A plant with deep roots can withstand a drought, a windstorm. It can continue "planting" even when conditions are stressful or traumatic.
In D&D, character's health is defined by hit points. As you become more experienced, you earn hit points which allow you to continue your journey, even if you come across Asmodian the devil.
I imagine that, even in good times, the plant is able to take in more water, nutrients, able to be more open to the sun to photosynthesize. (Does a plant JUST photosynthesize? No. It matures, reproduces, provides food for insects, etc.... it lives in a matrix of beings and being and doing.)
People who are flourishing experience grief and stress and struggle; they experience sadness and withdraw from social relations for a time. (grief hits, or illness, or failure, or betrays... they take real damage, they're wounded, maybe badly. But they don't go to zero. they absorb damage without total collapse.) But they continue their essential tasks.
In non-flourishing person.... the grief/wound eclipses everything else: relationships, purpose, bodily care, connection to beauty. They become isolated, bitter, poisonous to others. Or, they might refuse the grief, numbing it with work or substances or frantic activity, performing 'I'm fine' while something essential dies inside them.
Plants (in my house at least) can exist for a long time in some middle state between flourishing and collapse. Rootbound. Over or under watered (soggy or parched) leaves with a strange cast of yellow, dropping leaves, but continuing, trying to make it through until they get repotted or get their leaves dusted or put in a more light-filled room.
In my experience, (though I don't live in anyone else's body or brain) that's where most people live -- frantic, or frozen with anxiety, or sunk in sadness, or bored and searching diversion (look at this silly meme!) depression, loneliness, without connection, untethered, without meaning. Rootbound, unthriving, unflourishing.
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