Stressful Life Events and How to Survive Them

One of the bad sides of becoming an adult is that stressful events seem to multiply and come at you faster and faster. You need to learn to how to deal with them as they appear without breaking a sweat or you’ll be buried. Whether it’s dealing with tricky housemate, or facing a difficult time at work, even redundancy, you’re bound to encounter some less than ideal situations and how you handle them is vital to your success, happiness and mental health.

Today we’re taking a look at how you can handle stressful events, so that the next time you have to move, you don’t find yourself googling “how to move house” while the removals van waits outside.

Attitude

The most important thing you can do to face stressful events, whatever they are, is cultivate a constructive attitude. Learn to assess a situation and identify what you can change, and what must simply be accepted. This allows you to focus on what you can do to make your situation better, rather than being dragged down into inaction by sadness and anxiety about the things that are simply beyond your control.

Accepting Negative Feelings

This doesn’t mean simply ignoring any negative feelings: things like redundancy, sickness or the breakdown of relationships will naturally affect your mood, and bottling up your negative emotions won’t actually make them go away. There’s nothing like moving from one rented room to another to remind you how powerless the modern renter is!

You need to acknowledge and accept that you’re feeling down – without letting those feelings take over. Even on your worst days, try to do at least one constructive thing to better your situation. Even if it comes to nothing, it will remind you you do have the power to affect your circumstances and will ultimately be able to create a better situation.

This leads into…

Planning

When you can see an event on the horizon that brings with it lots of additional stress, try to be ready. If you have a house move coming up you can start to plan for it. If you hear redundancy is in the pipeline, you can do some calculations to work out how long you can sustain yourself for, and where you might want to look for a job next.

It’s important to make sure your plans are flexible enough to account for factors you have no control over. Trying to force yourself to keep to a rigid timetable in the face of a world you can’t control will not just result in failure but depression and paralysis, so structure your plans around things you can actually achieve for your best chance at success.