In my Contemporary Issues senior seminar course this semester, my students and I have been reading The Anxious Generation, a book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, that explores how smartphones and social media have rewired childhood and contributed to rising rates of children and youth’s mental health, specifically anxiety and depression (Haidt, 2024). As psychologists study identity formation, digital culture, and emotional vulnerability, one theme seems to continuously surface: the reality of digital distress today often runs deeper than what we typically label “stress.”
A 2025 study from researchers, Korkmaz et al., in the journal of Brain and Behavior helps illuminate part of this reality. The team examined adolescent girls who had experienced cyberbullying to determine whether resilience could protect them against negative mental health outcomes. Their findings were hopeful and sobering. They found that higher resilience was associated with lower stress, but it did not significantly reduce anxiety or depression.
The distinction matters. Stress reflects emotional and physiological overload, such as too much pressure at once. But anxiety and depression signal something deeper: threats to one’s sense of self, belonging, and meaning. The study suggests that while resilience may help girls manage immediate stress, it does not fully protect them from the emotional toll of relational harm that happens in digital spaces.
What especially drew my attention in the Korkmaz et al. research article was a sentence that guides the reader’s thoughts beyond the conventional psychological language. The researchers reference spiritual strain (STR) and present it as “the ongoing sensation of spiritual strain coming with human relationships becoming more intense and complex in today’s modern society” (Korkmaz et al., 2025). The phrase names an existential crisis that contemporary humans, young and old, may recognize but rarely can name.
What Is Spiritual Strain?
In psychological research, spiritual strain (often presented under the umbrella concept of spiritual struggles) refers to distress that emerges when a person’s core sense of meaning, identity, or moral coherence becomes unsettled (Pargament & Exline, 2021). Consistently, I teach that spiritual or spirit struggles are broader and deeper than religion; instead, it involves grappling with questions like:
Who am I now that this thing or event has happened in my life?
What does it say about my worth as a being?
Can I still trust others, or even myself?
Does the world make sense?
Unlike everyday stress, which asks, “How much can I handle?” spiritual strain asks, “What does this mean about who I am and how human relationships work?” (Park, 2010). Research exists that shows that spiritual struggles correlate with higher anxiety, depressive symptoms, and emotional distress across the lifespan, especially when a person’s prior meaning-making frameworks are challenged (Exline et al., 2014). Frameworks may be challenged regarding one’s culture, society, nation, identity, and world.
Why Modern Relationships Intensify Strain
Researchers’ reference to increasingly “intense and complex” relationships is especially relevant in modern digital cultural environments. When adolescents experience cyberbullying, it is intense for many youth. Cyberbullying is beyond interpersonal conflict; it is often public, persistent, and socially amplified shame and attacks. For adolescent girls, whose identities are still forming, online attacks can feel less like isolated events and more like collective judgments about who they are. In these moments, the distress is not only emotional, it is existential. This may help explain the findings: resilience helped mitigate the girls’ stress, but it did not influence their anxiety or depression. Therefore, girls learning to be resilient as a coping skill for cyberbullying may calm their nervous system, but the resilience doesn’t automatically repair the girls’ damaged or disrupted meanings about what’s happening to them and why. The girls may be able to superficially “manage it” but still feel fundamentally shaken in their spirit.
Why This Matters for Adults Too
Although the study focuses on adolescents, spiritual strain is not limited to youth. Adults today navigate moral conflict in polarized environments, fractured family relationships, blurred boundaries between work and identity, constant social comparison, and a cultural landscape where meaning is often fragmented. Studies on meaning-making show that when life events disrupt a person’s sense of coherence, psychological distress often follows even without a diagnosable disorder (Park, 2010; George & Park, 2016). Many adults report exhaustion not just from doing too much, but from trying to make sense of too much in a chaotic world. This is spiritual strain.
Rethinking Resilience
The findings of the Korkmaz et al. study prompt humans to rethink how we talk about resilience. On the positive side, resilience helps people endure life’s adversity. Yet, meaning helps people integrate adversity into life in a way that doesn’t cause spiritual strain. What humans need is a space to explore their identity, values, and relational meaning. Healing then becomes not about bouncing back, but about rebuilding coherence after something has disrupted how life once made sense before an adverse event happened.
Key Takeaway for Parents and Educators
If a young person appears strong yet remains anxious or withdrawn, resilience may not be the missing piece. They may be struggling not with stress, but with meaning. Support begins by making room for questions about identity, belonging, and how digital harms affect a young person’s emerging sense of self. Sometimes the most protective response is helping someone feel less alone in their confusion.
A Broader Invitation
Spiritual strain reminds us that mental health cannot be reduced to symptom management alone. Humans are meaning-making beings, and relationships are primary sites where meaning can be formed and fractured. Naming spiritual strain is a way to deepen psychological science. Understanding spiritual strain helps explain why some forms of distress persist even when people appear resilient. In a world of increasingly complex relationships, healing may begin not with stronger armor but with deeper understanding.
Much of my work explores how meaning, identity, and the social brain intersect, especially during periods of uncertainty and transition. If these ideas resonate, you can find related resources on my website.