Resilience: Overcoming Stress and Improving Mental Health

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Resilience has been described as the human capacity to face, overcome and emerge strengthened or transformed from experiences of misfortune (Garmezy, 1991). When considering the stressful life situations of an individual, there are different events that occur during one’s life that can be decisive in the activation of resilience. Studies have now shown a link between psychological resilience and various mental health outcomes such as burnout, secondary traumatic stress, depression, and anxiety (Mealer, Jones, & Moss, 2012; McGarry et al., 2013). For example, a study by Mealer et al. (2012) included 744 intensive care nurses working in the United States and found that high resilience was associated with a lower prevalence of burnout and symptoms …show more content…

An explanatory model of the relation between stress, burnout and resilience as well as the factors and behaviours affecting resilience is developed. Results indicated that the stress level and burnout rate of the EBC teachers range from the moderate to high level. Lack of support, bring unprepared and overwhelmed by job responsibilities and the sense of disempowered are sources of stresses mentioned by the interviewees. It was also found that there are correlations among stress, burnout and resilience and that rational coping behaviours and positive thinking strategies are personal resources that help teachers overcome stress and burnout. Furthermore, individual resilience and organisational resilience both had significant roles in lessening the negative effects of stress and burnout. Strong support from the administrators too had a reassuring effect on these …show more content…

The respective scales used were the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) 10 scale for the measurement of resilience, the burnout scale MBI, and the 12-Item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) questionnaire to assess psychological health. It was found that resilience and emotional exhaustion (i.e. a component of burnout) and self-efficacy as well as with psychological health all had significant relationships. Resilience was seen to have played a moderating role on psychological health in emotionally exhausting (burnout) situations. Students who indicated having a higher level of resilience also obtained higher scores in academic efficacy and lower scores in emotional exhaustion, thus illustrating the negative relationship between resilience and burnout. Students in this sample who showed a higher level of resilience were seen to experience less burnout. Therefore, the obtained results indicate, in practice, the need to foster learning of this psychological capacity with the aim of preventing the development of burnout syndrome by improving the students’ level of resilience. This finding

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