Every now and then life throws us something - a breakup, loss of your job or a situation that is simply one of those hard life moments.
And in those moments, our brain can literally feel like it is the end of the world and bend towards much darker thinking. You might feel like a failure and experience negative thoughts towards yourself.
Ideally, all of us would have a toolbox on how to deal with feeling down, but let us face it those skills are more than often lacking from most of us. So what can be done, when you are going through a hard life moment and start to feel down in the midst of the crisis?
First of all, become familiar with the concept of " Perspective". Even take it as a personal mantra if you will. Perspective is the knowing that at that moment, there are alternative perspectives to your feelings of gloom. That there are other options and the possibility of feeling lighter again. If nothing helps in the moment, you might just want to whisper "perspective" to your mind. I personally love to use that mantra a lot.
Secondly, know that you are not alone in your suffering. Often times we feel bad in our life situations because we feel as if we have personally failed. This could however not be further from the truth - in fact in this very moment, many will experience the same life situation as you do. You are not alone in it, and neither does this situation tell anything about your worth as a human being. A good exercise here would be to say out loud " I am not alone in this, other people share the same human experience." This concept is known as common humanity and it has been proven to be effective against depressive thinking. When feeling down, it helps us to not stay in the middle of self-blame.
All in all, it is important to resource yourself at the moment of crisis with loving and supportive concepts, so that you can move through what life has brought. Use these techniques mentioned above and take notes in your journal about your process. Most importantly - know that you can make it through this!
