Facing Adversity with Resilience
How resilience differs from perseverance and endurance
You know things are rough when the eternal optimists are losing it.
One of my most optimistic, positive-framing friends recently sent me an article from a “happiness journalist” about how Omicron was “crushing her.” My friend commented, “Same.”
And who could blame anyone for feeling like this? We’re entering our third year of having to be cautious about touching people, hugging them, and even seeing them. We’ve watched friends and family suffer. Some of us have lost loved ones. Others are experiencing long-term effects from a bout of Covid. Our youngest children have lost a year or more of education and socialization. Our older children have lost proms, graduations, in-person college orientations, and more. Weddings have been canceled or postponed. Businesses and restaurants have failed or struggle every day. And there’s no clear end in sight.
Even if it hasn’t taken a toll on our physical health, these last years have certainly negatively impacted our mental health. Perhaps in the beginning, we thought we could “tough it out.” We’re Midwesterners, after all, and that’s what we do best. We persevere. We endure. We “suck it up.” We “grin and bear it.” But you can’t keep toughing something out when it’s starting its third year. At some point, there’s no “bounce back” left, and you have to build something that’s designed for the long term, and that provides stretch, give, and expansion. This is the quality of resilience.
Resilience differs from perseverance and endurance in the following ways:
Perseverance is a “mind over body” mindset. It is an energy fed by the ego. It calls upon willpower and adrenaline. To persevere, you must push aside your emotions, especially fear or anger. You have to ignore warning signs from your body. And you can never tell yourself the truth of how you really feel.
Endurance is similar to perseverance, but it also has an additional quality of silence. No one ever endures loudly. No, people endure silently, stoically, and without complaint.
At some point, both perseverance and endurance fail. That’s because these qualities were designed for earthquakes, snowstorms, and walking to the grocery store from your car in -10 degrees. They’re both about survival for the moment. The energy they provide is drawn from your body’s reserves. Like borrowing money on credit, the bill will someday come due. You crash and burn, hit a wall, or collapse into exhaustion or illness.
Over time, perseverance and endurance harden you. You become less pliant and flexible. Rather than adversity making you wiser and more compassionate, you become rigid and judgmental of others who are in pain or “can’t hack it.”
Resilience is night and day different from both these qualities. Resilience helps you not just survive, it helps you thrive for the long term. Unlike perseverance or endurance, you can develop and nurture resilience over time. And, you can store it in such a way that it becomes a buffer, so you don’t have to drop into your reserves. Resilience has a direct relationship with your wellbeing: the more you care for yourself, the more resilience you have, and the more resilience you have, the more you remember to care for yourself when times are hard.