Resilience is a hot wellness topic for the profession. I’ve noted and attended several Continuing Professional Development sessions over the last few years – particularly since COVID. I’ve learned to be a tennis ball rather than an egg. I now better bounce off the walls of adversity and have found the training invaluable in both my professional and personal life. But is resilience all it’s cracked up to be?

I recently rewatched the movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story and in between laughs it got me thinking about resiliency. A ragtag team of misfits must win a dodgeball tournament in order to save their beloved gym, Average Joe’s. They enlist dodgeball expert, Patches O’Houlihan, to teach them the game. He explains the five D’s of dodgeball:

Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive and Dodge

In one training montage, Patches pulls out a sack of wrenches for the team to dodge and exclaims, ‘If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball’.

True I suppose, but it is worth continuing to play the game if we have to keep dodging wrenches? Is there a point when we should just stop playing?

After the movie I came across an article from the Harvard Business Review called “The Dark Side of Resilience” by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Derek Lusk. The authors rely upon perhaps more prestigious sources than Patches O’Houlihan to explain that it is accepted that the best way to develop resilience is through hardship. The great philosopher Seneca noted that “difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body” while Nietzsche noted “that which does not kill us, makes us stronger”.

The authors then ask “could too much resilience be a bad thing, just like too much muscle mass could be a bad thing – i.e., putting a strain on the heart?”. They conclude that yes, there are situations in which individuals could be too resilient for their own sake.

The authors provide a few examples such as extreme resilience driving people to become overly persistent with unattainable goals. That is, they waste time persisting with unrealistic goals, a phenomenon called the “false hope syndrome”. Too much resilience can also make people overly tolerant of adversity. For example, putting up with a demoralizing job as a badge of honour.

There are dangers to being too resilient – the trick is deciding when you’ve dodged enough of those wrenches and need to stop or change the game.