On Father’s Day 2015, we experienced a house fire. Everything in our lives changed in an instant. We found ourselves forced to come to terms with a rapidly shifting reality and to move forward without any sense of when things might begin to return to something even remotely resembling normal.
On the day of the fire — when the house was still smouldering.
Sound familiar? I’ll bet it does—because the situation that we’re dealing with right now is, in fact, remarkably similar.
We’re being forced to adjust to a rapidly changing world and to cope with the uncertainty that comes from not knowing what the future may hold for ourselves, the people we care about, the wider community, and the rest of the world.
It’s a lot.
After spending much of the past week trying to manage my own initially sky-high levels of anxiety, I started to look for ways to try to make things better (or at least a little less awful) for other people. Because I’m a writer, I landed on the idea of sharing stories about what I’ve learned about coming through times of struggle. (Spoiler alert: I’ve been through a lot and I’ve managed to come out the other side.)
I’ll be continuing to share other stories during the days and weeks ahead, but in this initial post, I’m going to highlight the specific strategies that proved to be most helpful to my family in allowing us to cope during an extremely scary and uncertain time. In other words, here’s the best advice from my family to yours on getting through the days and weeks to come.
Accept the fact that things are going to be uncertain for a while.
Uncertainly is one of my least favourite things. I really, really hate it. I find it incredibly difficult to cope with uncertainty and I’m pretty sure you do, too. I desperately want answers to questions that are unanswerable right now—or at least in any honest and meaningful way. How long will the current social distancing measures be required? What will be the final toll of this pandemic? What will our lives and communities look like when we come out the other side? At this point, the answer to most of those questions is that we simply don’t know and we probably won’t know for a while. Accepting that is an important first step.
Acknowledge and accept all your emotions.
Give yourself permission to feel all the feelings. Trying to talk yourself out of your feelings or trying to ignore those feelings doesn’t magically make those feelings go away. It simply drives those emotions underground or causes the emotion to get expressed in other ways that could make life so much harder for you.
Seek support from others.
You don’t have handle this on your own. As humans, we’re wired to turn to one another for support. So seek support from others and be willing to offer support to others. When your emotional well is empty, seek replenishment. When you feel like you have an abundance of emotional energy, dip into that well and use it to replenish others.
Pare down your worry list to the bare essentials.
Some things are worth worrying about right now; other things are not. Try to maximize your emotional bandwidth by zeroing in on what matters most in this moment and what is actually within your control right now. Try to put the rest of your worries on the back burner.
Take a gratitude inventory.
Take stock of the good things in your life: the things you can feel grateful for right now. Yes, things are incredibly stressful right now—and, yes, there’s also a lot to feel grateful about. This isn’t just a feel-good exercise, by the way. There is a huge (and growing) body of research to demonstrate the benefits of activating your sense of gratitude. As I explain in my most recent book Happy Parents, Happy Kids:
“People who experience gratitude more often are less anxious and less depressed. They sleep better at night. They have better social and emotional skills and healthier relationships, at least in part because they’re more likely to do kind things for other people when they feel grateful for the kind things other people have done for them. They feel an increased sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. And they find it easier to bounce back from life’s curveballs. Gratitude acts as a buffer against negative events and stressful experiences by encouraging you to treat difficult experiences as opportunities for growth.”
So there’s that….
Identify the strategies you’ve used to weather other challenging situations in the past.
Unless you’ve led a truly charmed life, you’ve no doubt encountered some challenges and figured out a way to work through them. Maybe you’re a great problem solver—someone who is able to look at a problem that has other people completely baffled and zero in on a really creative solution. Maybe you’re the kind of person who is able to radiate a sense of calm in a moment when other people are coming completely unglued! (I long for that superpower.) Maybe you’re good at reaching out for support and offering support to others.
When people sing your praises, what kinds of things do they say about you? What kinds of strengths do they spotlight? How might you leverage those strengths during this time of struggle?
Focus on finding meaning in this moment.
Look for opportunities to make things better for other people—people who may be having a much tougher time than you. Challenge yourself to find all kinds of creative ways of contributing to the common good. The more we can invest in our collective humanity, the stronger and healthier our world will be when we emerge from this difficult time. We have an unprecedented opportunity to plant the seeds for a happy, healthier, more just, and more compassionate world. Let’s do our best to start spreading those seeds.
After the house was repaired (Fall 2015).
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So there you have it: some advice from my family to yours. I’m going to continue to write about getting through times of struggle during the days and weeks ahead. If you’d like to be notified of future posts, just sign up for one of my three newsletters (or all three, if you’d like). Or follow me on social media (Twitter | Facebook | Instagram).
And if there is something in particular you’d like me to write about, please leave me a note in the comments section below. (Yesterday’s post about sleep strategies was the direct result of requests I received via social media. I’m happy to continue to create content in response to what the community needs right now.)