10 Things To Remember When Going Through Tough Times
10 Things To Remember When Going Through Tough Times
Perhaps you’re not having the best week… or month… or year. I get it. There’s a lot of people who’d like a refund on 2020. Ahhh, if only.
So if you’re doing it tough right now, here’s ten truths to help you weather this ‘storm’ better, and emerge better off.
1- Dwelling on what you don’t want works against what you do want
We all have our ideas of how things ‘should’ be. So when our plans derail and the reality we find ourselves in is a far cry from the one we’d worked for, it’s easy to get into a wrestling match with life. But the biggest thing that messes us up is not the external conditions of our lives, it’s the picture in our heads about how we think those conditions should be. When you let go and accept your reality for all that it is, you reclaim energy lost to the battle against what it isn’t.
2- You’ve overcome tough times before. You will again.
Sure they are not like the one you’ve dealt with now. But you have a 100% success rate at overcoming difficult situations. And if you think back to them, you’ll recall that at the time you worried you might now have what it would take only to discover that you did. Well that same tendency to underestimate your resiliency is still wired into you. So just remember, you are capable of difficult things. You’ve risen above them before , you win again.
3- No matter how bad it feels now, it won’t feel this way forever
Research by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert found that people are generally pretty lousy at forecasting their feelings when they’re in the middle a tough situation. In fact, in the midst of a crisis, we tend to think we will always feel the way we do now. Not true. “It’s not that things don’t hurt,” Gilbert says. “It’s that they don’t hurt quite as long or as much as we think they’re going to.” So no matter how bad you feel right now, know that you will not feel this way forever. Hope is a risk that must be run.
4- You are bigger than your problems
As difficult as your circumstances may be, don’t let them define your or become your identity. You are not your adversities, your job status or bank statement or messy divorce nor anything that has ever happened to you. Anything. Who you are is far beyond any external measure, situation or experience.
Avoid putting a label on yourself that hems you in or casting yourself as a victim of life. As pioneering psychiatrist Alfred Adler wrote in What Life Should Mean To You, “We determine ourselves by the meanings we ascribe to situations.”
It’s not your adversities that shape who you are, but who you are in the face of your adversities. Don’t let your problems be your identity.
5- Nothings robs your peace of mind faster than fear
The more uncertain our future, the more prone we are to turning our forecasts into fearcasts, conjuring up all array of imagined troubles. Yet because our brains are wired to focus more on potential loss than on potential gains, most of our fears laden worst-case outcomes never actually eventuate. So live your worry once. Focus your attention on what is in front of you today. Tomorrow, repeat.
To quote Mark Twain, “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
6- It’s okay not to feel okay
I currently live in Singapore. Last week the Singapore Government announced they while they were lifting a few measures in their ‘circuit breaker,’ they continued prohibiting any socializing outsize of parents and grandparents.
This news was a bitter disappointment to many, particularly to the two million plus expatriates whose grandparents live in other countries. It was an even harder blow to the many who live alone and will soon be two months without any social contact. As I surfed online chats, many expressed a whole array of emotions - ranging from sadness to outrage at the lack of justification for the extension to grave concern about the mental and economic toll.
I like to be upbeat and positive. And I have, up until now, felt very positive about living in Singapore as I wrote previously. But last Tuesday night and Wednesday I felt deflated, frustrated and flat. Partially for myself, but even more so for my son who not only missed his final months of high school, but who is still has no idea when he will see his friends, many of whom will disperse across the world for college come June.
His loss is real. I am sure you’ve experienced your own. Many of us have missed out on experiences we would have treasured due to this pandemic. Graduations. Birthdays. Weddings. Funerals.
Many have also lost their businesses, jobs, livelihoods and future plans. Not to mention the hundreds and thousands of lives this crisis has claimed and will claim -from the virus itself and from the poverty and despair resulting from the measures used to contain it.
Sadness. Anger. Frustration. Despondency. Anguish. Disappointment. Envy. Hurt.
These emotions are part and parcel of the human experience.
Unfortunately though we live in a culture that often does positivity to excess and suffer from the phenomena coined ‘toxic positivity’.
So if you’ve been feeling bad about feeling bad, give yourself permission not to feel like you’re on top of the world, all day, every day. You can still be positive person and be having a tough time.
All emotions are legitimate and need to be validated. Denying, minimalizing and masking the difficult emotions that naturally rise up when we are facing challenges doesn’t make them go away. It just makes them bury deeper until they eventually get expressed in unhealthy and destructive ways.
“Negative emotions are necessary for us to flourish,” wrote Barbara Fredrickson in her book Positivity. So don’t beat yourself up for not feeling upbeat. And don’t pretend to be on top of things when you’re feeling weighed under. After all, pretending to be strong is still pretending.
Whether you’re feeling sad, angry, disappointed or just super despondent about your future, extend compassion toward yourself and give those emotions the space they need. Honor their validity. Just don’t get stuck in them. The emotions that you don’t own, will own you.
7- Faith doesn’t remove your problems, it transforms them
We can’t connect the dots moving forward. We can only connect them looking backward. So keep faith that as messy as your situation may be right now, in the longer arch of time, the dots will connect.
Having faith that some higher order is at work doesn’t remove your challenges, but it transforms your relationship to them. As I wrote in You’ve Got This!, daring to have faith that everything will ultimately work out for your highest good will expand your bandwidth for seeing the good - and making the best - of even your greatest challenges. On the flip side, operating from fear will just shrink it.
Perhaps those storms you think have come to disrupt your path are really just revealing it. The most valuable chapters of our lives often don’t get a title til much later.
Keep faith and press on.
8- We are braver together than we can ever be alone
Is a burden shared really a burden halved? Who can say. But it is certainly a burden lightened. Various studies including the Harvard Longitudinal Study found that people with strong social connections were more resilient when life’s pressures mounted than people without them.
Human nature being what it is, often when we are going through a tough time, we can feel inclined to put on a mask and withdraw from the very people who could help us get through it better.
Which is why it’s so important not to let your fear of appearing weak or needy keep you from reaching out and sharing the truth of your life. As I’ve found so many times in my own life, including the recent hospitalization of my husband for Covid-19 (thankfully, now fully recovered!), we connect far more deeply through our vulnerability and struggles, than we do through our victories and success. Reaching out to others during my own moments of vulnerability lifted me up and helped me move through those first few days with far more courage than I would have otherwise.
So if you’ve been struggling, I encourage you to reach out to the people in your world you know care about you. Confide how you’re feeling. Enlist support. Asking for help is never a sign of weakness; it’s a sign of courage that shows you want to be stronger.
9- Life doesn’t happen to you, it happens for you
You would not be half the person you were today if everything you’d ever wanted had gone to plan. You might not choose your current circumstances, but they hold a silent invitation for you to grow into more of the person you have it within you to be.
Adversity has a way of introducing us to aspects of our humanity –strengths, talents and deeper dimensions of our own being – that we couldn’t access without them. So embrace those uncomfortable emotions for the opportunity they hold to learn and grow in whole new ways.
As I have written before, growth and comfort can’t ride the same horse. Just because an experience is hard, doesn’t mean it’s bad. Sometimes the very worst thing that ever happened to us can turn out to be the very best thing.
10- Trust yourself that whatever happens, you’ll handle it
Most people underestimate their capacity for life. They spin themselves as story that if ‘that’ happened, they couldn’t handle it. Yet, as I found while researching You’ve Got This! The Life-Changing Power of Trusting Yourself, when faced with a major life crisis or significant adversity, people discover within themselves a far greater capacity for life than they’d imagined.
In recounting the heart wrenching loss of her eleven-year-old son Luke, murdered by her estranged partner, Rosie Batty shared with me (Live Brave Podcast, ep. 38):
“We can never underestimate the strength of the human spirit. We may feel utterly crushed but within us is a force that can rise again, even from the darkest times.”
Trusting yourself may not change your experiences in life, but it will can change your experience of life.
The more you trust that ‘you’ve got this,’ the sooner you actually will.
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