Everyday life is stressful, work, kids, cleaning the house keeping it all balanced can be a huge job. We can help reduce stress, call today 724-934-8446 to see how we can help you with stress and anxiety. Also read the 12 steps below on some ideas how you can make dealing with change less stressful.
Preparing in advance
1. Be prepared.
Life is full of unexpected surprises; don’t let this be a lesson you refuse to learn. Death, loss, and strange situations will be a part of your life, no matter how much you may try to shelter or protect yourself from it. The major key to coping with change is to begin by accepting the reality of change and its inevitability.
2. Notice the signs.
Many a time we refuse to see what is before us. The ailing health of a loved one, the restructuring of the place we work at, the pointed comments about things needing to be different. To avoid surprise or shock at the last minute, stay alert, listen and register the signs of oncoming change. Acknowledging impending change allows you to be forewarned and forearmed. Nothing can be helped by pretending things will be okay––they may be, but equally they may not be. Putting in place options to cope with change ahead of the actual change can help you to not only deal with it but potentially thrive too.
◦ Any general talk of redundancies at a workplace should be heeded. Start polishing up your resume, start looking for new jobs and start sending in applications. Even if you absolutely love where you are, it is wise to seek other options. You can always turn down another job offer but it might even make your current position more sound if your employer finds out someone else sees you as worth poaching.
◦ Read about an illness if a loved one has it. Know and understand the coming stages of the illness, including what to do if the situation worsens quickly. If the illness is terminal, learn what you can about making the most of the person’s remaining time and how to make their last days comfortable and pain-free. There will be decisions you need to face that will be better for being informed while you can still think clearly.
◦ If you need to move to another city, state or country, learn as much as you can about the new place before going. Use the internet to read about the new place and to find out about all the equivalent services you’re likely to need to use when you get there. Leaving a loved residence and community is never easy but you don’t need to make the change harder on yourself than it need be.
3. Ask yourself What’s the worse that could happen?
This question will force you to look a the worst case scenario then work back from there. It’s forcing yourself to look at what could go wrong and finding strategies to do your best to prevent this.
◦ For example, say you have been told that you’re going to be moved to a different department at work. You think that this means you will fail in the new department because it’s not an area you know much about. What’s the worst that could happen? You could lose your job. Now work back from that: To improve your chances, what can you do? Ask for retraining, ask for books that you can study to come up to scratch, return to night school briefly to relearn that accounting you skipped over during college, etc. You might even feel it’s okay to express your concerns to a trusted supervisor. Whatever solutions you come up with, you’ve faced the worst possibility and now you have ideas to stop that from becoming an eventuality.
◦ Another example could be the melding of two families because your mom has married someone new. You might think she won’t have time for you anymore or that she’ll disinherit you. Ask yourself: “What’s the worst that could happen?” Maybe it’s that she and her new husband will jet set around the world most of the year or that the new family will inherit things you were meant to get. Now work back from that and ask yourself what you can do. You might raise your worry with her initially and ask that the two of you make arrangements to spend time together at regular intervals or that she clarify the will with you.
4. Acknowledge that there’s only one thing you can control in life, and that’s yourself.
Acceptance as a strategy for coping with change. Change may turn your world upside down but it’s how you react that makes the difference between coping or falling apart. Blaming others is a fairly standard response but whether or not it’s a fair assessment, blame won’t solve anything and it risks turning you bitter and leaving you feeling helpless.
◦ Accept that you cannot change others. Nor do you need to take their actions as a reflection of who you are or of your personal worth. That’s a slippery slope of giving in to fate and disempowering yourself.
◦ Seek to be empowered instead. Empowerment is essential for coping with change in a dignified way. The reality of the change won’t go away but by understanding that you can––and will––find a way through relying on both your own resourcefulness and the help of those who care about you, you will be able to roll with the change without breaking.
5. Be discerning about advice from others.
Some people have a switch that gets flicked on when they see someone else’s life falling apart. Whether it’s rescuer mode or interferer mode is neither here nor there, if the advice is unwarranted and unwelcome, then you do not need to add it to the weight already sitting on your shoulders. So what if Mrs White only grieved a week for her husband and so what if Mr Black found a new job only two weeks after being made redundant. What these people may be failing to tell you is that they’re packed up to the eyeballs with Vicodin, scoffing down half a dozen cupcakes a day or leaning on their already overwrought brother-in-law’s business to give them something new to do. People can be absolutely wonderful when the chips are down but they can also be really manipulative and thoughtless too, and you need to be discerning about peoples own motivations for offering you advice.
◦ If the advice feels wrong, pushy or manipulative, then listen to your inner voice. Thank them for their help and ideas but make no commitments. Just let them know that “you’re working on it” or that “you’re already getting help thanks”. There is no need to go into copious details.
◦ Be aware that a lot of people actually just don’t want to know. Hearing about change and/or loss from others brings fear to some people and causes them to don their armor in the hope you won’t infect them. Let them be––life often has a funny way of bringing about what they fear most. Look for the people who are supportive, caring and willing to listen. Even if you have to pay a counselor, get someone’s non-judgmental ear on side so that you can spill it all out now and then.
6. Allowing time to heal
Accept that the change has knocked you flat. Acknowledging that you don’t feel like coping is the first step to picking yourself and getting up again. There is a lot of emotional pain involved in many types of change, from job loss through to death of a loved one. Each emotional upheaval is very personal and cannot be measured by any other person, whoever they be. Give yourself the time to grieve the change as well as finding ways up and out of it. If you don’t acknowledge the pain that accompanies change, there is a risk you’ll push it deep down and pretend you’re coping. In turn, this emotional time-bomb risks exploding later on, when you’re least able to cope.
◦ For example, perhaps you’ve lost a job and suddenly there is no regular income coming in, no daily routine to get up for and no activity left beyond your four walls. This type of change isn’t just about the loss of income––it’s loss of place in a society that values what you do, it’s potentially the loss of the ability to keep the shelter over your head and it’s loss of dignity.
By acknowledging your fears and pain outright, you can begin to sift through the feelings while coping with the practical realities that need facing now. Be patient with your feelings but aim to stay on top of the practical matters, like informing the bank you need more time, drawing up a strict budget, growing your own food, and so forth. This approach is about being gentle on yourself and can prevent you from avoiding facing the practical issues because the emotional ones feel so overwhelming that you’d prefer to shut yourself down totally.
7. Expect new patterns of living to take time.
Change is a shock because it destabilizes the life you’ve made for yourself to this point. If you had goals and they had been achieved, then change can feel like a slap in the face to your goals. All habits and routines are up for questioning when change interferes, so going slowly and easing yourself into the new is an essential strategy for coping.
◦ Give yourself time to recoup. For example, if you’re grieving after a death, be it a person or a pet, acknowledge that how you grieve and how long you grieve for are decisions only you can make. Nobody else can rush you, no matter what they insist. Time is very subjective and only you can say whether or not your mourning is done with. Indeed, there is much evidence that those who do not grieve end up experiencing breakdowns and the inability to cope at unexpected times.
◦ Recouping is not about giving up to hopelessness. As suggested earlier, cherish your feelings but continue to deal with life’s practical day-to-day decisions both as a way of reintroducing routine to your life and to ensuring that your daily life is not harmed by indecision and complacency.
8. Cherish the memories but nourish the future too.
With grief for death, there will always be a piece of your heart missing but if you accept this and you’re willing to carry the memories as lively as can be for the rest of your life, this will help you reach some acceptance of what has happened. If it is a job loss or some other personal loss that is not death, you still need mourning time to assuage your sadness and grief over a loss of something that once filled a large part of your life. Perhaps a small ending ceremony of some sort will help to give you a sense of closure and allow you to move forward; it may help you to read How to Get Closure.
9. Restore equilibrium in your life
Adopt a purposeful approach to recovery from change. Restating, rediscovering, or finally finding your purpose in life can be a very powerful way of putting change into context in your life. Initially you may feel resistance to the idea that your sense of purpose in life is either missing or skewed, but change can actually awaken the quest for re-examining what truly matters to you. Allow this to be an opportunity to renew or reroute your purpose in life.
◦ Have you been true to yourself in life? Sometimes you might discover that you’ve wandered off the path of what matters to you and that you’ve been pursuing someone else’s dreams or expectations.
◦ Has this change shown you that perhaps there are cracks in the dreams and goals you held for yourself? You might have achieved all that you set out to get, only to discover that this has been a fairly hollow victory. Can the change teach you how to get back to a pathway that aligns with what fulfills you?
◦ Do you still have self-belief? Losing a loved one, a job or a home can shake this aspect of yourself. Remembering that what others say or do does not define who you are, it’s time to restore your self-belief by remembering what counts in your life and deciding practical ways to go about restoring that.
◦ Are you reacting to change or are you shaping the change? A purposeful approach to change and life in general, is to take the curveballs and toss them right back, all the while fielding the other balls coming your way. Change won’t go away but make this the time that you roar back at change and set a precedent for how you’ll deal resourcefully with future change in your life.
◦ Nobody is asking you to dismantle who you are. If anything, change is the very time during which your true character rises to the top. But is that character as polished and healthy as you’d wish it to be? Examine yourself, be truthful and set about improving anything you think you could be better.
10. See change as opportunity.
Change is an opportunity to re-examine the life you’ve been leading to see whether you’ve been making the right choices, paying too much (time, money, effort) for leading a lifestyle that isn’t bringing you happiness or being aimless rather than making choices that make you the leader of your life. Although devastating, each of the following types of change can bring a silver lining:
◦ Grief can lead to greater understanding of the cycle of life from birth to death. It can bring you a renewed sense of purposeful vigor and a decreased fear of your own death. It can shock you out of complacency about putting up with second best. And it can help you renew your investment of time spent with family and friends.
◦ Job loss can lead to meeting people you never knew existed and finding possible new things to do with your skills and creativity. It can also help you to see how little you enjoyed your last job but clung to it just for the sake of surviving. The gain in time from job loss can sometimes be a total surprise, when you find you can save money by doing many things yourself from scratch precisely because you do have the time. It can also be a time of changing your occupation, perhaps with a small skills upgrade, to work in something you really do love doing.
◦ Moving to a new place can lead to meeting new people and opening up amazing new opportunities. It can broaden your understanding of people and your place in the world and it can bring many new activities into your life that you never considered before.
11. Leave complaining and blaming behind you.
Move on. When a change thrusts you into constant complaining and blaming, it can be understandable for a short period of time. Friends and family will rally at the beginning of a misfortune. However, as time progresses, constant complaining turns you into your family’s and friend’s misfortune and does absolutely nothing to improve your state of affairs. Rather, you may alienate the very people who would be happy to support you through your hardships if you turn into a grouch and someone who feels permanently victimized and scolds the entire world for your troubles.
◦ A little ranting is fine at the beginning; a sourpuss for life is someone who becomes increasingly isolated. Do not allow this to happen to you.
◦ Seek to be an optimist who has faced the worst possible scenario but still knows that life will go on, regardless. Do what you can to make things better and remember that action is the best antidote against falling into a heap.
12. Let go of what has happened and move on.
You cannot remain rooted in the current or a past situation. It may feel comfortable and returning to a habit is always the simpler path of least resistance. Yet, change requires change from you as well and you will need to learn to resist turning back to the past and trying to recreate what once was. Forge on into the future and stand proud. Use what you have learned but don’t let it use you.
