How Much Adversity Do We Need?

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I recently came across an article written by Pendell (2021) titled “Younger Workers Have Had It Worse.” Although I have serious criticisms of many of the underlying claims^[1], the title and the article stimulated a question: Can adversity be good for us?

To answer this question, I needed a definition of adversity, so I consulted a few dictionaries^[2]. The general idea is that adversity is any sort of misfortune, small or large.

What, then, is the difference between adversity and stress? Stress, as Lazarus and Folkman (1986) argued, is a reaction to situations “a person appraises as significant for his or her well-being and in which the demands tax or exceed available coping resources” (p. 63)^[3]. When we perceive a situation as challenging, threatening, or hurting our well-being and we perceive a lack of resources for managing that situation, we experience stress. This stress produces an emotional reaction, and we respond by relying on various coping strategies, addressing the demand itself (problem-focused coping) and/or our emotional reactions (emotion-focused coping).

So, we could define adversity as any situation that produces stress and requires us to cope. This doesn’t imply that adversity must somehow be good for us. After all, adversity produces stress, and few people enjoy marshaling their resources to cope with stress. In the short term, adversity doesn’t seem positive at all.

But Adversity May Be Good for Us

Yet, there’s a good reason to conclude that adversity can have positive consequences, up to a point. Appraisals of stress are judgments we make about situations and events and coping involves making judgments about how to respond to those events. Like all other decisions, both are affected by our frame of reference. When we experience adversity, we appraise that experience through the lens of our goals and values. The more the experience is perceived as incompatible with our goals/values, the more challenging, threatening, or potentially hurtful we’ll appraise the adversity to be. When we have little experience with a particular adversity, we also have little understanding of the actual resources necessary to respond, and we don't have established heuristics for how to cope. The lack of experience requires us to resort to trial-and-error coping, more conscious (and resource-intensive) coping, and coping strategies we’ve found to be useful in other situations.

Consider an adverse event you recently experienced. Perhaps it was receiving an unexpected bill, a flat tire on the way to work, or testing positive for COVID and having to quarantine. The degree to which these experiences would impact your goals or values would affect how you appraise them. Yet, the overall emotional reaction is likely to be influenced as much by the degree to which you believe you have the resources necessary to manage the situation. An unexpected bill would have a bigger impact on the stress levels of someone barely making ends meet and less impact on someone who can easily pay the bill.

When we establish effective coping heuristics across various adverse experiences, especially when those coping heuristics include both problem- and emotion-focused coping, it’s easier for us to cope with similar situations in the future^[4]. Thus, adversity is beneficial for our ability to navigate future adverse situations and can, as Seery et al. (2010) showed, result in better well-being than if we lacked any experience with adversity.

There’s also an interesting wrinkle in this. The breadth of adverse experiences we’ve encountered serves as a frame of reference that influences our primary appraisals. Levari et al. (2018) recently demonstrated that when frames of reference change, so, too, do our judgments. When we have a narrow frame of reference for what constitutes challenging, threatening, or potentially hurtful experiences, we’re likely to view experiences beyond our frame of reference as more extreme than someone with a broader frame of reference. This may pose consequences for how we respond emotionally to adversity^[5].

Let’s go back to the experience of having a flat tire on the way to work. No one appreciates that adversity, but someone with no experience dealing with it is likely to have a stronger emotional reaction than someone who knows how to change a tire and has a spare in the trunk. If a flat tire in the past had led to more detrimental consequences (e.g., losing the job, missing an important meeting, a costly accident) we are likely to appraise a flat tire that merely creates inconvenience as much less adverse than someone who lacks comparable prior experiences^[6].

When Adversity Can Be Problematic

Even though we may become more capable of coping with adversity as we acquire more experience with it, coping still requires the expenditure of resources. Therefore, we can experience so much adversity that we deplete the resources we have. This is the reason why chronic stress can be so problematic for well-being. If we have little time to recover and replenish our resources before our next experience with adversity, then we have fewer resources for coping with it^[7].

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Think of it as a deck of playing cards. Each adverse experience requires us to pull resources from our deck, leaving our deck with fewer cards. If we don’t have time to replenish the deck, we’ll eventually run out of cards.

Additionally, as Seery et al. (2010) pointed out, eventually, significant adversity experiences (e.g., death of loved ones, significant illness, unemployment, divorce), will begin to add up and negatively affect our well-being. It’s impossible to say exactly how much is too much adversity, though the Seery et al. study reported that about nine or ten significant adverse events over a lifetime were sufficient to show some adverse well-being effects.

An issue can also surface when an adverse situation is so far outside our frame of reference that we cannot effectively cope with it. Such situations, argued Krupnik (2019), are what differentiate trauma from mere adversity^[8]. When we experience actual trauma, we cannot cope effectively with the situation, leading to significant negative consequences for well-being (e.g., PTSD, severe depression).

So, Adversity Is Good for Us – Up to a Point

The key takeaway is that adversity offers value but only when the adversity is not so recurring (i.e., chronic) that it produces long-term wear and tear on the body or so extreme we cannot cope with it. I cannot help but wonder if many younger people have struggled as much as they have with the pandemic because they lack a sufficient frame of reference to allow them to rely on existing coping heuristics. Many had few experiences with adversity on a level even remotely like the adaptation required with the radical changes to their lives caused by COVID. Some of this is likely age-related (we acquire a broader frame of reference as we age), but some is likely also related to a culture of hyper-protectiveness^[9].

At some point, it may be worth posing the question of how to ensure children experience the adversity they need to develop effective coping heuristics that will benefit them later in life. This isn’t to suggest society should go out of its way to harm children, but perhaps there’s a large gray area between actual harm and an overly sanitized environment. Letting children experience some adversity directly (such as through sports, household chores with consequences for not doing them, attempting to solve problems themselves before parents take over) and vicariously (such as by volunteering to help those less fortunate) can provide children with a broader frame of reference that will benefit them long term.

But we also must ensure we don’t legislate away such opportunities (e.g., such as by eliminating swings from playgrounds). At some point, we need to decide where we, as a society, should be legally obligated to intervene for purposes of protection from actual trauma and where we should leave the potential for beneficial adversity well enough alone.