The longer I’ve practiced medicine, the more uncomfortable I’ve grown with the word resilience.

I’m a physician, and I am also a person in long-term recovery from addiction. Both of those identities have shaped everything about how I move through health care, and nowhere do they collide more sharply than in the culture of resilience that medicine holds so dear. We praise it like a virtue. We stitch it into wellness workshops and evaluation feedback. We hand it to struggling residents like a prescription. But in the world of addiction, the world I also inhabit, resilience is often the very thing that kills us.

By definition, resilience means the capacity to withstand or recover quickly from difficulties. It implies grit, endurance, fortitude. But for those of us with substance use disorders, that kind of toughness becomes dangerous. We do withstand a lot. We do push through. We keep showing up, long after we’ve stopped coping. We survive metaphorical fires that are burning our lives to the ground.

Until we don’t. Until we overdose. Until we die.

That is why this word, which is meant to inspire, has grown heavier and heavier for me over the years. The problem isn’t resilience itself. It’s the demand for it. When resilience becomes the metric by which health care professionals are judged or a benchmark for how “well” someone is doing, it morphs from an internal strength to an external pressure. It tells us that when the system fails, when support is absent, when trauma accumulates, and when we reach our emotional limits, the solution is to push through. Try harder. Don’t complain.

This framing shifts the burden of coping away from the system and onto the individual. It implies that if you’re struggling, it’s a personal failure of toughness, not a natural response to dehumanizing conditions. This attitude perpetuates stigma around mental health by creating a culture where vulnerability is punished, not protected.

The truth is, we cannot always be resilient, nor should we be expected to. Sometimes, we’re exhausted. Sometimes, we’re overwhelmed by grief or trauma. Sometimes, what we need is not to “bounce back,” but to stop and rest. The work of healing requires more than stamina. It requires space, safety, and compassion.

If we want to create a sustainable future in health care, we must stop worshipping resilience and start building systems that don’t require it as a survival strategy. We must validate the moments when resilience isn’t possible. And we must redefine strength, not as stoicism in the face of suffering, but as the courage to say, “I need help.”

Resilience has a place in medicine, but it cannot be the place where we end the conversation. When resilience becomes the answer to suffering rather than a response to being supported, it quietly excuses broken systems. It silences those who are struggling most. Recovery from addiction taught me that real strength is not endless endurance. It’s discernment, knowing when to keep going and when to stop, ask for help, and let yourself be held. If health care is ever going to heal, we must create environments where people are not admired for surviving harm, but protected from it in the first place. A sustainable, humane system does not require its workforce to be resilient just to stay alive within it.

Anthony Grandelis is a fellowship-trained OB/GYN hospitalist, medical educator, author, and person in long-term recovery from addiction. He holds an academic appointment at SUNY Downstate and a hospital affiliation with Maimonides Medical Center.

Recovery saved his life, and he believes it also made him a better doctor. The longer he has practiced medicine, the more convinced he has become that health care does not need another wellness initiative. It needs recovery. He founded Recovering Healthcare on a simple idea: The principles that help people rebuild their lives after addiction are exactly the principles that medicine is missing. Through speaking, writing, and education, he brings the principles of addiction recovery into clinical spaces, including honesty, presence, surrender, community, and humility, not as a metaphor but as a practice.

He is the author of The Recovery Prescription: What Addiction Can Teach Us About Fixing a Broken Healthcare System. He shares his work at AnthonyGrandelisMD.com, on Instagram, and on LinkedIn.