9 Tips to Cope With Negative Situations

The thing is, as long as you live in this world, you are subjected to the same chaos, the ups and downs, the good and bad, the positives and the negatives of life. You are not the only person facing this.

What sets you apart from others though, is how you choose to deal with this situation. Here are my personal 9 steps to cope with bad situations and create something good out of them:

1. Release your frustrations. Don’t bottle them out because you might just implode. Talk to a friend about it. A listening ear does wonders. Go exercise and release the tension. Journal it out.

2. Realize you are not alone. No matter what you may think, you’re not alone in this. Somewhere around the world, someone else is thinking the exact same thing as you. Someone out there is feeling down and out too, wondering why she is experiencing this. Knowing it’s not just you helps you to get out of a self-victimizing mindset.

3. Being frustrated isn’t going to solve anything. The problem will still remain whether you go berserk at it or whether you think about it calmly. The former will create more problems as your agitation prevents you from making good decisions. I knew remaining frustrated was not going to help me get my 200 pages back, so I focused on what could be done instead (#6).

4. Know you always have a choice. Realize no matter what happens, you always have a choice in how you react. While you may not be able to control what happens to you, you can most certainly control your behaviors. You can face the worst things in the world, but if you make the choice not to let yourself be affected by them, you won’t be.

5. Objectify it. An incident is an incident; we’re responsible for the feelings attached. Remove the feelings and look at the situation objectify. This will help us cope a lot better.

6. Focus on what you can do. Action creates empowerment. It brings possibilities. It creates results. By taking action, you are no longer a passive recipient. You are a conscious creator.

7. Ask for help if you need to. It’s okay to ask for help if it makes the situation easier. Remember, you are not alone in this (#2).

8. See it as an obstacle to be overcome. Life is a journey of learning and growth, and everything happens for a reason. Obstacles are the things stopping you from getting your goals, and if you keep overcoming these obstacles, you’ll eventually get what you want.

9. Identify the lesson learned. There are always things to be learned from every situation. For me, I learned to rigorously back-up everything I’m doing now—even saving files in different versions so I can still recover the last version if the latest version ever gets destroyed.

No matter what bad stuff life throws your way, as long as you cope with it constructively, nothing can get you down.