Health Sciences 2110B Essay: Resilience, Wellbeing, and Purpose

This essay, written for Health Sciences 2110B, explores the concepts of resilience and wellbeing, arguing that resilience is a skill developed to overcome adversity and achieve a state of comfort and health. The essay emphasizes that wellbeing is a temporary state, and to achieve it, one must cultivate resilience. It then highlights the importance of purpose, suffering, creativity, and tolerance in building resilience. Purpose provides perspective and confidence, suffering allows for growth and meaning-making, creativity fosters resourceful problem-solving, and tolerance expands one's capacity to endure. The essay argues that facing challenges and utilizing resources like creativity and tolerance are crucial for personal success and achieving wellbeing, ultimately emphasizing the ability to endure and overcome challenges as a key determinant of success. The essay emphasizes that suffering without meaning can be detrimental, while creativity allows for finding meaning and building resilience. The essay provides a comprehensive exploration of the factors that influence the development of resilience and its relation to wellbeing.

Sreenija Pappur
251009136
Health Sciences 2110B Resilience and the Creation of Wellbeing
Marnie Wedlake
April, 18th, 2020

Resilience, the ability to be resourceful and recover quickly from adversity, is a dynamic skill
that can be nurtured at any point in our lives. Wellbeing is the state of being comfortable,
healthy, and happy at any given time. Both definitions describe a state which can only be
achieved temporarily because life always throws us curveballs, so it is unrealistic to expect to
always be well. Thus, one must develop resilience to achieve wellbeing, but to do so, one must
live purposefully, experience suffering, embrace their creativity, and develop tolerance. These
concepts form the foundation for success.
Having a sense of purpose provides us with perspective and confidence, thus making it easier
to recover from adversity. Throughout our lives, we are regularly confronted with experiences
that challenge our wellbeing. Resilient people can find meaning in all life experiences, thus
providing them with a psychological buffer against obstacles.
Suffering is the state of experiencing distress or hardship and is core to our human
experience; thus, we should acknowledge its presence in our lives. The feeling of
accomplishment we get from working hard for something is the result of suffering. If we can
understand that there is something beyond ‘me and myself,’ then suffering can help us build
resilience. Conversely, suffering without meaning causes us to break down and miss the
opportunity to improve because we are plagued by our misery. Hence, past accomplishments
give us the confidence to tackle new challenges; thus, suffering is critical to our growth.
Creativity enables us to see the root of an issue, allows us to make connections between
seemingly unrelated experiences and gain new perspectives. It is a resource for coping with
stress, as it unlocks internal resources for dealing with stress, problem solving, and enjoying life.
When experiencing suffering, we tend to adopt a victim mentality and feel powerless in our
lives, preventing us from obtaining or maintaining resilience. However, perceptions are

malleable, so a creative individual can overlook this tunnel vision, thereby facilitating resilience.
When we are creative, we are resourceful and able to problem solve in new and original ways.
Tolerance is defined as one’s capacity to endure. Everyone has a window of tolerance in
which they can function optimally, but, being resilient expands this window so that we can
overcome a variety of challenges. This capacity to be resilient and rise above adversity depends
on our cognitive flexibility, which is the ability to reframe and have a different relationship with
what is happening. We can endure a lot of suffering if we can find meaning for it. In fact, it is not
suffering that destroys people, but suffering without meaning. Sometimes bad things happen in
someone’s life and they cannot reconcile how this suffering has any value, but creativity allows
us to find meaning in our suffering, thus building our tolerance to stress.
Personal success is what one aspires to achieve for themself and is defined by the individual.
However, one must experience suffering to utilize, test, and enhance their resources, such as
creativity, their window of tolerance, and their meaning-making ability. Every challenge one
faces make them more resilient and brings them closer to their goal of achieving wellbeing.
Ultimately, our ability to endure and overcome such challenges determines whether we will be
successful or not.