The Resilience Well Depletion Phenomenon - Part III

In Part 1, I described the "Resilience Well" and how it gets depleted. In Part 2, I explained that the "Resilience Well" is refillable, and how to fill it.

In this, Part 3, I want to talk about how the well is depleted over time and how the well can be refilled over time, while engaged in pretty typical day to day activities.

The well has been designed into us by evolution, so it is calibrated to allow us to survive lengthy periods of adversity. Think flood, famine, drought for example. These events last months and even in extreme examples, years. So, it can take quite a long time to drain the "Resilience Well" to traumatic levels. This is assuming a person engages in a "typical" day to day series of activities, in which over a prolonged period, there is more resilience being "drained" from the well than there is flowing back into the well.

Typically, any lengthy period of time in which there is more "drain" than "gain" is usually followed by a similarly lengthy period of time in which there is more "gain" than "drain", and the well fills back up again.

In today's stressful, somewhat inactive, high-intensity information processing and problem-solving environments, there are many fewer periods of rest and relaxation caused by being physically tired and needing to rest, by lengthy periods with "nothing going on", or long journeys to get to and from places needed for survival, where the mind can rest and for lengthy periods of time, boredom reigns instead of stress and pressure. We have evolved ways of being creative, artistic, athletic and inventive during those times. In a sense, these activities seem to "fill our resilience well" and keep us from being too preoccupied with worry or care. Now, however, such natural "rest periods", for some people in particular, are few and far between.

We now find it necessary to "discipline" ourselves to carve out periods in our day, week or month for "recreation", rest and relaxation, or "filling the resilience well". There are many people engaged in service work, for example, who work far too long for far too many hours, without rest and relaxation. Policemen, nurses, emergency health personnel, teachers, social service workers, especially those who work on the "front lines", are all occupations which in my experience produce people whose "well is depleted". They appear in my practice having "hit the wall" - which I consider the moment people come to the realization, finally, that there is "nothing left in the tank (resilience well)". Usually this comes upon them suddenly and without warning.

Some may call this "burnout" or "brownout", or a "nervous breakdown", or "agitated depression", or some other "mental illness" and there would indeed appear to be similarities between what I have read about these conditions and what I am calling "resilience well depletion". But I am of the opinion that "resilience well depletion" is not a mental illness as much as it is an opportunity to realize lifestyle patterns of work without rest and relaxation and filling the resilience well, for too long a period of time (usually measured in years in my clinical experience), resulting in an "empty tank" ("resilience well").

I usually begin with an explanation of the phenomenon to clients in this state. This is followed by a "prescription" to carve out time in their days, weeks, and months for "joyful activity", rest and relaxation, time for themselves without interruption or distraction, especially from people who make demands upon them for problem-solving, executive functions like planning, decision-making, or multi-tasking.

The goal will be to ensure that in each three month span of time, there has been a rough "balancing" of the expenditure and revenue of resilience - in favour of revenue if the well needs to be filled after a lengthy period of adversity when it has been emptied too far.