Picture this: You’re a full-time university student responsible for caring for your cancer-ridden mother. Two years after your mother is gone, your closest friend has just told you they have a few months to live, and a few months after they’re gone, you yourself are given a cancer diagnosis.
This is a reality for many people around the world; many people grieve more than once throughout their youth, and ultimately, they are presented with a choice between life and happiness or letting this grief get them down and remaining sad.
The notion that adversity makes us stronger—or, at the very least, better prepared to manage certain everyday situations—appears to be accurate, but only to a degree. A new study used online surveys to check on over 2,000 people over many years to assess their mental health and general well-being. Before the poll started, they were asked to describe any upsetting occurrences that had happened to them, such as a divorce, a parent’s passing, or a natural disaster. They also shared negative incidents that occurred over the study period.
The unexpected outcome? People who had previously experienced challenges had recovered and become happier. This is because people who are challenged by life have opportunities to learn about overcoming adversity, enabling them to develop coping strategies and identify who the important people in their lives are, build a solid support system, and feel more secure after they make it through.
While every person reacts to tragedy differently, people in the research who had never experienced hardship tended to feel less happy, in general. Most of us do ultimately regain our prior level of happiness after a catastrophe. A person’s capacity for coping might become too overwhelmed by a series of bad experiences. Two or three setbacks appeared to increase resilience in the study, but as many as 15 setbacks made it difficult to cope regularly.
It is important that people have support during these experiences. For example, participants of the study said that in situations where they knew that a person important to the was going to die soon, it helped to talk about the future without them, strengthening their fortitude.
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