Tips for Thinking Clearly When Facing Difficult Challenges

I'm sure you've had times in your life when you wondered how you were going to get through.

But the fact is, if you are reading this article, you obviously got through whatever challenge was facing you. You may have judgement about how well you handled whatever it was you were stuck on, but you can't deny that you got through!

How did you do it?

How might you have done it better...or at least believe you did it better, so as to generate less judgment within yourself about how you did it?

Understanding how you perceive, process, and respond to crisis, or any challenging situation, is vital to moving forward and being able to handle these types of situations as well as you possibly can.

So, let's take a look.

One thing you may have observed about yourself in crisis is that it's often difficult to think clearly when you're highly challenged by how things are happening around you.

It'd difficult to think clearly when what is happening is different from What you expected or how you wanted things to go.

Perhaps you were busy saying to yourself, "This can't be happening!", or "Oh no, I can't possibly handle this!", or even, "I'm going to die!"

When your brain goes into denial mode, and then moves quickly into survival mode, it's difficult to get a clear picture of what's actually going on in the situation, or what to do about what's happening.

Albert Ellis, noted psychologist, speaker, and author refers to the phenomenon as "awful-izing." It's the Oh-my-god, Oh-my-god, Oh-my-god chatter that goes on in your brain when you're overwhelmed and feeling out of your league in finding a way out of whatever situation you're in.

But this type of thinking mentally gets in your way and interferes with clarity of focus, attention, and problem-solving capability. Once the primal, reptilian brain is activated, the decisions you make are geared toward keeping you safe.

Decisions made out of this mind-set are automatically generated to insure survival and do not involve much conscious thought. They are a knee-jerk reaction to a felt sense that you are in danger. And whether you are actually in danger or not, the behaviors that come from this process are an assumption that there is a real threat to your safety that must be handled...right now!

How can you get around this mechanism?

First, let me be clear that I am not suggesting you ignore truly dangerous situations. The primal reflexes are hard-wired into us for a reason.

There is nothing abnormal or pathological about an initial knee-jerk reaction to something. If there is a real threat to your safety, this mechanism allows you to react without having to think about it first.

That's really important if you might die in the next 5-10 seconds!

And there is no technique in the world that will override that initial survival mechanism. (Try not jerking your leg when the doctor hits the front of your knee with a mallet!)

But, you can refrain from hitting the doctor!

When the first 5-10 seconds have passed and you aren't dead or seriously injured, here are some tips for managing your primal brain and allowing yourself access to the rational, cognitive portion of the brain which is much better suited to assessing (after the immediate gut reaction) whether a challenging situation is truly dangerous to your actual survival and what is ultimately the wisest course of action.

In other words, it will help you assess whether there's a tiger in the room, or whether what you are seeing is merely the shadow of a couch?

First of all, take a deep breath...or two or three...

Breathing is good! It gives you a moment of waiting, as well as providing more oxygen to the brain to help with mental clarity.

Next, take a metaphorical, or actual, step away from the situation. Give yourself some room (and some time) to look at things in a broader scope, to see the whole picture rather than just the part that is scaring the dickens out of you.

Now, count to three, or four, or ten...whatever is required to stop your head from spinning, and to allow you to plant yourself firmly in time and space. Make sure you are sitting in the middle of the present moment in time.

Finally, ask yourself three questions:

1. What will most likely happen if I do nothing?
2. Is it just my feelings that are hurt? Is this perhaps an emotional affront to my sense of who I am and how I believe I deserve to be treated?
3. What other options might there be for handling the situation, rather than fight, flight, or freeze?

Bingo!

That's where using your interpersonal skills of communication, emotional intelligence, collaboration, compromise, working on win/win solutions, etc. come in!

Give it a try!

You'll be amazed how much your relationships will improve and how much closer you can feel to people in you life when you no longer act as if many of them are out to get you, and when your reactions are kept in check sufficiently so that you feel more in charge of how you respond to situations in your life!

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How Your Feelings Affect Mental Health

Your emotional health plays a large role in your ability to deal with life problems and stress. You can establish good emotional health by first identifying what it is you are feeling. This may sound like a no-brainer, but many people have difficulty honing in on exactly what they are feeling at a particular moment. 

Other people find themselves able to identify what it is they are feeling, yet are unable to manage their feeling to the extent they don’t feel overcome, or flooded, by their emotions.

Good emotional health requires that you allow yourself to be present at the moment, identify what it is you are feeling, and not get stuck or flooded in the feeling. Thus, while your feelings can appear quite real and strong, it is worth considering whether your feelings are based on reality, or personal beliefs or experiences. 

Put another way, you can examine whether your experience of feeling certain things (sadness, hopelessness, anxiety, fear) is based on fact or your own subjective lens. How you approach this task will, in large part, determine your relationship with feelings.

Learn to control your feelings

To take an example, imagine a person struggling with feeling depressed. This feeling can be so debilitating that sufferers feel as if they are drowning in their feelings. Associated feelings of resignation, helplessness, and hopelessness are not too uncommon. Persons suffering from depression may come to identify themselves through their depression, rather than viewing themselves as multi-faceted human beings who have possessed strengths and abilities while also struggling with depression. 

This is an important distinction which often gets lost. By looking at feelings as representations of thoughts and actions, rather than some external, uncontrollable force from which there is no escape, we are then able to apply a more scientific and objective approach to our relationship with the feelings created and stored inside ourselves.

Many depression sufferers are stuck, or entrenched, in their depression to the extent that they are no longer able to separate feeling depressed from “becoming their depression.” In separating the feeling of depression as just that –one feeling on a continuum of many possible, self-generated feelings (generated through our thoughts and actions) – from “being in the state of depression,” we allow ourselves to feel what we feel without “becoming that which we feel.” 

We can now change our relationship to our feelings (and not allow ourselves to become flooded by certain distressing or debilitating emotions) by changing the way we choose to think about and act in relation to such feelings. This takes the “sting” out of the emotion and places it into a range of choices. 

Thus, we can identify the feeling, acknowledge it, and let it pass on through rather than allowing ourselves to be immersed in or controlled by that feeling.

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