A couple months ago, I wrote about a study showing that those who had experienced a little (but not too much) adversity were better at handling physical pain than their pain-free counterparts.

Now, a new study finds the same trend – but with mental health and wellbeing. It seems that both physical and mental resilience can be achieved through a healthy amount of adversity. When we face hard times, we adapt and build a callous that helps us take on future challenges.

Resilience is often considered a process that occurs in spite of adversity, but we might want to instead think of it as a phenomenon that appears because of adversity.  Indeed, we can become even more physically and mentally capable as a result of our misfortunes.