Can you have too much resilience?
Can you have too much resilience?
We explore if resilience is the answer to all lifes problems.
Is There A Downside To Resilience?
In today’s hustle culture, resilience is often touted as the cure-all for any obstacle. Bounce back from adversity. Push through the pain. Persist until you prevail. From sporting champions to business moguls, the world’s most successful people all seem to share one trait - an uncanny ability to be resilient.
But is resilience always the answer? Could there be a dark side to this vaunted virtue that often goes unmentioned? While resilience is rightly praised for fuelling perseverance and grit, taken to an unhealthy extreme, it can potentially enable some surprisingly toxic patterns.
In this article, we’ll explore how an obsession with constant resilience, if left unchecked, can sometimes work against you. From rationalising unhealthy situations to neglecting essential self-care, we’ll dive into the risks of making resilience your only coping strategy. Because, like most things in life, balance and nuance are key - even when it comes to resilience.
To explore this more fully, let’s first examine situations where resilience can work against one’s best interests.
There are times in life when you should quit.
A strong component of resilience is continually showing up, looking for gradual improvements, and making changes that come to fruition in the long term. This is all well and good, but not every life situation is one to endure.
Some relationships are toxic, some jobs are dead-end roles, and some behaviour is harmful. It would be wrong to suggest you keep going in every activity or situation purely because you agree with resilience. There will always be times when it is best to cut your losses, giving yourself time to think and start afresh.
One of the critical components of resilience is having friends and a group support group around you. At times like this, help from others is vital. You can often be too close to a situation to see the damage it causes or how it makes you feel. When you have a support group you trust, there’s a greater chance you’ll see the warning signs before it’s too late.
If you rationalise these difficult situations or normalise an unhealthy relationship, it’s likely you’ll eventually hit a wall.
Self-care is not a sign of weakness.
There’s a pervasive mentality, especially in workaholic culture, that prioritising self-care over resilience is a sign of weakness. The philosophy becomes, “Tough it out at all costs—rest is for losers.” This inability to ease off the gas can wreak havoc on one’s overall well-being.
On an emotional level, when resilience is the only coping mechanism, people tend to bottle up difficult feelings rather than processing them in a healthy way. The mindset is “I’ll just power through this difficult emotion,” but unexpressed emotions can lead to anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues.
Physically, an excess of resilience promotes unhealthy habits like poor sleep, inadequate nutrition, and lack of exercise and recreation—all in the name of muscling through. But the body and mind require rejuvenation to function optimally. Going into a perpetual “war” mindset puts you in an unsustainable chronic stress state.
Socially, ultra-resilient types often isolate themselves, missing out on crucial supportive bonds. They view any leisure activity or loved ones’ emotional needs as unacceptable distractions from their current hurdle. But humans are wired for connection - depriving yourself of relationships and fun leads to loneliness.
The truth is, genuine self-care—tending to your holistic needs rather than white-knuckling it through everything—is an act of resilience. It’s about having the wisdom to reinforce your reserves, not deplete them.
Resilience at the expense of your overall well-being is self-defeating. True resilience involves strategic recovery, not egotistical self-sacrifice.
Burnout is real, and sometimes resilience can cause it.
A genuine reason why resilience is sometimes a bad trait comes to the fore when you drain yourself of energy by continually pushing on. You might think taking responsibility for everything and putting in long hours every day is beneficial and a sign of leadership.
It can be. Sometimes, it isn’t.
There will be times when it is far better to step back, allow yourself the chance to regroup and come back stronger.
What follows on is a realisation that resilient people often neglect self-care.
We’ve mentioned a few times in recent articles how the traditional outlook of a Glaswegian perhaps stands at odds with resilience. We’re a people whose culture is to get on with things, and that shouldn’t be abandoned. However, as we move forward, looking for help, saying no to things and creating a better balance in life will help us achieve more.
In fact, the same can be said for the USA. Americans often have a stereotype of being dogged, determined, and resilient, which is why I was surprised to find two extremely prominent Americans talking about this very subject.
Jocko Willink (who actually looks like he could be made of 100% solid resilience), the ex-US Navy Seal, said in his book, The Dichtomtomy Of Leadership, ‘Yes, you must have the unconquerable will to win. But to really win, to truly win at all cost, requires more flexibility, more creativity, more adaptability, more compromise, and more humility than most people ever realise. That is what it takes to win.’ He is talking about natural resilience, the art of finding a pivot to get to your goal.
NVIDIA, the huge American chip maker’s CEO, Jensen Huang, told a group of Stanford University students that people like them (top of their class, surrounded by great people, from great backgrounds, with even better bank accounts) often have high expectations. However, people with high expectations have low resilience, which is required for greatness in his experience. He also said that resilience is brought on by suffering, and he couldn’t teach them this, but dealing with adversity might. Adversity will get you so far, but too much will lead to burnout, as mentioned above. Plus, we know of some great resilience teachers. We interviewed one a couple of weeks ago, you can read it here.
The human capacity for resilience is indeed remarkable. At our core, we all possess the ability to bounce back from adversity and overcome formidable obstacles through grit and perseverance. That’s why cultivating resilience has been a focus for us here at Ready Sweat Go.
However, as we’ve explored, resilience is not a limitless renewable resource. Like any strength, it must be strategically deployed and balanced with other essential needs. An excess of resilience, divorced from self-awareness, can enable toxic patterns and lead to burnout. True resilience wisdom lies in knowing when to push forward and when to pause, recover, and reset.
Resilience is a powerful virtue, but not the only one. You’ll avoid the pitfalls by integrating rest, self-care, strong relationships, and self-compassion into your resilience practice. Resilience is a means to an end - a tool to achieve your goals while safeguarding your holistic well-being along the way. With this balanced approach, the upsides of resilience can be fully unleashed without succumbing to the downsides.
So don’t just blindly “tough it out” at all costs. Respect your limits, recharge when needed, and apply resilience judiciously as one part of your arsenal. That’s the path to maximising this powerful trait while avoiding its potential dark side.
Resources:
Signs of a toxic relationship: https://www.calm.com/blog/toxic-relationships
Trauma: https://www.ptsduk.org/its-so-much-more-than-just-fight-or-flight/
Jocko Willink Quotes: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/60292563-the-dichotomy-of-leadership-balancing-the-challenges-of-extreme-ownersh#:~:text=Yes%2C%20you%20must%20have%20the,what%20it%20takes%20to%20win.
Jensen Huang:
