Resilience in the Rough: What Adversity Can Teach Us About Ourselves

In this month’s mindfulness and wellbeing updates, we’d like to think about how we can try to use difficult situations to help us gain wisdom and courage, and we’ll also be thinking about what adversity can teach us about ourselves and the people around us. 

Research discussed by Forbes magazine indicates that there are five common themes that people tend to experience after a significantly stressful life event, with these being stronger and more meaningful relationships, enhanced personal strength, renewed appreciation for life, and spiritual growth, along with possibly the biggest topic of all, which is recognising new paths for your life.

Here are some more things that we feel life challenges can teach us.

Greater self-knowledge and self-reliance

While being part of a community can help us, life sometimes throws us challenges that for whatever reason we have to endure on our own, perhaps because we're geographically distant from other people or because they're unavailable for us in other ways. Facing down a difficult situation alone is scary yet it also forces us to be resourceful and to draw on our own inner strength. As the late, great Bob Marley once said, “You never know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have”. We’re all capable of more than we think we are, but sometimes it takes a difficult event to draw that out of us.

Increased empathy with other people 

It’s easy to think that other people’s major life crises will never happen to us, until they do. Unfortunately, many of the big traumatic events that we tend to fear the most are likely to touch us at some point, whether that’s ill health, financial difficulties, or bereavement. But while withstanding difficult situations can be incredibly challenging in the moment, the fact is that the more knocks we handle in life, the better we’re able to empathise with others who have faced similar situations. Learning from our own adverse circumstances can therefore make us better able to support other people, whether that means through offering practical help or just being accommodating of what they’re going through.

Pragmatism and a more flexible mindset

Suffering an adverse life event, particularly one that we weren’t expecting or couldn’t have planned for, can sometimes help in the sense that it teaches us to have realistic expectations and accept situations for what they are. For some reason, it seems to be basic human nature to have a fixed idea of how we want things to work out, but life throws us a lot of curveballs, and what ultimately matters is how we respond to these. While it's great to have plans, having these thrown into disarray can teach us to think on our feet, not take situations for granted, and be open to new experiences coming our way. Sometimes hardships can also create new opportunities, even if we can’t necessarily always see that in the moment.

Better appreciation of the good in other people

Unfortunately, some hardships in life are a direct result of other people’s actions, while negative experiences in general can often make us more cautious and cynical. At the same time, sometimes we can be surprised at how people can come through for us in times of crisis, particularly since in many cases it can be the people we least expect that help us in our moment of vulnerability. If you’re lucky enough to have someone help you through a difficult interval then their kind actions will probably help to reinforce your faith in the goodness of people, while other people’s kindness can often also inspire us to pay the good deed forward and help someone else out in their hour of need.

Humility and acknowledgement of our own (potential) role in setbacks 

A lot of adverse life events are thrust upon us, but sometimes the hardships we experience are a direct consequence of our own actions, or of decisions that we might have made differently if we’d had better knowledge or a different set of circumstances available to us. Reflecting on situations that we’ve potentially handled badly takes courage, but it can help us to act differently moving forward and make better-informed decisions in the future, as well as giving us space to reflect on what our goals are and how best we can accomplish them. 

A sharper focus on the present

Many life crises force us to put other activities on hold and while it can be stressful to have to narrow our focus to surviving on a day-to-day level, the flip side of this is that things you’d normally worry about when you’re generally doing well become less of a priority when things get tough. If you have to take particular actions to solve a crisis then this will encourage you to tackle one situation at a time rather than getting too overwhelmed by the bigger picture. Crises also often force us to focus on what’s really important, whereas it can be much easier to lose sight of this when we’re living through more normal times. 

Increased resilience for future adverse events

Research conducted in the US found that people with a history of moderate life adversity reported better mental health and wellbeing and better life satisfaction than people who had either a history of high life adversity or no history of adversity at all, with the report indicating that exposure to negative life events can foster subsequent resilience up to a certain point. This indicates that the hardships that we experience now may help us to be able to deal with other difficult events in the future.

We hope the above points helped indicate how even the most challenging experiences in life can have some value as a learning opportunity, but we’d love to hear your thoughts too, so if you have any life lessons that you’ve learned through challenges then please don’t hesitate to drop a comment. 

Stay resilient, and see you again for next month’s updates! 

Sources 

Paula Davis | Forbes

How Adversity Makes You Stronger

https://www.forbes.com/sites/pauladavislaack/2020/03/26/adversity-makes-you-stronger

Seery, Mark D; Holman, E Alison; Silver, Roxane Cohen

Whatever does not kill us: cumulative lifetime adversity, vulnerability, and resilience

Published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(6)

Made available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution License

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4b6787gk