Many folks consider being resilient a good thing. And on a surface level, it is a good thing.
The American Psychological Association defines resilience as “the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands.”
You may be told you’re resilient if you recover quickly from a job loss or understand how to care for your own mental health in a stressful home environment. So, yes, resilience is a good skill to have, but I recently learned of the term “toxic resilience” through a social media post from Dr. Aditi Nerurkar, a stress researcher at Harvard. In the post, Nerurkar says toxic resilience is when you power through and bounce back even when you shouldn’t, leaving you feeling totally stressed out and exhausted.
“Resilience, I don’t think, is a bad thing inherently, I want to make that clear. I believe it’s important to withstand discomfort and to manage the ways in which discomfort impacts our functioning on a daily basis,” said Meghan Watson, the founder and clinical director of Bloom Psychology & Wellness in Toronto.
If you get constructive feedback from your boss, you should be able to handle and work through that distress, Watson noted.
