Resilience in wellbeing goes beyond enduring tough times—it’s about building a life where happiness and fulfillment are sustainable, even in the face of challenges. To cultivate wellbeing resilience, we need to embrace three vital principles: pursuing balance and breadth of wellbeing sources, avoiding narrow reliance on just one or two areas of life, and fostering variety to sustain joy over time. Let’s explore how these elements create a foundation for lasting wellbeing.
Balance and Breadth: A Foundation for Resilience
Wellbeing resilience thrives on diversity—having multiple sources of happiness that can support us when adversity strikes. People often rely heavily on a narrow set of pillars for their wellbeing, like a job or a close relationship, that consume most of their time. While these can bring joy in the moment, they leave us vulnerable. If one falters – a career setback, a breakup, an injury or other major life change – our overall wellbeing can crumble.
A resilient approach is to build balance and breadth into your life by nurturing wellbeing across a range of areas: physical health, mental engagement, meaningful connections, and community contribution. For example, someone who balances time with friends, hobbies, and volunteering has a broader foundation to rely upon if their work life becomes unstable. This diversity creates a safety net, ensuring that when one area faces challenges, others can provide support and stability.
To incorporate breadth into your life, reflect on areas that bring joy and fulfillment but may currently feel neglected. Could you reconnect with an old activity you enjoyed? Strengthen a distant friendship? Or explore a new area of personal growth and connection? Expanding your sources of happiness strengthens your ability to weather life’s inevitable ups and downs.
The Inevitability of Adversity: Why Resilience Matters
Adversity is an unavoidable part of life. Whether it’s the loss of a job, the strain of a relationship, or unexpected health challenges, life’s setbacks are as certain as its joys. While we can’t always control what happens to us, we can control how well-prepared we are to navigate those challenges. This is where the concept of wellbeing resilience becomes crucial.
When our lives are overly dependent on one or two areas for happiness, adversity in those areas can feel devastating. A career stumble can leave us questioning our purpose and whether our lives even matter. Relationship struggles can erode our sense of connection and support. And injury or loss of mobility can dramatically limit our ability to participate in enjoyable daily activities. Without other areas of fulfillment to lean on, even minor challenges can feel overwhelming.
However, when our sources of wellbeing are diverse, adversity in one area becomes less destabilizing. A difficult week at work is easier to bear when you know you’ll find comfort in a creative activity, support from friends, love from a companion, or solace in nature. Building resilience is about ensuring that life’s inevitable storms don’t define us or strip away our joy. By diversifying where we find fulfillment, we create a safety net – a buffer against the disruptions that are bound to come.
Resilient wellbeing doesn’t mean avoiding adversity; it means being equipped to adapt, recover, and continue thriving despite it. By intentionally nurturing multiple dimensions of your life, you ensure that you can face challenges with strength and grace, turning setbacks into opportunities for growth and renewal.
Narrow Wellbeing: The Risk of Fragility
In contrast, narrowing your focus to one or two sources of wellbeing creates fragility. Consider someone whose identity is deeply tied to their career or whose joy hinges solely on their romantic relationship. A promotion could bring elation, but a layoff might lead to a deep sense of loss. Similarly, the joy of a thriving relationship could be replaced with isolation if that bond is strained.
When wellbeing relies too heavily on a single source, it becomes fragile, leaving us vulnerable when that source is disrupted. For example, this fragility can manifest in various ways, mapped to the four petals of the WellBalance Lotus:
Strong Mind: Knowledge workers gain their wellbeing from a focus on mental engagement and can neglect balance in physical or social wellbeing. Often their self-worth is deeply tied to professional success, which can cause a crisis as they age and lose mental acuity or see their roles at work erode, especially if they haven’t nurtured interests, social networks, or other fulfilling pursuits outside their careers.
Social Connection: The burned-out caregiver pours all their energy into relationships and connection, neglecting their own physical or emotional needs, leaving them depleted and unsupported. In particular, parents who devote their lives to raising children often experience a loss of purpose upon "empty nesting" when their children leave home. Having neglected personal interests and relationships, they may feel adrift without their primary parenting role, despite having had ample time to prepare for this transition.
Purposeful Contribution: The overachieving professional thrives on a sense of purpose and contribution but risks losing their sense of self when their career is shaken. Similarly, the workaholic who invests heavily in their job to escape dissatisfaction at home, risks a dual crisis when both career and relationship falter.
Healthy Body: Elite athletes often tie their identity, social connections, and sense of purpose to their sport. A career-ending injury can leave them struggling to rebuild their identity, self-care habits, and relationships. More commonly, a health enthusiast who prioritizes their physical wellbeing above all else can become overly self-centered, leaving their emotional and social needs unfulfilled, which can lead to loneliness and disconnection.
Each of these archetypes highlights how over-reliance on one domain of wellbeing creates imbalance, leaving us unprepared for life's inevitable challenges. These examples also illustrate how all of us are prone to imbalances and risk building our lives on narrow foundations, no matter what our skills, interests, personalities and identities.
Resilience means creating a balance that doesn’t overly depend on any one area. It’s about ensuring that your identity and fulfillment are enriched and expanded by a variety of experiences and feelings. By diversifying where we find happiness and joy, peace and contentment, we build a stronger, more adaptable sense of wellbeing.
Variety: Keeping Wellbeing Fresh
Even with a broad and balanced foundation, our wellbeing can plateau if we fall into routines that feel stagnant. Over time, the excitement and joy from familiar activities can fade, a phenomenon known as hedonic adaptation. The key to overcoming this is variety – introducing new experiences or refreshing the way we engage with old ones.
Adding variety doesn’t mean abandoning your favorite pastimes; it can be about finding new ways to enjoy them. For instance, if you love walking in your neighborhood, try exploring a local hiking trail. If you enjoy cooking, experiment with new cuisines or host a dinner with friends to add a social dimension. Variety keeps the joy alive, ensuring that your activities continue to feel meaningful and energizing.
To sustain your wellbeing, seek opportunities for novelty. Challenge yourself to join a new class, travel to an unfamiliar place, or switch up your routine in small but significant ways. This not only prevents stagnation but also fosters a sense of curiosity and engagement with life.
Sustaining Wellbeing Through Balance, Breadth, and Variety
Resilient wellbeing isn’t about eliminating life’s challenges – it’s about creating a strong, flexible foundation to navigate them. By cultivating balance and breadth, we ensure that our wellbeing isn’t dependent on any single area of life. By embracing variety, we keep our joy fresh and our lives vibrant.
Start by reflecting on how you are spending your time and where you find happiness, contentment and meaning in life. Are they too narrow? Have you been neglecting important parts of your life? Could you add new dimensions to your day-to-day experiences? By taking small but intentional steps to diversify your wellbeing, over time you’ll create a life that’s not only resilient but vibrant and deeply fulfilling.
Related Posts
