How To Deal With An Emotionally Difficult Week?
Surely more than once you have had to face especially hard days. That dreaded emotionally difficult week that keeps you in a constant state of nerves and doesn’t let you get a good night’s rest. Whether for work, important personal decisions, family health, unforeseen expenses …
As we can see, the reasons can be varied, but the sensations that they produce us are usually always the same: anguish, restlessness and discomfort. How can you cope with this emotionally tense peak in a satisfactory way? We give you some keys to face that event, challenge or evaluation that causes you so much anxiety, avoiding that this emotion somehow kidnaps you.
Learn to react well
If you know how you usually react to different types of events, you are in luck. Thus, you can choose if you like that reaction or, on the contrary, you would prefer to change it. If you do not know or intuit what your behavior is going to be at a certain moment, pay attention and take a trip through your past to collect clues. You may not find a situation exactly the same, but you will find one that shares some important characteristics.
For example, when your boss raised his voice at you, what did you do? Did you go to your site, sit down and continue working or did you add to the escalation of the tone of voice? Did you go to vent to your colleagues? The response you get will give you clues as to how you can react to a specific situation in an emotionally difficult week.
Let’s put other cases. If your child fails two subjects, do you immediately punish him? Do you decide to give him a private teacher? Do you yell at him? Depending on your attitude to their lack of responsibility, you will know how you can act in similar circumstances. In short, self-observation and personal knowledge.
Count to ten and breathe
Although it may seem very obvious, the truth is that, when it comes down to it, we do it very little. It is not necessary to count out loud and expire in an exaggerated way : each person will do better one method or another. Let’s say that instead of counting from 1 to 10, it is more practical for you to get up from your chair and look out the window for a few seconds to relax. Then do it!
The important thing is that you are able to control that nervousness. Furthermore, the anxiety peak follows a normal distribution. That is, it reaches a maximum that lasts relatively little. And if you manage to overcome that moment and do not adopt elusive attitudes, you will notice how the feeling of anguish decreases little by little.
Seek to laugh and have fun
A joke, a comedy show, a comical situation … Find something that will ease your internal discomfort and allow you to escape for a while. Nowhere is it written that positivism is prohibited in an emotionally difficult week. Quite the opposite. Advocate for him and embrace hope, fun, love, gratitude. They are great ways to charge your body with energy.
Keep your hourly routine
Keeping your schedule the same and doing things that keep you in the weekly routine can be beneficial. For example, if you know that Friday is going to be the day you are going to have the most stress, it is best that you support yourself as much as you can in the routine, so that you overload yourself as little as possible saving on the number of decisions to be made.
Adequate food and rest
Buying a chocolate ice cream and sitting on the couch for hours, although it is something very common in movies, is not a decisive attitude that will help you face an emotionally difficult week. Everything we eat has an effect on our body, and getting high on sugar does not improve or increase our coping resources.
Quite the opposite. You may feel really good for the first few minutes (chocolate contains tryptophan and produces serotonin), but its effect is temporary. That is why it is very likely when you get up from the sofa, you feel even worse, because you have not changed your mood in the most intelligent way, you have somehow masked it and ignored it.
It is preferable that you sleep the hours you need and that you include in your diet those nutrients that your body needs, especially in regard to vitamins and minerals . Also, try not to saturate it with extra calories without any nutritional value.
Assess the difficulty of the situation
Not all people perceive events in the same way. Maybe one of your children faces a family birthday with great nervousness because they do not like social gatherings, when they are exciting for you. These differences in perception make a difference.
Therefore, closely related to learning to know your reactions is knowing how to assess the difficulty of the situation. Does that event paralyze you? It bothers you? Does it bother you? You will gain a lot if you are able to make a good estimate of the importance you give to each circumstance and how it affects you in your day-to-day life. If it prevents you from going about your day normally, it may be time to try to incorporate more emotional control in that moment.
In this sense, the event itself is important, but our way of dealing with it is no less important. Therefore, the more prepared we are to face that emotionally difficult week, the better off we will get out of it.
