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It happens so badly that hands drop. Fear, hatred, despair come in wave after wave, or the stress goes on and on, it seems there will be no end to it. You feel like a little more – and really go crazy. How to pull myself together, calm down, find the strength to continue living? Here are some tips to help you get through these difficult times.
1. Train yourself to be happy
The ability to enjoy is nothing but a habit. “If you don’t know how to take the positive out of what is happening and remember only the bad, the neural pathways in the brain that are responsible for good news are not activated,” says psychotherapist Philippe Peri, author of How To Stay Sane. “If the brain isn’t used to receiving good news, it doesn’t have the neural pathways to produce it on its own.”
It turns out that we ourselves program our well-being. Optimism is a matter of practice. You need to consciously look for, notice and remember what pleases, then a good mood will be with you more often than a bad one. One way is to ask positive questions that open, rather than close, the door of opportunity. In almost any situation, you can ask yourself: what is good about this experience? This is a quick way to change your mood and thoughts with gratitude.
2. The bad is as valuable as the good.
“Perhaps you are afraid that believing in the best will make you vulnerable and attract misfortune,” continues the psychotherapist Philippa Perry. “The key is to train yourself to accept feelings that can hurt, not avoid them.”
To be ashamed or to avoid an experience is to get stuck in some unlived experience.
The American writer, Nobel laureate in literature Toni Morrison very accurately said about this: “I want to feel what I feel. What belongs to me. Even if it’s not a feeling of happiness. Because you are all you have.” To be ashamed or to cross out experiences, to run away from them because they hurt, means to get stuck in some kind of unlived experience, depriving yourself of the opportunity to learn an important lesson so that it does not happen again in the future.
3. Giving up is better than hitting a wall.
In an old 1934 book, You Can Master Life, Rev. James Gordon Gilkey gives amazing advice. When you go through a difficult life experience, the first impulse is to try to explain, to find the reason why what happened happened. Usually this only provokes confusion, despair and self-pity.
Most difficult life situations cannot be explained – they can only be endured, overpowered and gradually forgotten. As soon as we give up trying to find a reasonable explanation, the tension inside gives way to silence, and it helps to find a way out.
“Why is it so hard for so many people? the priest asks. ‒ Because from childhood we were told: to win means to fight and destroy. This is what happens when you are young. Many of the hardships we face in adolescence tend to be short-lived, and a combination of heroic courage, strong will, and perseverance helps overcome them.
But with age, the situation changes. We find prison walls in our little world that no hail of blows can destroy. Within these walls, we must spend our day – happily or with hatred in our souls. In the new circumstances, we must consciously change the technique of youth. It is necessary to achieve victory not by attacking the walls, but by accepting them.
4. Shift your focus from yourself to others
In Christianity, one way to feel better when you feel bad is to pray for others. It is not necessary to be a religious person to wish something good to a stranger passing by and feel relieved yourself.
All emotions come down to two main ones: love and fear. And they can’t exist at the same time
The author of The Trick of Life article in the New York Times writes that it helped him cope with panic attacks.
“I sat down on a park bench and began to pray… I prayed for the nanny who was pushing the stroller with the baby in front of her, for the young woman who was jogging in the morning next to them, for the little boy who pedaled the bike nearby. I prayed that each of them would always have what I wanted for myself: health, peace of mind, financial stability. By focusing on others, I realized that my problems were no different from the problems of other people, and they stopped putting pressure on me.
5. Love, not be afraid
“In the end, all emotions come down to two main ones: love and fear,” says psychologist Olga Prokhorova. “Moreover, they cannot exist in the soul at the same time. In every situation, we make a choice: love (believe, accept, invest, give, care for) or fear (distrust, run away, take away, attack, manipulate).”
If you choose to love, then you drive fear out of your soul, if on the contrary, you sink deeper and deeper into the abyss of horror, where there is no place for love. Every time fear kicks in, you can say to yourself, “I choose to love over fear.” This short mantra can be used as an auto-training.