronger, Joseon failed to read the changing geopolitical landscape. The court clung stubbornly to its loyalty to the fading Ming — a stance known as sungmyeong baecheong, the doctrine of venerating the Ming and rejecting the rising Qing. When King Gwanghaegun's pragmatic diplomacy was overturned by a palace coup, the new court only doubled down, pledging even deeper allegiance to the crumbling Ming. The first Manchu invasion swept across the peninsula. Even then, Joseon did not adjust. A second invasion followed — led by Hong Taiji, who had already toppled the Ming and declared the Qing. The result was the Humiliation at Samjeondo, where the Korean king knelt before his conqueror, and 300,000 innocent Korean civilians were taken north as prisoners. Joseon's response to the challenge of a rising power on its border ended in total failure.
When Failure Comes Knocking
The same principle applies to our personal histories. How we respond to the challenges of school entrance exams, job loss, marriage and divorce, starting a business, illness, and aging — these responses determine the shape of our lives.
In 2011, after completing my first six years as a professor at Yonsei University and contributing to the successful bid for the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, I headed to Harvard as a visiting scholar with big plans. I had already spent two years there as a postdoctoral fellow at the Joslin Diabetes Center, so the setting felt comfortable, and the prospect of a year at the neighboring Dana-Farber Cancer Institute filled me with excitement. Joint research with world-class cancer scientists was on the table. I was confident I would produce work good enough for top-tier journals.
My first semester started well. On my very first day, I ran into a professor I knew from the Diabetes Center, and he invited me to give a lecture at their Wednesday seminar — a long-running, well-regarded event I had attended regularly during my postdoc in 2003. I was thrilled. Dreams really do come true, I thought, and happily accepted. My confidence was through the roof. I am embarrassed to admit this now, but I was so far ahead of myself that I actually rehearsed a hypothetical TV interview in my head: "I give all the glory to God. I have done nothing on my own."
That is when things started to go wrong.
The short version: over the course of that year at Harvard, I submitted thirteen papers to journals. Not a single one was accepted. Thirteen submissions, thirteen rejections. For an entire year, my routine consisted of sitting in the corner of an office I shared with two other people, learning new statistical methods, writing a paper, submitting it, getting rejected, writing another, and getting rejected again. Meanwhile, Boston's cost of living was brutal. After paying my kids' tuition and patching up the apartment, I often had less than a hundred dollars left. Looking back, it was a pretty miserable existence. Here is something I wrote at the time:
Resilience and Oxytocin
Reading that passage still hits me. During that long stretch of rejections, I could not stop the thoughts from coming: Maybe I am just not cut out for research. Maybe I should quit being a professor. What do the people at the hospital think of me? "The loser from Asia"? I was on the verge of depression. And then I remembered myself — the younger, more confident version — standing in front of those Canadian students and declaring with total conviction: History is the dynamic of challenge and response! And I recalled something from a book called Cushion: the word "responsibility" is a compound of "response" and "ability."1
It is true. When things happen to us, we can simply react — get angry at what frustrates us, sink when we are depressed, collapse when we are exhausted, quit when quitting feels easiest. But we can also choose to respond. Instead of telling ourselves "I'm worthless," we can tell ourselves "This happened to teach me humility." The ability to find something worthwhile in hardship, to get back up after falling down — that is responsibility, is it not?
After this realization, I picked up Professor Joo-Hwan Kim's book Resilience and it all clicked. "Response + ability" — that is resilience. The strength to get back up after being knocked down. The willingness to try again after thirteen straight rejections. The ability to turn a stumbling block into a stepping stone. What makes this even more interesting is the work of Emmy E. Werner, the psychologist who gave resilience its formal definition. Werner spent forty years studying children on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in one of the longest longitudinal studies in psychology, and she summarized her findings like this: "Every person has the capacity to overcome adversity, and that capacity is resilience. But resilience varies. Children who received devoted love and trust from their parents or family showed higher resilience."2
When I reread Werner's Overcoming the Odds, I could barely contain my excitement. If children who receive devoted love and trust from their parents produce more oxytocin — and everything we know about the hormone says they would — then that elevated oxytocin must profoundly shape their resilience. And the data backs this up. Search for "oxytocin" and "resilience" on major medical databases and you will find over a hundred published papers. Some researchers are now investigating whether oxytocin is the very biological foundation of resilience.
To understand why this makes sense, it helps to know a little about brain architecture. Evolutionary biologist Paul MacLean proposed the "triune brain" theory, which divides the human brain into three layers. The reptilian brain handles survival basics — breathing, heartbeat, appetite, blood pressure. The mammalian brain, sometimes called the emotional brain, manages the fight-or-flight response, along with drives like hunger and sex. The neocortex — the most recently evolved layer — is where reasoning, planning, and moral judgment happen.
Here is how it works in practice. Imagine walking to the bathroom late at night and seeing a dark shape in the hallway. It could be your brother in a dark shirt, or it could be an intruder. Your amygdala fires immediately, raising your heart rate and pulling you a step backward. Meanwhile, your prefrontal cortex starts piecing together the clues: What was your brother wearing? How does his build compare to the shape? Within moments, it makes a call: that is your brother, relax. The amygdala makes us react. The prefrontal cortex helps us respond.3
Here is where oxytocin enters the picture. The brain region with the highest concentration of oxytocin receptors is the amygdala. Oxytocin acts on the amygdala to shift negative emotions in a more positive direction. The next most receptor-dense areas — the anterior cingulate cortex, the nucleus accumbens, and the prefrontal cortex — are all involved in reward, motivation, decision-making, and moral reasoning. It seems plausible that oxytocin supports the very mechanism behind "response + ability": calming the amygdala's automatic reactivity while activating the circuits that allow us to respond thoughtfully.
Professor Kim identifies two pillars of resilience: self-regulation (emotional regulation, impulse control, and causal analysis) and interpersonal capacity (communication, empathy, and self-expansion). These are, almost exactly, the functions that oxytocin directly influences.
A hallmark of highly resilient people is their tendency to interpret whatever happens to them in the most constructive light possible. I will explore this further in a later chapter on narrative, but the ability to assign meaning to events is largely a prefrontal cortex function, and a positively reframed personal narrative can further stimulate oxytocin secretion. Resilience and oxytocin end up in a virtuous cycle — each reinforcing the other, helping us gradually become better versions of ourselves.