Young professional in a Singapore office reviewing a resilience assessment report

Resilience Science & Research

Two Years On: What Changed Between the 2023 and 2025 Resilience Reports

Resilience Institute · Weekly Resilience Brief · 6 minute read

Singapore’s Institute of Mental Health found in 2024 that nearly a third of young people aged 15 to 35 reported severe or very severe symptoms of depression, anxiety, or stress, with higher resilience linked directly to lower risk.
Resilience Institute’s 2023 report flagged young women under 30 as the most at risk group globally, with more than one in five scoring low enough to be flagged, against roughly one in ten for those over 30.
By the 2025 report, drawn from 8,419 professionals across more than 70 countries, women aged 20 to 29 still scored lowest of any group (60%), but the diagnosis had sharpened considerably: the gap is now understood to be almost entirely emotional, not cognitive.
Purpose flipped from a listed weakness in 2023 to a genuine relative strength by 2025 (63% among workers in their 20s), while multitasking became the single lowest-scoring factor of all 50 measured, at just 25%, even among top performers.

Two Global Resilience Reports and two years apart give us something most single studies cannot: a chance to see whether a finding held up, sharpened, or shifted entirely. Read from where we stand now, in 2026, the honest answer is all three, depending on which part of the finding you look at.

Table of Contents

What Singapore and the Region Were Already Telling Us

Before looking at either global report, it is worth starting closer to home, because Singapore’s own data anticipated exactly this concern. The Institute of Mental Health, working with the Ministry of Health and the NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, published Singapore’s first National Youth Mental Health Study in 2024. It found that nearly a third of young people aged 15 to 35 reported severe or very severe symptoms of depression, anxiety, or stress, and that those with higher resilience, stronger perceived social support, and greater self-esteem were significantly less likely to experience these severe symptoms. A separate NUS-led study, the Youth Epidemiology and Resilience study, tracked more than 3,300 adolescents through the pandemic years and reached a similar conclusion: resilience measurably mitigates mental health distress in young people, and the relationship is strong enough to build policy around, which is exactly what Singapore’s National Mental Health and Well-Being Strategy has since done.

This regional evidence matters because it means the global pattern this article is about was never a distant, Western finding. It was already visible, independently, in local, government-backed research before Resilience Institute’s global reports confirmed the same demographic pattern at scale.

What the 2023 Report First Flagged

The 2023 Global Resilience Report centred its concern on young people, and specifically young women. It found more than one in five females under 30 fell into an at-risk Resilience Ratio, against roughly one in ten for those over 30. The report described young women as lagging their male peers across a long list of areas: fitness, tactical calm, bounce, trust, purpose, focus, influence, decisiveness, impulse control, emotional agility, assertiveness, and sleep quality. It was a genuinely useful early warning, but it was also, by necessity, broad. A list of twelve weak areas tells you something is wrong without telling you precisely where to intervene first.

What Changed by 2025

The 2025 Global Resilience Report, Fit for Change, drew on assessments from 8,419 professionals across more than 70 countries, the largest sample the study has ever used. The headline finding: 54.3% of the global workforce sits in a “Challenged” band, functioning day to day but fragile under pressure, with only 30.7% genuinely resilient and just 1.2% thriving. The global average resilience score sits at 64 out of 100.

The specific demographic flagged in 2023 was still visible two years later. Women aged 20 to 29 recorded the lowest resilience score of any group measured, at 60%, compared with 62% for young men and 68% for women over 50. But the 2025 analysis went further than 2023 could, concluding that the gap between the Challenged majority and the genuinely Resilient group is almost entirely emotional, not cognitive. As women gain experience, they appear to convert emotional awareness into composure, a transition the report suggests mentoring can accelerate rather than simply waiting for time to deliver.

One finding actually reversed direction. Purpose was on the 2023 list of areas where young women lagged. By 2025, purpose had become a genuine relative strength for young workers overall, scoring 63.2% among people in their 20s, rising to 80% by the time workers reach their 60s, the single largest growth factor tracked by age. The opportunity this reveals is specific: younger employees already care about purpose. What erodes it is stress and overload, not a lack of caring in the first place, which is a materially different problem to solve than the one implied by a broad 2023 list.

A separate, unrelated finding stood out just as clearly. Multitasking scored lowest of all 50 resilience factors measured, at just 25%, even among top performers. Digital workers now switch context up to 1,200 times a day, a scale of fragmentation the 2023 report had no way to capture, since sustained multitasking at this intensity is a relatively recent feature of how digital work actually happens.

The Comparison, Read From 2026

Put the two reports side by side and a clear pattern emerges. The demographic concern from 2023 did not resolve itself in two years, which is a useful reminder that awareness alone does not close a resilience gap. But the diagnosis sharpened considerably, from a long list of weak areas to one dominant, specific lever: emotional regulation, not talent, effort, or even purpose. As Resilience Institute’s CEO, Benoit Greindl, put it on the 2025 report’s release, “resilience is not personality. It is a set of learnable skills, calm, focus, recovery, and emotional regulation, that protect performance and wellbeing in fast-changing environments.”

For a leader planning 2026 programmes, that sharpening changes the design decision. A 2023-style response might reasonably have tried to address twelve different weak areas at once. A 2025-informed response can target the one variable the data shows actually separates the Challenged majority from the Resilient minority, and pair it with the genuine strength, purpose, that is already present and simply needs protecting from stress and overload rather than being built from nothing.

Before your next workforce planning cycle, ask:

Are our younger and early-career employees, particularly young women, showing the same emotional regulation gap the global data flags?
Are we protecting the purpose our younger employees already bring, or letting stress and overload quietly erode it?
Given multitasking now scores lowest of 50 measured factors globally, is our own always-on work culture making this specific problem worse?

Two years did not close the resilience gap the 2023 report first flagged. What it did was replace a broad list of concerns with one clear, actionable answer. In 2026, that is the more useful place for a leader to start.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Find answers to some of the most common questions about this topic.

Did the youth resilience gap flagged in 2023 improve by 2025?

Not in the sense of closing. Women aged 20 to 29 still recorded the lowest resilience score of any demographic group in the 2025 report. What changed was the precision of the diagnosis: the gap is now understood to be almost entirely emotional regulation, rather than the broader list of twelve weak areas the 2023 report described.

Is this pattern specific to Western countries, or does it show up in Singapore and the region too?

Singapore's own government-backed research anticipated this pattern independently. The Institute of Mental Health's 2024 National Youth Mental Health Study and an NUS-led study tracking adolescents through the pandemic both found resilience directly mitigates severe mental health symptoms in young people, consistent with the pattern the global Resilience Institute reports later confirmed at scale.

What should organisations actually do differently in 2026 based on this comparison?

Target emotional regulation specifically for early-career employees, particularly young women, rather than spreading a programme thin across many weak areas at once. Separately, protect the purpose younger employees already bring from being eroded by stress and overload, and address multitasking directly, since it is now the lowest-scoring resilience factor globally.