The goal is to grow so strong on the inside that nothing on the outside can affect your inner wellness without your conscious permission.

How you cope with unexpected stress and frustration can easily be the difference between living a good life and living an unhealthy one. If you choose unhealthy coping mechanisms like avoidance or denial, for example, you can quickly turn a tough situation into a tragic one. And sadly, this is a common mistake many people make.

When you find yourself facing a disheartening reality, your first reaction might be to deny the situation, or to avoid dealing with it altogether. But by doing so you’re inadvertently holding on even tighter to the pain that you wish to let go of — you’re, in effect, sealing it up inside you.

Let’s imagine someone close to you has grown ill, and supporting this person through his or her illness is incredibly painful. You might not want to deal with the pain, so you cope by avoiding it, by finding ways to numb yourself with alcohol and unhealthy eating. And consequently, you grow physically ill too while the pain continues to fester inside you.

Obviously, that’s not good.

If you notice yourself doing something similar, it’s time to pause, admit to yourself that you’re coping by avoiding, and then shift your focus to a healthier coping mechanism, like using the quotes listed later in this post (several of which are excerpts from our books) to help you open your mind.

When you face struggles with an attitude of openness — open to the painful feelings and emotions you have — you find out that it’s not comfortable, but you can still be fine and you can still step forward. Openness means you don’t instantly decide that you know this is only going to be a horrible experience — it means you admit that you don’t really know what the next step will be like, and you’d like to understand the whole truth of the matter. It’s a learning stance, instead of one that assumes the worst.

Reminder: Our 6th annual Think Better, Live Better conference is taking place this coming weekend in Orlando. If you can’t attend in person, get yourself a full recording of the 2022 live event HERE.

The General Benefits of Healthy Coping

Coping certainly isn’t an [Read more…]

Maybe it’s the life lessons I was forced to learn the hard way, or the toll of loss and failure I had recently endured, but a decade ago, in the midst of a panic attack on my 27th birthday, I had to admit to myself right then and there that the cheerful world of possibility I once felt in my youth now seemed dead inside me.  I wanted to feel light and free and ambitious and passionate again, but I didn’t know how.  Luckily, I had a wise mom nearby who gave me some good advice.  She told me that she could still see a positive, passionate young man inside of me, but that I needed to do some soul searching to reconnect myself to him.

As I attempted to follow my mother’s advice, I remembered that I used to have several daily reminders written on post-it notes hanging on my bedroom wall when I was a teenager.  I called them my “10-second reminders.”  I would pause for 10 seconds and recite one to myself whenever I felt a wave of anxiety coming over me.

So, I wrote down a few of those same 10-second reminders again, just as I remembered them, and I added several new ones as well.  Then I posted them up on the wall in my home office in clear sight.  I’ve literally been surrounded by these daily reminders for a decade now.  And yes, I [Read more…]