Tips for Dealing with Uncertainty and Emotional Turmoil

If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.

– Leonard Cohen

The past few months for me have been full of unexpected challenges including my car breaking down, physical injury, along with all the regular pressures of life. It’s a lot. I tend to keep in good spirits but every once in a while I feel like laying on the floor in defeat. Thankfully, this is usually only momentary.

Last week a friend of mine posted the Leonard Cohen quote above on Instagram. It immediately resonated with me given my most recent experiences. What I take away from the quote is that you’d better learn to go with the flow and ride the waves or else you’ll be constantly overwhelmed by everything coming at you day after day.

It’s so reminiscent of what I felt during the divorce process.

I thought it would be a good chance to revisit some of what helped me back then and share the things I learned to incorporate here.

Schedule in moments to pause

The world doesn’t stop turning. Everything moves so quickly sometimes that it’s important that we make the effort ourselves to demand rest. And I feel this pause should be aside from and separate to sleep. There’s something about being consciously awake and taking the time to not be burdened by the fast pace of life. An act of resistance, if you will.

My pause of choice was often a guided meditation. I enjoyed using the Insight Timer app for short meditations and songs. My favorite were the soothing sounds of ‘Beautiful Chorus’. I prefer trying to do this everyday but I might also do one out of the blue when I feel overwhelmed.

Take one step at a time

Take one thing at a time, one step at a time. Literally I might be walking around and observing individual steps I take when I’m walking through a parking lot. I find much of the overwhelm I experience is thinking about everything that must happen before the eventual outcome that I want materializes. It can almost stop me in my tracks. It feels so daunting that I get discouraged and have trouble making forward progress because it seems all too much.

However, if I focus on one little thing at a time, even if it is the tiniest of steps it still is progress. During the first week of my divorce, if someone had told me about everything that I’d have to go through to finally get an outcome, I might have thrown in the towel well before I had a chance. Sometimes it’s better not to know and just take one thing at a time. You’ll eventually get there.

Give up the idea that you can control your circumstances

I used to be someone that used to need to plan everything because it made me feel like I had a sense of control. I would stress about a certain outcome and if it didn’t eventuate I would feel so down.

Other times I might try to anticipate certain scenarios and wind myself up trying to think of 100 different solutions to imaginary problems that hadn’t happened yet. Again, an attempt to feel like I could control the situation. All it was doing was making me an anxious mess.

What helped me release a lot of this anxiousness was something that my therapist had said to me one day when we were discussing this topic. She noted that I was very quick to assess and come up with a solution. I told her my mind likes to immediately think of 100 different solutions. She asked me how long it takes for my brain to process that. I told her almost instantly. Then she caught me off guard with this beautiful logic:

If your clever brain can draw up solutions that quickly, why don’t you just wait until the actual scenario develops so you can think of the single solution you need rather than 100 solutions to correspond to 100 different theoretical problems?

I had to hand it to her, it made a lot of sense. And it released me of the need to worry about or be anxious any longer. I had enough confidence in my problem-solving abilities to allow myself to relax and worry less.

Know that some days only require the bare minimum

For me, one of the hardest things about going through emotional turmoil is that it almost feels like a physical ailment. I have often been surprised in the past how dealing with the stress of divorce could often make my body feel exhausted.

On those days when I needed it, I allowed myself to be okay with doing the least. Dishes might pile up, dust might collect, laundry may have to wait so I can lie on the couch for the day. You’ll get to it when you have the energy again but if on this day you can’t muster the energy and you’d benefit from rest, do not hesitate to take it.

Life can be so wildly unpredictable that it’s impossible to always feel like we have it together. Being able to keep going through it all is one of the greatest skills toward resiliency that you can develop.