From Struggle to Strength: This is How to Make Hard Situations Easier.
Lessons Learned from Life’s Toughest Moments.
Airports are stressful and traveling can be a nightmare. There’s no doubt about that. Writing is stressful and can be a nightmare. You’re a witness to that.
Dealing with a toddler’s tantrum at the grocery store tries the best of us. Facing challenges like layoffs demotions and dealing with hostile working environment can be stressful and make the future uncertain.
The confrontation with an employee or a colleague. The phone call where we get the news that a loved one has kicked the bucket.
All these are life stressful situations humanity encounters through it’s journey to enlightenment.
But what we should understand as humans is, Life is full with these situations. They challenge us. They overwhelm us.
They mould us. They Alchemicalize us. There is no foolproof way to prevent them or to manage them. No not one.
But there is something that helps. Something that really helps. Seneca talked about premeditatio malorum.
He said that we had to meditate on all the things that could happen to us and that by thinking in advance, let’s say, about a nightmare travel day or the eventual death of a grandparent, we lessen it—if only slightly by thinking in advance that it would eventually happen. The unexpected blow, he said, lands heaviest. Even just saying that to yourself: The airport is stressful. There may be delays.
But I’ve dealt with that before, and it’s important for me to try to relax and take things as they come. This doesn’t seem like much but it is.
It helps! Waiting only becomes stressful when one is in anticipation. But when we say to ourselves, this is part of life and relax into it, it lessens the load of waiting.
Dr. Becky Kennedy, whose book Good Inside I spoke about some time (great podcast episode, too!), calls this “emotional vaccination.” In the same way that a vaccine exposes our body to a manageable amount of the virus or the disease, teaching it how to fight the illness, talking to ourselves (or our children) about what is going to happen in advance of it happening helps us deal with it. It removes the surprise, it removes the suddenness of it.
The last thing you want to do is to face anything—a virus or a trip to the grocery store with a tired kid—defenseless.
The last thing we want to do in this stressful situations is to practice resilience, break overwhelming situations down and focus on what we can control. And now because we are going to catch these situations, we are going to be exposed to the realities of life—but if we strengthen ourselves in advance, we can handle it.
