- Have you ever felt stressed and depressed?
- Have you ever felt you aren’t good enough?
- Have you ever felt there is no light at the end of the tunnel?
- Do you often soul search with negative impact?
Whether you’re feeling this way now or have done in the past, or even if you are lucky enough never to have been in the ‘dark tunnel’ unable to see where you’re going, which way to go or even know where you are going, this may be helpful for you to identify and resonate with others who may be in this place right now.
I come with personal experience and remember feeling all the above when my children were small. I watched a documentary on the television where they interviewed several people who were describing how they felt. I was utterly stunned to identify I was feeling what they all were feeling, and it had a name, depression! Back then it was taboo and not discussed, even today people still find it hard to talk about or share with others, let along ask for help.
What did help me was hearing those people being interviewed saying there was light at the end of the tunnel, they could see it, they were using great strategies to enable them to focus more on the positive and with the help of these, family, friends, colleagues or professional people they were getting through it or had it behind them. This gave me hope and was my ‘saving grace’ so to speak.
Here are FIVE areas with which to focus on to work towards finding the light at the end of the tunnel:
- Try and identify the reason or reasons why you got stuck in the first place – Sometimes it’s helpful to write these down and acknowledge and recognise what it is so it becomes more tangible; this way you can work on how you might move forward
- Avoiding burying your head in the sand – Trying to do the above can be hard, scary and something you want to avoid like the plague, but worrying about facing it is worse than doing it and actually seeing exactly what it is, this way you know what you’re dealing with, and sometimes if you’re lucky, it often doesn’t feel quite to bad
- Determine what gives you joy – When we are in this ‘depressed’ state, we can’t see anything positive, don’t do anything for ourselves and just want to wallow in our own misery, but forcing ourselves to consider what gives us joy and seeing how we can incorporate this into our lives helps, often it’s more around re-introducing joy into our lives – writing these down helps as well as picking one main one to work on first
- Finding your happy place – Determining what gives you joy can help you find or work towards your happy place again; when we focus on this we are stimulating all the positive hormones rather than feeding all the negative ones; again this can be hard work and whilst difficult, trying to keep thinking about this can be helpful both mentally and emotionally
- Starting at the being thankful and grateful point – We know there are many people worse off than ourselves but this doesn’t make us feel any better, however, focusing on what we do have to be thankful for and grateful for is a great starting point
Subscribe to Success Factor Wednesday Wake-Up: www.successfactor.co.nz
#successfactor