COPING BETTER
5 Things You Should Remember When Life is Hard
Most people never learn #3 and #4
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Life is hard. The longer I live, the more hard times I have come through.
When I was 17, I started college in Cookville, a small town in Tennessee. I didn’t know a single person, and I had never lived with a roommate. I didn’t know what college classes would be like. I was overwhelmed, and I was fighting lifelong depression.
At age 49, I lost a Silicon Valley job, and I faced for the first time the task of finding a new job without having a job ahead lined up for me. I had no experience doing this, and it took me five months of searching to find a new job.
Now, at 70, I face the largest difficulty in my life so far: I have developed a tremor in my hands and legs, as well as an impaired sense of balance. This forces me to use a walker, which greatly limits my life. (Try shopping at a grocery store when you have to keep both your hands on a walker.)
What I call “hard times” are inevitable. They’re just a part of life. And of course, they’re also unfair.
No one is exempt (not even you).
But there are things you can do to make things better.
Looking at “hard times”
Hard times threaten your spirit. You feel helpless and overwhelmed. You feel that your troubles will never end.
In addition to my own hard times, I have helped people with theirs. The range of situations is infinite, and I despaired that I couldn’t write any kind of article that would help you. However, I persevered (despite a strong urge to give up) and have come up with some things that apply to any situation.
It’s very important to remember that your hard times will end. Nothing is forever.
This doesn’t mean that all you need to do is wait it out. Hard times never get better by themselves — they get worse.
You can do better. Here are five things that will help.
1. Accept the reality of your situation
The first and most important shift in your thinking is to accept the reality of your life and resources, and the state of the world around you.
The following behaviors are deadly:
- denial (“This can’t be happening to me”)
- blaming others (“It’s their fault, not mine”)
- blaming yourself (“I’m no good in a crisis”)
- wishful thinking (“If only that had happened instead of this”)
- refusing to change (more on this later)
Because you are human, these behaviors are inevitable. They cloud your thinking, sap your energy, and waste your time.
So what should you do instead?
2. Realize that you are in hard times
You’re committed to reality, so now what?
You can’t work on a problem until you are aware that the problem exists. You must realize that you are in hard times. For example, a poker player who isn’t aware of their opponents’ body language will always lose to players who are — they don’t know where to find the source of their weakness.
Realizing this is critical to improving what your life will look like when the hard times have passed. Identifying that you’re in the middle of hard times is the strongest possible signal that you need to take action — but it needs to be action that makes things better, not worse.
3. Focus on what you can control
What can you control, really?
Can you make your partner accept you just as you are?
Can you make your boss promote you instead of someone else?
Can you make the weather stop raining on your outdoor wedding?
Of course not. You can try to influence your partner or boss. And you can take the wedding indoors, but you can’t make the rain stop.
The only thing you can control is yourself — what you think and what you do. Know that you are in hard times, accept that reality, and focus on the factors that you can control. But knowing what to control is only part of what you need to do.
4. Be willing to change
If you do nothing, you get nothing (and often things get worse). People will pursue their own goals (often at your expense), and you will be at the mercy of random influences from the world around you.
As time passes, a lot of things change — refusing to change is either foolish, ill-advised, or disastrous. There are many reasons for this, but here are three:
- Your needs, desires, and capabilities change over time
- As you age, you are ruled by the different stages of life (each with its own challenges and rewards)
- As you and the world change, what used to work now doesn’t, or what didn’t work in the past now does
Change can be many things — difficult, painful, dangerous — but it’s necessary. It’s not the only way forward, but it’s the only one that will lead you out of hard times.
All that remains is to address a critical implication of changing.
5. Expect to make sacrifices
If you work longer to make more money, you lose an equal amount of time doing what you’d rather be doing. If you become an actor, you have to give up living a life of solitude.
You can’t have it all. Change requires tradeoffs.
Getting better at getting through hard times
Hard times are hard, and you can’t change that — but you can make the process less hard and the results better.
It begins with being committed to the reality of what is (see #1). You will then realize that you’re in hard times (#2).
You know that doing nothing is bad. Making changes (#3) based on what you can control (#4) is your best hope of improving your journey, and that means sacrifices (#5) will be necessary. It’s important to realize that getting through these hard times will increase your resilience, a factor that will make it easier for you to deal with future difficulties.
All this is a lot to handle, but the brain is hard-wired to handle change. You got this.
