The ability to overcome the state of extreme distress and stress is called resilience. People in difficult situations who have the ability to “survive” and sustain the interaction with the environment despite all kinds of problems, and people who do not usually get frustrated for stressful events but react in term of coping getting rid of troubles and adverse enviromental conditions are called resilient people.
Three common points are expressed in various definitions of the concept of resilience. These are:
a) risk and/or difficulty;
b) positive adaptation, coping, competence;
c) protective factors.
In this case, resilience is:
“a phenomenon that occurs as a result of the pronounced interaction of protective factors associated with healthy adaptation and contributing to this adaptation process with existing risk factors” (Windle, 1999).
It is observed that resilient individuals who can cope with difficulties, easily recover from difficult situations and are psychologically flexible possess some certain characteristics. Krovetz (1999) talks about four basic characteristics of resilient individuals.
These characteristics are:
Social competence: Ability to create positive impressions in others and thus to establish positive relationships with both adults and their peers.
Problem solving skills: Skills necessary to ask for help from others and to plan activities to occur under one’s own control.
Autonomy: Ability of a person to possess his/her own identity, to behave independently and to establish control on his/her environment.
Having goals and sense of future: Sense of having some goals, educational expectations, hope and bright future.
Two main factors have been emphasized with the concept of resilience; the first one focuses on getting rid of stressful life events and is the ability to quickly balance and recover from stress to return to a healthy initial state. The second factor is sustainability as the ability to sustain healthy reactions in other stressful situations as a result of giving healthy reactions to stressful life events. The American Psychological Association (2014) defines resilience as a process of adaptation to adversity, trauma, tragedy, threat and important stressors.
Now we are living the worst crisis in last 100 years. The way situation has gone out of hand and number of people getting corona positive and deaths are increasing day by day. It’s very difficult to keep the mental balance and very few people can do this.
We are certainly no exception today as people try to figure out how to cope, and help others cope, with the grief, stress, and anxiety caused by biggest health challenge of our time: the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
Facing difficult times is part of everyone’s life but coming out of tough times is the power of resilience.
Karatas Z., Tagay O. (2021) The relationships between resilience of the adults affected by the Covid pandemic in Turkey and Covid-19 fear, meaning in life, life satisfaction, intolerance of uncertainty and hope. ScienceDirect.
