About the BRS

Bruce Smith and colleagues published the Brief Resilience Scale in 2008 to measure resilience as recovery rather than as a trait list. Six statements, three of them reverse-scored, take about a minute.

What does the Brief Resilience Scale measure?

How quickly you recover from stress, which is a narrower question than how much stress you can take. It is scored as an average from 1 to 5; below 3 is low, 3 to 4.3 normal, above 4.3 high.

Brief Resilience Scale, Smith et al. (2008). Free to use. Page reviewed by Michael RoBards, LCSW, September 2026.