Resilient and Resilience in Relation to Optimism and Well Being

When I started to learn positive psychology I had absolutly no idea what to expect from it, so I just thought that it will be some hippie practise about how to be happy all the time. Then we had our first lesson. We learned about how positive psychology started, what are the key topics of it and how it can be applied to real life. That washed away my thoughts about overaly possitive hippies and caught my interest. Afterwards I came along a book called Authentic happiness by Martin Seligman (Add citation) and yet the first page made me realise what positive psychology is really about. Seligman writes there about how for decades the goal of psychology was to get people from minus five to minus three, which means that psychologists were working the same way as for example surgeons. Analysing the symptoms, coming up with diagnose and “cutting” away the negative things form peoples minds. There is nothing wrong with that, but since our mind works differently than for example our leg or arm, it was not enough. That is why positive psychology was founded. To get people from plus two to plus seven. To find the strengths that people have and develop them, make them achieve their potential. After reading this, something in my mind clicked and I finally started perceiving positive psychology the right way.

In this essay I am going to focus on following topics: Optimism, Resilience. I am going explain basics of each topic, I will write about research and findings connected to the topic and I will reflect on my knowledge from lessons of Positive psychology and write about how the topic can according to my opinion be applied in real life situations.

Optimism

‘Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement…no pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit’. Helen Keller (1880 – 1968)

Definitions

Optimism is defined as global expectation that more good things than bad things will happen in future (Scheier and Carver, 1985). It is something nearly every person has experienced. However, the question is, can we use optimism in any other way than just telling ourselves that the essay we just wrote was good and that we are going to get an A?

The answer for this question is yes, we can. Buchanan & Seligman (1995) explain optimism as an attribution style, or in other words a way of perceiving and explaining events happening in our lives. They also describe that “Optimistic explanatory style” is something that everyone can learn. It basically means that we think that the good things in our lives happen because of what we do and how hard we try etc. and that the bad things are caused by external factors and are not entirely our fault.

Research

It has been found that people with Optimistic explanatory style are less likely to have suicidal thoughts (Hirsh, Rabon 2015) or that lack of it can be one of the causes for eating disorders (Goebel, Spalthoff, Schulze, & Florin, 1989; Watkins et al., 2001). Attribution style was also proved to be a key factor in assigning type of treatment for patients diagnosed with depression. Those who attributed it to personal factors were far more likely to be assigned Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and those who attributed it to biological factors were more likely to be treated with psychopharmacological treatment (PHT) (Schweizer, Peeters, Huibers, Reolofs, Van Os, Arntz 2010). But on the other hand, Peterson and De Avila (1995) found that unrealistic optimism can lead people to act more careless about their health issues. The unrealistic optimists often tend to ignore health care and promotion and act more carelesss about their physical health.

But how can all this be used in real life? The optimistic explanatory style, otherwise known as learned optimism is not a genetical predisposition but learned behaviour. That means that it is something we can all learn and benefit from in our lives. By seeing things in positive way and thinking that we are going to do good on the next exam or assignment, we can keep ourselves more relaxed and calm and therefore, it will be easier for us to focus on it and we will actually be able to do better.

However, we can not be overly optimistic about everything. If we will keep telling ourselves that we are the best and we can write the essay in one day or that we are going to do great on the exam even though we did not study for it, we are probably going to fail. So we need to carefully consider where is the line between being optimistic and being overly optimistic or reckless.

Resilience

Definitions

Robertson and Cooper (2013) define resilience as an ability of person or object to recover back to its original state. From psychological point of view, resilience is a process of adapting to stress caused by a certain threat, trauma or tragedy. Specifically, the most common causes of the stress are relationship problems, health problems, workplace issues and financial difficulties, terrorist attacks or natural disasters. If a person is resilient it does not mean that he/she does not feel any emotional distress in a difficult situation. They experience the stressful event in a same way as non-resilient people do, but what makes them different is the ability to “bounce” back to the state they were before the event. It is important to remember that resilience is not a genetic attribute but that it involves behaviours, actions and thoughts that anyone can learn and developed by anyone. (Road to resilience, Author unknown)

Research

Gooding, Hurst, Johnson and Tarrier (2012) conducted a research focusing on differences in resilience between young and older adults. They have found that older people tend to be more resilient to emotional regulation and problem solving and that younger people had more resilience regarding social support. However, that does not directly suggest that some kinds of resilience are correlated with age. One of the main explanations for this could be that every generation is raised slightly differently and therefore they may develop resilience to different types of things or situations. The most common stressful situations in peoples lives are caused by work. Due to that, it is important for employers to train their employees to be resilient. Partly for the good and the employees and partly for the good of the company. That is why Powley and Powley (2012) decided to take a look at how HR manages critical situations at workplace and how they try to build resilience within their employees. First two parts of building resilience are focused more about avoiding stressful situations then about resilience itself. They focus on building a good relationships within the company and on strategies to minimize risks. The other parts focus on how to build back the confidence in employees after some accident. Mostly it is used something very similar to Solution focused approach (George, Iveson, & Ratner, Evan, Chris, Harvey. 2015). The HR staff try to make employees think about what is going to happen now, how to improve their work and how to avoid the stressful situations.

I would like to point out that being resilient does not only mean that you are able to cope with extreme situations. It simply means being able to “bounce” back to the state you were in before after some hard situation. Although it may seem like that from the examples I gave, resilience is not some extraordinary feature that only few chosen ones have. Everyone is resilient to something. There are many situations that require us to be resilient. Many of them are normal daily situations, for example work stress. If someone was not resilient at all they would not be able to cope with it. Of c course we need to consider the term “work stress” covers an enormous amount things, depending on what your job is. It is obvious when you compare for example Police officer and accountant. Both get stressed at work and both jobs require them to be resilient in some way. However, one of them can get stressed by not being able to finish some report at time and the other one can get stressed by someone pointing a gun at him. Every one of us is resilient in one way or another.

What is Well-Being

Although it may sound very scientific, it is indeed very simple. Well-being is the experience of happiness, prosperity and health. Besides that, it means having a good mental health, sense of purpose and meaning and high life satisfaction. In general Well-Being simply means feeling well. Well-Being is split into five major types:

1. Emotional Well-Being- being able to practise stress management, be resilient etc.
2. Physical Well-being- improving your physical health by exercising and healthy lifestyle in general
3. Social Well-Being- maintaining a meaningful relationships, having supportive people around
4. Workplace Well-Being- using your interests and values to gain meaning and happiness professionally
5. Societal Well-Being- Ability to participate in community and be a part of culture.

How to Improve your Well-Being

Well-Being is not something that we are genetically predetermined to either have or not. Anyone can improve their well-being if they want to. It can be improved either with a help of psychologist or with a use of self-help books related to it. It is not difficult to find how to improve it. The difficult part is finding out what parts of your life should be improved in order to improve you well-being. When using science-based techniques to improve your well-being, it usual takes around five weeks, before you start feeling better (Davis, 2019) But it is very similar to being on a diet. When you are trying to lose weight, you eat healthy and exercise you eventually lose it, but if you stop trying afterwards and you start eating junk food again, you will gain the weight back up. It is nearly the same with well-being. If, for five weeks, you follow all the steps in some guide on boosting well-being, there is a big chance that it will improve. But if you then stop caring about it, it is not going to stay the same. You need to work for it and care about your mind the same as you care about your body.