Impact of well-being on resiliency to stress

Abstract

Research shows that mature entry and school leaver students have vastly different experiences when transitioning to the university environment. It is suggested that the transition to university is a major life transition and thus is a period of great stress. For mature entry students and school leaver students, the impacts upon adjustment to university are varied during the transition to university study. It has been proposed that for successful university adjustment, high levels of resilience are needed. Psychological resilience is an individual's tendency to cope with stress and adversity. This coping may result in the individual bouncing to a previous state of normal functioning, or simply not showing negative effects. A third, more controversial form of resilience is sometimes referred to as 'posttraumatic growth' or 'steeling effects' where in the experience adversity leads to better functioning (much like an inoculation gives one the capacity to cope well with future exposure to disease). Resilience is most commonly understood as a process, and not a trait of an individual. Several years ago, researchers began to consider why some people are better to endure and overcome the stress associated with potentially traumatic events than others. The ability to confront and adapt to stress and adversity is now commonly referred to as resilience (Block & Kreman, 1996). The construct of resiliency may help us to better understand the key characteristics and coping strategies that enable some individual to avoid the potentially debilitating effects of extreme stress and trauma. Resilience is having the skills or attributes to recover quickly from a mental, physical or emotional crisis. Some individuals seem to have a natural ability to bounce back from adverse circumstances; others have to learn how to become resilient.In a study that examined post-bereavement responses ,resilient people were those who were characterized as experiencing less enduring grief symptoms after the loss of a loved one (Bonano et al., 2002),after controlling other predictors such as subjective wellbeing, researchers found that resilient individuals also scored higher on indexes of global adjustment ,work and social adjustment and psychological and physical health adjustment (Klohmen,1996). Resilient people are less likely to perceive uncertainty, confidence in their coping resources ,more likely to make positive meaning of adversity, and more efficient in their learning. Resilient person has an internal locus of control, healthy self-esteem and well-being, and has developed adaptive coping skills. Resilience depends on personality, childhood and experience etc. Some people are strong willed and simply refuse to be victim. This has a lot to do with self confidence or self-esteem and well-being as well. One of the major focuses in psychology relating to resilience is a trait called Hardiness. This is our level of resilience in a difficult situation. The theory behind this is that those people who have more attributes relating to hardiness are better equipped to deal with life's challenges. Those who do not possess as many attributes relating to hardiness are not well equipped to deal with these situations.Health is an individuals' normal condition, his/her birth right .It is the result of living in accordance with the natural laws pertaining to the body, mind and environment. The World Health Organization (1964) defines health as a state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Well-being is differentiated into psychological and physical well-being.Psychological well-being is thus a wide ranging concept that embraces effective aspects of everyday experiences. Negative and bivalent components of well-being are relatively easily assessed through self-report such as anxiety, happiness, job satisfaction or personnel esteem (Maslow, 1973).Warr (1987) distinguished between five aspects of mental health which include affective well-being, competence, autonomy, level of aspiration and integrative functioning which refers to the balance between the dimensions leading to high resilience to stress in the individual. …