When it comes to health, social life, and the economy, we can agree that 2020 has been a bad year.
Covid-19 had brought unemployment, sickness, death, and social isolation like I have never seen in my lifetime. Everyone has been affected. From the North Pole to Antarctica, no country has scaped the virus.
Every day I count my blessings. I am still alive, I am in good health, and I figured out how to make a living with my computer. The only blow I took to the face was my social life. I used to be a social animal; now I am forced into self-isolation.
when it rains it pours
It’s normal to have a bad day, a bad week, even a bad month. As humans, we are used to accepting one failure after another one. A flat tire, a break up with a partner, a business failure, the death of a pet or a family member. We take the bad news in strides, we recuperate, and we move on.
But what happens when we get a relentless barrage of bad news? What happens when you get Covid-19, you lose your job, your spouse leaves you, and your cat dies; all within a short period of time? You feel as if the whole world is out to get you.
A possible way out from the spiral of negativity is to look at your life from a third person’s point of view. Imagine a friend is watching you from a distance, and they feel empathy but they are not as emotionally involved as you are. How would they react? What would they see as a possible course of action? Imagine that you are that friend watching from the outside.
The process of looking at your life from a third person’s point of view is called self-distancing, the process of psychologically distancing yourself from a situation that’s happening to you.
When people use self-distancing, their stress level is reduced and their health doesn’t deteriorate. When people give themselves this mental and emotional space, they are better able to analyze their problems and find solutions.
Of course, self-distancing is easier said than done, but here are techniques that can help you put self-distancing into practice.
Share your spiral of negativity with someone
we are social animals. We feel better when we share our emotions with someone. This someone could be a family member, a friend, or even a complete stranger. When you release your pain and anguish, the act of sharing will reduce the burden on yourself and you will be able to take one step back from your sad situation.
Follow a ritual
when you follow a ritual, doing the same thing ever day, it can give you a sense of stability over your life, thus it can reduce anxiety and reduce the pain.
Rituals give you a sense of control, they can make you feel as if you are doing something to fix your life.
Let’s say that you are in the habit of practicing yoga every morning. Imagine that your cat dies and you are terribly sad. If you go ahead and do your yoga session in spite of your sadness, you feel a little bit more in control of your life, you have already started the process of healing.
The ritual could be many things. It could be cooking dinner at the same time, it could be reading, it could be walking around the park in the evenings. Whatever activity it is, buy doing it, by focusing on it, you begin to take your mind away from your pain.
Having rituals is a reliable way to come back to something that is comforting, familiar, and meaningful, no matter how out-of-control our life feels. The outside world may be full of confusion and uncertainty, but a person can take comfort knowing that their ritual is there for them when they need it.
Accept your negative feelings
However, you shouldn’t try to eliminate negative emotions completely, they are an essential part of us.
Negative feelings are part of the palette of our emotions, like the color back on a canvas, you need back to bring out the light. Having negative emotions is necessary in order to enjoy positive emotions, we need negative emotions to help us survive in our environment.
But we don’t want negativity to be paralyzing. So the challenge is to understand how to get unstuck when you feel overwhelmed with bad news.
The goal is not to become positive about bad things, the goal is to feel less bad about them. To make your suffering and pain bearable. To be able to find a way to move on with your life, to make it through the critical point of sadness and despair so that you can start tapping again on the positive array of emotions.
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