The Extraordinary Everyday
The Extraordinary Everyday
Five Helpful Things to Do When Life Sucks
Life can feel overwhelming at times, but I am here to help. In this episode, I will give you five helpful things to help you stay strong and resilient. We will explore techniques like deep breathing to find inner calm and the importance of taking care of yourself with adequate nutrition, hydration, and rest.
I would like to invite you to join our More community, a group of dynamic women who are committed to empowering each other to be their best selves. Remember to cherish yourself, take care of your needs, and embrace the growth that comes with adversity. By doing so, you will be able to navigate life's storms with strength and grace.
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About Wendy Johnson:
I'm a certified life coach for women who want to take their 'good' lives and make them extraordinary with personal development and life coaching tools. If you are going to find your passion, increase your self-confidence, make more money, strengthen your relationships, build your business, and do it with less struggle and frustration then you're in the right place. My programs are for busy women who want to feel better and live well in their everyday lives.
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You're listening to the Extraordinary Everyday Podcast with Wendy Johnson, episode number 49.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Extraordinary Everyday Podcast where women come to be inspired and motivated to become the best version of themselves and elevate the quality of their everyday. Now here's your host, certified life coach, wendy Johnson.
Speaker 1:Hello, gorgeous friends. How are you doing today? I'm doing well and enjoying a beautiful spring day or low 70s. We just had lunch outside and it was really nice. We're starting to see some flowers bloom in our yard and the roses are starting to bloom. Everything is so pretty this time of year.
Speaker 1:Today, I want to talk to you about five helpful things to do when life sucks. Life isn't always extraordinary, and sometimes things are downright awful. When something sucks, I want you to have a process for what you can do and how you can manage yourself during challenging times. Rather than have a disempowering feeling like you're helpless or hopeless, I want you to know there's something you can do to get out of the challenge. When life is hard. Maybe you're going through marital problems or a divorce, or your kids are struggling. Maybe you're having problems with a member of your family. Maybe you or somebody else close to you has been diagnosed with an illness or a state of prognosis. That isn't what we want to hear. If something sucks right now, it's okay, it's supposed to be hard and it's supposed to suck. We can't always feel great, but more than that, I want to provide you with a way to navigate something that sucks so that you don't feel powerless, so you don't feel like it's lasting forever. It's not permanent. It's lasting forever. It's not permanent, it's only temporary and there's ways that you can manage it. However, it becomes a problem when you feel that life shouldn't be hard or when you shouldn't have seasons in your life that suck, seasons in your life that suck. Also, when life sucks, you're not dealing with it in a way that is helping you. You add the worry and the stress and the stuckness. You can make yourself more miserable by the way you handle things.
Speaker 1:So in this episode, I'm going to give you five helpful things to do when life sucks, and the first one is to find calm. Why? Why do you want to find calm? When you're in a fight or flight, your nervous system is in overload and you're not going to have the best thoughts. Let's start with a few examples. Let's say your child has an accident on the playground and you get a call from the administration that your child has broken her arm and you need to get immediate emergency care. This isn't what you needed, because you're already having a hard day, maybe the week before your spouse tells you that he wants a divorce, and this last month you had a water pipe break in your house and you had some flooding in your kitchen and you have to make a makeshift kitchen for the next six months in your laundry room. It could be any number of things. Your dog is dying, your parent has been diagnosed with cancer or is terminally ill.
Speaker 1:The first thing you want to do is find calm, focus on your breathing for a couple of minutes, close your eyes and watch your breath. Bring yourself back to the moment. Give yourself some peace. We often breathe shallow in our chest when we're upset and when we're in a fight or flight. You want to take deep abdominal breaths. Also, you can focus on what's around you for a couple of minutes, rather than dwelling on a cycle of thoughts in your head. Look around, observe what you see, sit at a window and look outside, go outside, smell the flowers, look up at the clouds, watch a bird singing. When you focus, you bring yourself back to the present moment and you're slowing your nervous system down. When you do this, it's easier to focus and be here now and think better thoughts.
Speaker 1:The second thing you can do is to take care of yourself. When things are hard, the first thing people do is stop eating and they're losing sleep. At night, they're tossing and turning and they're thinking about all their worries. This is when you want to take extra care to do things that are going to help you. You want to eat nutritional food. You want to drink plenty of water, get plenty of rest and sleep. If you've had a rough night sleeping, take a nap. Avoid watching negative news and drama during this time, and get movement by stretching or doing yoga, tai chi or taking a walk around your neighborhood. Rather than staying inside your home, go outside and get some fresh air. This will do wonders for your emotions and will help you and your immune system to stay strong.
Speaker 1:And the third thing you can do is to focus on what you can control. Shift your attention away from what you can't control and back to yourself, which is what you can control, because you can always control how you think, how you feel and what you do. That is going to feel the most empowering. Do. That is going to feel the most empowering when something sucks. When you think about whatever it is that sucks for you ask yourself how do I want to think about this? How do I want to feel about this? You can't control what other people say or do. You can't control rude comments that your mother-in-law has said to you. You can't control a layoff. Your spouse comes home and says he's been laid off from work. You can't control a leaking roof or pipe in your home and you certainly can't control the weather.
Speaker 1:One of my clients came to me and said my spouse told me that he's miserable and we've been married for almost 30 years. And he came to me and he said I am miserable. And the first thing my client said to me was what should I do? She doesn't know what she can do. This isn't a bad question for her to ask, but it's not the most helpful question she can ask first. The most helpful first question to ask yourself is how do you want to think and feel about this situation? And she told me that she wants to feel love and compassion for herself and for her spouse, for how he's feeling. He's feeling.
Speaker 1:What we do is often think by default that when other people come to us, we make it our problem to solve. We can't help that the spouse is miserable. If somebody isn't happy with their life, the most important question you can ask is what's going on for you, what do you want to think and what do you want to feel. You're not trying to solve for the other person. Most of the time, we want to take action right away. What can we do to help this? How can I resolve this? Whenever you immediately come to that conclusion, when you're struggling with something, remember to ask yourself how do I want to think and feel about this? And then you can show up with those thoughts and feelings that you want to have and you will take much better action under the circumstances. When you're feeling loving and compassionate and confident and empowered, you're going to have a lot reflects those emotions Rather than being angry or resentful and upset. This isn't your problem to solve and those feelings aren't useful.
Speaker 1:The fourth helpful thing you can do is to create solutions. Oftentimes we think we don't know all the steps to create a solution and we oftentimes think that there's no step to take. But there's always a next best step and we get to decide what that is and if that step doesn't create the result we want, then we'll try another step and then we'll try another thing and another thing until we come up with a solution that can feel very empowering. When you create solutions, you're focusing on what you can control, regardless of the challenge. You're focusing on what you can control, regardless of the challenge. So, when something sucks, ask yourself what do you want to do next? This gets you out of feeling stagnant and stuck and in those spiraling thoughts that tend to repeat themselves over and over. This gets you focused on your future and solving for the challenge, instead of feeling helpless. Also, it will help you not dwell on the past, on something that may have happened several weeks ago. Oftentimes, when a person is going through a difficult situation, they will avoid doing anything and they think that things will go away. And if we don't create solutions to move us forward, we will be stuck and helpless.
Speaker 1:When we're creating solutions, we need to be patient because this may take time. We don't have control over how long a situation will go on. We have to be compassionate with ourself, keep our strength up, get help if we need it and focus on the future. And the last way is to tap into gratitude. It's easy to feel sorry for yourself and have a victim mentality when you're only focusing on the problems and the negative things going on in your life.
Speaker 1:This is the time where you want to tap into the simple things that are going well. Focus on the basic things that many people don't have access to. Be grateful that you have plenty of clean water, a roof over your head, a comfortable bed to sleep in, nutritious food to eat, clothing to wear. Look at what's going well in your life. Life isn't all doomsday. When we have a challenge, we're only focused on that challenge. But there's so many other things that are going well and we need to be grateful for those things and appreciative. Remind yourself that this season of your life is temporary and not permanent. It's okay to be frustrated, but at the same time, can we look for those things that bring us joy. If you actually accept that this is how life is from time to time and you stop clinging to a dream of perfection, then your life will become simpler and lighter and you'll be less stressed out and be able to constructively handle that bad day when it does show up on your doorstep. Maybe it's many bad days that are very hard, but know that it's temporary.
Speaker 1:So let's recap the five helpful things to help you when life sucks. The first one is to find calm. Focus on your breathing, focus on what's around you for a few minutes. Number two take care of yourself. Number three focus on what you can control. Number four create solutions. And number five tap into gratitude, even though you're doing your best and you feel like your life honestly sucks. Having these tools will help you. They will empower you, they will give you your life back, and they may even give you ease and peace and grace during this time. We're not always going to have a rain cloud over our head. I hope that you enjoyed this episode and I look forward to being with you next week. Friends, take care. Bye-bye.
Speaker 3:Hey, if you enjoy listening to this podcast, you have to come check out More. You, my community of like-minded women. We show up to create the highest version of ourselves and elevate the quality of our everyday. Along the way, head over to ontracklifecoachingcom forward, slash, join. That's O-N-T-R-A-C lifecoachingcom forward, slash, join. I'd love to see you in there. And if you haven't grabbed your copy of the Mindset Makeover, head over to ontracklifecoachingcom forward slash makeover and get a copy that teaches and inspires you to show up as your most extraordinary self.