In this part, you will learn about:

  • What wellbeing means to you
  • What resilience means and why it is important to have it

Let’s start with an important question: What does wellbeing mean to you?

  • Wellbeing has a different meaning for everyone, but it mostly means comfortable, healthy, or happy
  • Take a few moments to think about what wellbeing means to you…if it helps you can write it down. You can use your personal logbook to make notes (page 1)
  • Wellbeing can include things like your feelings, a place, an activity, people or even a favourite time of year
  • There is no right answer, watch this short video to find out what other carers have said
  • Your wellbeing is important because we all deserve to be comfortable, healthy and happy. By doing things we like best or being around the people we love the most, we can improve our overall wellbeing

We know that it's important to look after our wellbeing, but did you know that it is just as important to have resilience?

Your plan vs reality

We would all like our life to be a smooth ride, with no big bumps in the road.

Your plan

However, in reality, life does not work out that way. Sometimes there are great big dips and obstacles that get in our way.

Reality

Caring for someone can sometimes make your journey through life a bit harder, making the obstacles more difficult to get over.

If we look after our wellbeing and we are resilient, the obstacles become easier to handle and we can recover more quickly.

So, what is resilience and why is resilience important?

When we talk about a person being resilient, we usually mean that they are able to become strong again after something bad happens, then continue with their life.

Having resiliency is important because much of life involves difficulties and challenges that wear us down and teach us lessons. If we are resilient, we can learn from those lessons and make meaning from them.

Resiliency gets stronger over time and with practice. This course will help you to find ways to improve your resilient bounce!

You can find lots of good videos online that explain the importance of resilience, this one is a good example: Brains: Journey to resilience

Part 1 summary

In this part, you have learned:

  • What wellbeing means to you
  • What resilience means and why it is important to have it

Now that you understand what your wellbeing means to you and what we mean when we use the term resilience, let’s start Part 2 - Understanding Stress.