Short messages on Mental health, stress and anxiety issues from Respect Yourself, the guidance site for young people to help make good decisions in life.
When you’re thinking in black-and-white, you see everything in terms of being either good or bad with nothing in between. Either you’re great, or you’re a loser; if you don’t look like a model, you must be ugly; if you do something wrong, then you are completely useless.
Thinking errors are irrational patterns of thinking that can cause you to feel bad and sometimes act in self-defeating ways. If you feel more upset the more you think about a situation, you can learn to think in a different way.
You can’t change your height, your age, most of your physical features, or what has happened in the past. But, you can change the way you deal with how you see yourself, and situations, in the future.
When you’re faced with a difficult situation, ask “What’s the best thing I can do to resolve this problem?” Work through the options one step at a time. Sometimes you may find yourself in a situation that you can’t change, no matter how much you would like things to be different.
Coping strategies might include: challenging your negative self-talk; talking to people who can support you; relaxing and reflecting; and distracting yourself from the problem by getting involved in other enjoyable activities.
When we feel like reacting negatively to someone, they are helping to bring out what we haven’t healed in ourselves. How can there be blame and anger towards those that bring up our shadows? Instead, we could replace our resentment with compassion for ourselves and those who hurt us.
We all have invisible wounds and we’ll do anything to avoid them being touched. If someone else accidentally touches our wounds, we act as if they caused them. But, they didn’t cause them, and they cannot heal them. They are our wounds and we have the power to heal them.
When you develop coping strategies, you’re able to build resilience. You’re able to see things in a better perspective and you’ll feel much better about how you handled a certain situation.
In some situations, despite our best efforts, we still can’t fix the problems we find ourselves in. Coping strategies can help you learn to accept situations that are beyond your control and find ways to help you feel better even if the problem still exists.
Being able to stop and think before reacting, to generate alternative solutions, weighing consequences of decisions before you act, and having openness to seeking support when needed, will help build your resilience to adversity.