Resilience and Personal Well-Being: The Mediating Roles of Self-Esteem, Optimism, and Help-Seeking Willingness

Background and Purpose

Personal well-being is a central outcome in social work practice, yet the psychological mechanisms through which resilience promotes well-being remain incompletely understood. Grounded in Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, which holds that individuals strive to acquire and protect valued personal resources, this study examines whether self-esteem, optimism, and help-seeking willingness mediate the relationship between resilience and personal well-being. COR theory's resource-caravan perspective suggests that resilient individuals tend to harbor co-occurring personal resources - including positive self-regard and optimistic cognitive orientations - that jointly sustain well-being. Identifying these mechanisms is critical for designing targeted social work interventions that address specific modifiable resources rather than treating resilience as a generic, unitary construct.

Methods

Data were collected from a community sample of N = 670 Israeli adults via an anonymous online questionnaire. Participants completed validated measures of resilience (Brief Resilience Scale), self-esteem (Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale), optimism (Life Orientation Test–Revised), help-seeking willingness (General Help-Seeking Questionnaire), and personal well-being (Bradburn Affect Balance Scale). GLM-based parallel mediation analysis was employed to simultaneously test the indirect effects of resilience on well-being through all three mediators, with 95% confidence intervals computed using the delta method. Fully standardized effect sizes are reported.

Results

The total effect of resilience on well-being was significant (β = .308, p < .001). Both self-esteem (β = .113, p < .001) and optimism (β = .085, p < .001) significantly mediated the resilience–well-being relationship, with self-esteem constituting the stronger pathway. A significant direct effect of resilience on well-being remained after accounting for the mediators (β = .118, p < .001), indicating partial mediation. Help-seeking willingness did not function as a mediator (β = −.003, p = .537) — the path from resilience to help-seeking was non-significant — yet it independently and significantly predicted well-being (β = .100, p = .002), suggesting it represents a distinct protective pathway operating independently of resilience level.

Conclusions and Implications

Self-esteem and optimism mediated the resilience–well-being relationship, identifying them as the core psychological mechanisms through which resilience promotes well-being. This suggests that resilience-building interventions are most effective when they simultaneously and explicitly target self-esteem and optimism as distinct therapeutic goals. Help-seeking willingness independently predicted well-being regardless of resilience level, establishing it as a separate protective resource. This finding underscores the value of reducing barriers to help-seeking through stigma reduction, psychoeducation, and accessible services - as a complementary strategy for enhancing well-being across the full population.

For social work practice across settings, these findings point to a multi-target approach: rather than treating resilience as a unitary intervention goal, practitioners are encouraged to assess and address self-esteem, optimistic thinking, and help-seeking willingness as distinct, modifiable resources that together constitute the foundation of sustained personal well-being