Peak - 4 Nov. 2022
--We have all been there; you didn’t get enough sleep because your Instagram timeline needed refreshing 500 times, you burnt your breakfast, you missed your train by 1 minute, and to top it all off, once you finally arrived at work, you find out that you messed up the payslips of all employees. Needless to say, they are waiting with pitchforks at your desk. These are the perfect ingredients for you to think that it might be best for humanity if you stay in bed for the rest of your sad existence.
Unfortunately, sometimes life doesn’t give you lemons... it finds grapefruits, puts them in a cannon, shoots them one after another, aiming at your face while laughing maniacally. What we need in those situations is (a good helmet and) simply knowing how to get out of it alive.
1. Think About The Big Picture
Most things that happen to us, good or bad, we will not remember in 2 years’ time. That includes other people witnessing our misfortune (hooray!). It is very likely that only you remember the unfortunate day when you ran into a glass door in a busy shopping centre. Jeffrey Smith laughed about it for 30 seconds, then it was wiped from his brain, and he was back to thinking about his own problems.
Even if something really unfortunate or life-changing has happened to us, there are resources available nowadays that help us turn something very painful into something tolerable and maybe even beautiful–Jeffrey helps you wipe your face print off the glass door and buys you a coffee.
2. Don’t Avoid Discomfort
Did you know that emotional and physical pain are almost the same to your brain? Even though the brain does not process emotional distress and bodily pain identically, research on neural pathways indicates there is a significant overlapping between the experience of bodily and social pain.
This means leaning into uncomfortable situations actually hurts, so there is no surprise our first reaction is to try to avoid it. Usually, the more we avoid something, the more powerful the feared thing becomes. This goes for a broad spectrum of things, from avoiding doing the dishes to avoiding grieving the loss of a loved one. Avoidance is an unbeneficial coping skill that offers the mind an escape from uncomfortable thoughts, feelings, or experiences. It may seem like avoiding discomfort could be helpful; however, it results in never addressing the actual issue. It causes additional stress and drains you of your energy.
However hard it may be, overriding the urge to hide in comfort builds resilience. So try leaning into the uncomfortable feelings and things in the world. Easier said than done, eh? Think of yourself as an elastic band —if you never stretch out of your comfort zone, when you’re forced to, you’ll snap! If you stretch yourself bit by bit, you’ll be much more adaptable and always able to return to safety if it starts getting too much.
3. Change The Narrative
When something bad happens, we often ruminate about it internally day in and out; this is very counterproductive and pushes healing and growing aside. After all, we have to make mistakes to learn from them!
Writing your thoughts down can help us move away from ruminating by allowing us to gain new understandings of the challenges in our lives. Try free writing for 20 minutes about a problem, examining your deepest opinions and emotions about it.
When we are open to exploring uncomfortable emotions, it can lead to new perspectives. We’re then creating a more rounded version of our own life narrative, and that can give us a sense of control back. Once we think about the dark side of an incident, we might be able to consider some of its upsides. Remember an uncomfortable situation you faced and try to list three positive things about it. For example, you might recall how arguing with your mother surfaced some noteworthy problems out into the open and permitted you to learn how it feels being in her shoes.
A 2014 study found that accomplishing this exercise every day for three weeks enabled participants to lower their pessimistic thoughts over time. This was not the case for participants who only wrote about their daily life. It was especially valuable for stubborn pessimists. After just two months, though, the benefits wore off, implying that looking on the bright side is something we have to practise regularly.
