College students' psychological resilience and daily recovery: a narrative review

Research on college students' psychological resilience has long focused on stable protective and risk factors at the individual level, while paying insufficient attention to the recovery processes in response to daily micro-stressful contexts. Framed by the Conservation of Resources theory, this narrative review reconceptualizes resilience as the long-term outcome of sustained successful adaptation to everyday demands, a capacity that a daily recovery process helps to build and maintain. It specifies this process across three resources: sleep rhythm, daily interpersonal safety, and perceived academic control. This synthesis clarifies their recovery mechanisms, sources of vulnerability, and reinforcing pathways. On this basis, a three-dimensional daily recovery conceptual framework is proposed, which delineates two pathways of gain and loss dynamics and two temporal patterns of immediate transmission and cumulative trajectory. The framework shifts the research focus from static predictors of resilience to the daily conditions under which recovery occurs, and accordingly redirects intervention priorities toward providing systemic contextual supports that enable, rather than replace, the cultivation of individual capabilities.