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Adversity is a bad thing right? It means stress and we know stress is no good for our mental and physical health. But we also hear that adversity brings resilience. What does not kill us makes us stronger, as it were.
A multiyear study of nearly 2,400 surveyed subjects found that those who experienced negative life events reported better mental health and overall well-being than those who did not. The study is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Negative events included serious illness, violence, bereavement, social stress, relationship stress, and disasters like fires, floods, etc.
So those who had zero negative life events experienced more overall stress and lower life satisfaction. And here’s the rub: Those who experienced a high number of stressful negative events also reported greater stress.
It seems there’s a sweet spot, where a certain amount of struggle is good and produces a toughness and sense of control over one’s life, but anything above or below that amount is correlated with the inverse: Distress, anxiety, and feelings of being overwhelmed.
While the authors note that its impossible to identify this sweet spot of adversity, their research suggests that around two to three events might provide the ideal amount of protection from future stress and unhappiness. Yet they are careful to note they are not endorsing anyone to go out and purposely induce a negative life event.
—Christie Nicholson
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4 Comments
Add CommentPerhaps the positive effect of experiencing negative events is not solely a matter of their incidence rate. I suggest that the researchers missed a critical factor in determining the outcome of negative events: how well was each negative event dealt with or resolved?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat don't kill you makes you stronger. A high rate of negative events can overwhelm one's ability to successfully resolve them, or a single event that cannot be successfully resolved can do you in. I suggest that the beneficial effects of successfully resolved negative events is much more linear than simply the total number of negative events experienced.
The concept that individuals are programed to develop based upon predetermined Darwinian personality, character, and intellectual traits is an anathema to current psychiatric dogma.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe concept that certain life events, including traumatic events, catalyze the aforementioned such that the individuals traits, as mentioned above, successfully adapt to the same is even MORE of an anathema to the psychiatric politically correct community.
However, the tradition of nobility and royalty was based upon the same. This tradtion, based upon experience, for the most part, proved to be successful.
If you put an individual whose ancestors were kings and warriors in charge of a war and in a war, a very traumatic event, the same is likely to catalyze the aforementioned traits in him such that his inherited adaptive predispositions, as per the above, are catalyzed into being creating the emotional, intellectual, social, and psychiatric growth that the original article. delineates. .
Adversity makes you hardhearted against the world, thus creating hatred between people. On the other hand, negative experiences help you to develop a healthy personality which is able to empathize with the feelings of others. As one saying goes "a heart that did not know any suffering is a half heart".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don’t think adversity brings happiness. Rather, I think that people who can tolerate adversity are people who—if not “happy” to begin with—can learn how to deal with unhappiness, and find satisfactions in life notwithstanding.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThose who are willing to risk adversity—or at least tolerate it--can experience a more interesting world than those who try to avoid it. They tend to learn more, have more interesting lives, and not surprisingly, more satisfaction because they have met challenges—sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing—but they kept up the effort. They have learned that there is something to be gained by experiencing not just the “good” aspects of life, but the “bad” ones as well. Some even conclude that dealing with “bad’ things can bring “good” things, and become grateful for the bad things as well as for the good things.