How to Prosper When Life Gets Unbearable
Riddle me this: How can you lose $20,000 in five minutes and be happy about it?
People usually think this is a trick question. However, any situation, regardless of how awful it seems at the time, can be transformed into a positive motivational experience when you know the proper mediation strategies. While you may be skeptical, it is possible to psychologically prosper from the inevitable disasters of life: losing money, job termination, corrosive relationships, grief from the deaths of friends or family, and dozens of more mundane yet unavoidable sorrows.
According to many philosophers there are two kinds of people. We all know some who always seem to be having a terrible day, living life as grumbling, pessimistic curmudgeons. Yet we also know others who are generally upbeat, optimistic, and enthusiastic, despite having the same problems as everyone else. The difference between the constant complainer and the habitually happy is driven by two motivational beliefs: the realization that things will not always go as planned, and the understanding that we can control and regulate our subjective responses to life’s tragedies, disappointments, and curveballs.
The answer to my riddle is simple. If you take a risk and fail, you want to minimize your losses, right? That is exactly what Alec Torelli does when he plays professional poker. By the time he was 27, Torelli had earned over $3 million from tournament play. Torelli regularly loses large sums of money, because he cannot control the cards he is dealt. But he does control his response to his hand. If he knows he cannot win and folds, he has made the right decision in a hopeless situation. He might have lost $20,000 on one hand, but he kept himself from losing $200,000, so he’s content to see the smaller sum go. Like poker players, we can convert negativity into emotionally beneficial outcomes by focusing on improving ourselves, rather than ruminating about life’s unavoidable misfortunes that are beyond our control.
Converting Negative Events Into Positive Energy
Most of us will not be playing competitive poker like Torelli, but we will inevitably encounter misfortune. For example, my book, Hack Your Motivation, was dedicated to my son Robert, who unexpectedly died at age 30. His passing was one of the most difficult times in my life, yet also a time of vast personal growth for me. How could this tragic event possibly be positive?
When Robert died, I fully realized that I underappreciated many of his wonderful attributes—things that I had sometimes not noticed or taken for granted while he was alive. After his death, I modeled his best behaviors and as a professor began to teach others his kind ways. I began to transform a parent’s most devastating emotion — grief for their child — into a positive legacy.
The transformation process took time and fortitude, but a person who is aware and perceptive can repress spontaneous emotional reactions, stop rumination in its tracks, and convert their energy toward constructive resolutions to terrible situations. Using the strategy does not mean blocking out reality or forgetting the loss of a loved one, but it does mean taking active control of your behavior to convert negative events into positive energy.
Redirecting Focus to a Productive Outcome
Believe it or not, bad things will happen to you too. Failure, disappointment, and rejection are part of life. People typically react to misfortune automatically—many physical and psychological responses are beyond our control. We may show classic avoidance behaviors and feel nauseous, confused, shocked, distraught, or angry. But after a few minutes, we begin to reflect on what has happened and start to cope.
Our coping behaviors come from learned patterns of behavior developed over a lifetime. In other words, we make a choice about how to cope based on what we know. Some people dwell on negative consequences; they might see losing a job as a deflating end point, not an opportunity to succeed and make more money elsewhere. These people will direct their cognitive horsepower toward quelling the negative emotions rather than toward future goals and objectives. They might try to mask or disguise the emotion with nonproductive self-handicapping strategies like drinking or substance abuse. This type of coping may squash the feeling but does not offer real recovery from the catastrophic event.
Others consciously and deliberately regulate their emotions by redirecting the energy hijacked by the emotion into something productive, aiming to transform the negative situation into a positive outcome. This second coping strategy does not mean the uncomfortable emotion disappears, but it does shift the focus from the feeling and away from the contributing event. The repositioning strategy asks you to realize that your emotion is nonproductive and doesn’t help you recover; rumination wastes energy that we could use to focus on our goals. Sometimes directing our energy is the only aspect of recovery that we can control, and our only way forward is to work toward previously set goals or to be motivated by the event to create new ones.
The grief example I described is extreme and an enormously challenging example of emotional restructuring. Instead, start small. Think of what annoys you most. Maybe you get peeved when your spouse runs the washing machine when you are in the shower, dousing you with ice water. Maybe, like me, TV commercials showing sick children or abused animals make you feel hopeless and sad. You don’t have to fall in line with the advertiser’s goal and contribute money to get rid of the negative emotion. Try restructuring instead. Close your checkbook, redirect your cognitive horsepower, and volunteer your time, talk to others about how to help, or incorporate the cause into other meaningful goals such as educational or career plans. Do anything that leads to goal progress, which will make you feel good and avoid the feeling of being controlled by the emotion.
However you decide to use emotional regulation strategies, it’s crucial to direct your focus away from the emotion and toward a productive outcome. To cope, you must believe that you can influence your environment. If you doubt that you can bring about the life outcomes you want, you will be more easily sucked under by the dark tides of emotion. Worry and stress come out of familiar, stereotypical patterns of coping that are easy and require little conscious thought. Avoid reactionary indulgence in the form of excessive eating, drinking, substance abuse, or other vices by directing conscious, focused effort toward productive goals.
Adaptation takes work. Despair will linger unless your intentional actions produce change and achieve your goals. Remember what you value, and use the strategies to get what you want, despite the occasional but inevitable lemons of life.