Species’ lifetime schedules of survival, growth and reproduction generally assort along a principal axis called the “fast-slow” continuum, with positions attributed to the value of producing many fragile offspring early, versus few high-quality offspring later. Fast species are classically associated with surplus or pulsed resources, and slow species with stable, limiting resources. Here we demonstrate that the fast-slow continuum emerges as a zone of highest fitness in the face of stochastic demographic disturbances, regardless of resource supply, competition, or life history trade-offs. Our resilience framework measures resistance, recovery, and stochastic fitness of stage-structured life histories in disturbed environments. Stochastic disturbances favour either fast or slow life history variants due to their respective weak resistance and fast recovery, or strong resistance and slow recovery. Demographic disturbance regimes are important in shaping nature’s diversity of life histories, and the resilience framework is a useful tool for understanding species’ responses to environmental change.