Keeping It Together When Things Fall Apart
How to Stay in Control When Things Get Totally Out of Control
How to Stay in Control When Things Get Totally Out of Control
This article is part of the series on Mastering Depression. The book “Mastering Depression and Living the Life You Were Meant to Live” comes out in early 2021. Get notified when it releases by joining the community right here.
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Too often today things feel totally out of control.
Whether it’s a raging pandemic, another lockdown, elections that drive us into a raging frenzy, feeling totally alone because we can’t find love, friends passing away, or a lost job, it’s easy to feel as if we’re just a meaningless fragment in a cold, cruel universe.
The worst part is the uncertainty. It’s the feeling of powerlessness. It’s as if we’re all on a leaky ship, with no captain and we’re lost in a terrifying storm. It feels like there’s nothing we can do. But there is something we can do.
We can focus back on the things we are able to control. In this article, I’m going to talk about the key things you can do to stay sane when everything around you has gone totally insane.
Adaptation
We’ve all lost something in 2020.
I’ve had three friends die suddenly and unexpectedly. I couldn’t even go to their funeral because they’re half way around the world. I moved to another country and found myself in a frustrating and convoluted tax mess that’s painful to unravel. That’s just the tip of the iceberg and I’m not alone.
Everyone I talk to is facing something similar.
Some people were suddenly spending 24 hours a day with a partner and they found out they didn’t like that partner all that much. Other folks found themselves looking for love and battling terrible loneliness as dating suddenly got very, very hard and nightlife shut down across the world. Parents found themselves working from home while simultaneously home schooling their kids. Others lost their job. Some people went through all of that at once and more.
But it’s not just the big things we’ve lost. We lost little things like going to the gym or going on vacation. I spent my whole life working so I had the freedom and flexibility to travel the world and now I’m grounded with everyone else, looking at the same four walls, day in and day out.
The only solution is to adapt and adapt now.
Take something like working out. Except for the lucky few who love working every day, the rest of us face an uphill battle of motivation. We have phases where we workout hard and where we just can’t make it to the gym no matter how hard we try. It’s hard enough to get to the gym and it feels especially cruel when that gets ripped away from you after you finally got a rhythm going. Now suddenly you can’t workout.
But can’t is the wrong word.
You can work out.
The real reason is you won’t because you’ve gotten used to doing it one way and you refuse to accept the fact that life has changed. You’ve got to adapt to the changes.
You can do bodyline exercises at home with nothing but your own bodyweight. You can get in amazing shape with no weights and no yoga and no climbing wall or spin class. Of course, maybe you love yoga or weights. That’s fine but in a time when you can’t go anywhere, your options are to pretend there’s no way to work out or find a new way to workout.
There’s really only one good choice.
One of the most important lessons to learn right now is to stop using the word “can’t.” The truth is, you were happy doing it the old way and you don’t really want to change. Instead of considering that there’s more than one way, you’ve gotten stuck on doing it the old way at all costs.
If you’re willing to embrace change you’ll find there’s a lot of things you once thought you “couldn’t do” and now you can. Sometimes we have no choice but to adapt and this is one of those years. But to do that, we have to take the first step and try.
If something got taken away from us, we have to find a good substitute. Sometimes it’s not totally obvious what that substitute is but we’ve got to go looking for it. Get on the web, look around, find something to fill the gap.
The only constant this year is change. And when things are constantly changing you’ve got to change with it. You can break or your can bend with it. The key is getting more adaptable. Bend, don’t break.
Examine everything in your life that got taken away and see if you can find a good substitute. Don’t dismiss any options just because you haven’t liked it in the past. Write them all out if you have to and then go over them. Pretend you’re starting with a clean slate and you have no idea what you like and don’t like.
Now find a substitute on that list and get started.
The sooner the better.
The Little Things Matter so Much
Too many of us are spending way too much time in our houses and it’s easy to go stir crazy. The more stir crazy we get the more we lose focus, lash out at the people closest to us or curl into a ball feeling hopeless.
If we’re alone, it’s mind numbing. There’s no external stimulation and that can drive a person up the wall. If we have a family, we’re spending more time with them than we ever imagined and sometimes it feels like there’s no break or place to escape, no matter how much we love our family.
Nobody wants to spend all their time alone or all their time with the same people. We need more. We need a social life with friends and fun things to do like going to movies or museums are parties. Even if you’re heavily on the introvert spectrum, you need outside stimulation. A few small doses of fun and adventure are all we need sometimes to feel rejuvenated and alive.
But right now even that’s missing.
Germany went into a second lockdown this month that closed all the restaurants. My partner and I love to travel and be outdoors and we haven’t done any of that this year. We made up for it by doing date night once a week at different restaurants around Berlin. If nothing else, it was an excuse for her to do her make-up and her long brown hair and for both of us to get dressed up and looking beautiful for each other. We didn’t realize how much that little weekly activity mattered until it disappeared.
It took us weeks to find the answer. We had to find new things to break up the monotony. Since we didn’t have restaurants, we got dressed up at home and made delicious dinners, enjoying every step of cooking and eating together. There’s time now to research great new recipes and go shopping for the right ingredients. There’s time to prepare dishes we would never have tried in the past. This is the time of your life to slow down and enjoy every step. We realized we might never again have this much time for each other and we’ve gone from stir crazy to grateful for it.
Get creative with your time. Take long walks. Go where you can. Get out in nature. Do take-out that you have to drive to, instead of stuff that’s just down the street that you’ve had a million times. Check out flee markets and find something you never expected for a bargain. I picked up an old video game for $5 and a necklace for my partner and it was all because I took a walk to the Sunday flee market a few blocks away.
We’ve also discovered how much the little things matter in life.
Opening the curtains to let the light in. Getting beautiful flowers and taking the time to put them in a nice vase and water them. If you don’t have a nice vase then an old wine or saki bottle will do just fine. But whatever you do take the time to put those flowers on display and to trim them. Take time to stop and look at them and smell them.
The details of life can save you in the down times. When you’re working from home and every day seems the same, it’s easy to get up and work in your underwear all day and stop showering first thing in the morning. But in times like this it’s more important that ever to get the little details of life right. Take care of the little things. Do them every day. Don’t skip them.
Wake up. Work out. Get a good shower in. Get dressed. Open the curtains. Dust off that shelf. Make a good, healthy breakfast. Hang that picture you’ve been putting off hanging for so long. Cook. Have a great meal that takes time and effort to prepare and enjoy each step of the process.
The little things matter so much.
They can mean the difference between crumpling into a ball and getting a happy start to your day. Skip the little things and it can quickly spiral out of control. Soon you’re not taking care of the house and yourself and you’re feeling miserable and wondering why. All those skipped steps start to add up and cut into your mental well being.
Doing the work of life every day is the answer to staying afloat when times are tough. Find a way to do the little things no matter what and they’ll pay off big in your day to day mood and energy level.
Take Care of Your Health
I can’t think of a single thing better than eating well and exercising to keep you happy and healthy.
We mentioned working out earlier but if you’ve never worked out before, now is a great time to get in shape.
When you’re depressed, lonely, going stir crazy, or dealing with incredible adversity, taking care of your health is more essential than ever. When I exercise I can feel the depression and lack of motivation evaporate at a certain point in the workout. Suddenly, I’m charged up and ready to go after staring at social media on my phone for an hour feeling worthless. Exercise doesn’t just help the body, it supercharges the mind. It gets you motivated and feeling good about yourself.
The human body is designed to work. It’s meant to be in motion. The healthiest societies in world, with the highest concentrations of people living into their 100s, all have exercise built into daily life. It’s not optional. In Ikaria, Greece, the houses are all built high on the hill and the social areas are all at the bottom of the those hills so people walk up and down all day long.
In the modern world, where we don’t have such a lucky accident of geography, it’s up to us to work exercise into our daily life. As we’ve grown more and more “advanced” as a society, we spend more and more time sitting on our butts and our health has gone dramatically downhill.
Even worse, our food is barely food anymore. Too often today, we don’t eat food, we eat food-like substances masquerading as food, filled with sugar and salt and a complete lack of nutrition. That “food” might as well be sawdust or plaster because it’s about as equally good for your body and mind. We’ve gotten away from eating whole foods, like fruits and vegetables and we’ve traded them in for mass produced crap that makes us all sicker by the year.
I know because when I was younger I ate terribly. Burgers. Fries. Chilly cheese bombs. If it was loaded with unhealthy fats, salts and sugars I loved it.
Then one day I was just sick of feeling sick. I started reading everything I could on diet and health. I fell in love with the old legends of diet and exercise like Jack Lalanne and I changed everything about the way I ate. I also started exercising and working out as much as I possibly could and in six months I went from 225 to 176 and I never looked back, except for a single year that I faced a severe depression at the end of my marriage. But even with that setback it was once again exercise and eating right that saved me during a terrible divorce battle. I got back on the horse and starting working out hard again. That saved me. It helped me deal with the nearly overwhelming emotional and financial stress and exercise can save you too.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not perfect. I love a good cheat meal now and again. What’s life without a little indulgence?
I also don’t try to workout like a national champion or a Marvel superhero. Wherever you are with your health, start where you’re at. If you haven’t worked out in awhile, don’t pick some crazy crossfit routine you saw Chris Hemsworth doing on Instagram.
Don’t bother with Instagram influencers with perfect bodies unless you just want to get depressed. If your job was to work out all day you’d be in great shape too. Hugh Jackman looked like Wolverine because he trained three hours a day and ate perfectly. Nobody has time for that in the real world so don’t make that your goal.
Start walking. Start with bodyline exercises like pushups and situps and squats. You don’t need special equipment and a fancy gym. You’ve got a gym right outside your door where you can run and walk. You’ve got a gym right in your house or apartment, where you can get down and do some crunches and bicycle situps. Don’t give yourself any excuses. You can workout right where you are, right now.
Of course, maybe you like the gym or dancing or social exercise like my partner? That’s hard when it’s suddenly cut off and it can throw a wrench in the best of intentions. But in chaotic times you have to adapt. It’s hard but find something else that works for you. Find a yoga class online. Find a way to workout, by any means necessary. Experiment. Keep trying things until you find a substitute exercise system that works for you. When life gets back to normal you can go right back to yoga class and dancing but in the meantime you’ve got to find a way to adjust because your heart and mind and body depend on it.
But whatever you do, find a way to exercise now. It’s a habit that will help you for the rest of your life.
Learn Something New Now
Your brain needs stimulation. One of the best ways to beat back age and stress is to learn something new. It gets the neurons firing and growing.
Humans are at their best when they’re up striving towards something. Learning new things fires you up and gets you ready to take on the day.
Today, it’s a thousand times easier to learn something new. It used to be so much harder. You needed to go to the library or back to school. You could only learn at pre-set times and you had to make your schedule around those classes. If you got sick or the kids needed to get picked up, you missed class. Now you can grab an online class, or pick up a free app to help you learn whenever you feel like it.
I wanted to learn German because my partner is German and I’d love to talk to her in her own language. I downloaded MemRise and now I learn while I’m in the bathroom or waiting online at the store or in between calls at work. I learn on my schedule.
The only thing you need to learn something new now is discipline and consistency. Do a little bit each day and slowly but surely you’ll start to pick up that new skill.
In three months, I’m almost through the first stage German course, about 450 words. Not enough to feel confident talking to native speakers but enough to understand ordering food and picking up packages and how to read directions and basic signs. I’ve still got a lot of gaps, but each day I make a little more progress. You don’t have to do things all at once anymore. You can learn in bite size chunks wherever you are right now.
There’s an app or an online class for everything. When it comes to MemRise, the more advanced German language course I’m starting next even uses a custom plugin to MemRise to augment the course, so my time invested in the app will pay off double.
Today, the greatest colleges on Earth have tons of free classes online. Harvard. Stanford. Berkeley. Want to learn to program or learn statistics or take a history course on study the great sweep of European or Chinese history? It’s all there. You don’t even have to pass the tests to get into those schools anymore. You can take their classes for free, right from the comfort of your own home. The Great Courses from NYU offers huge sales all year round for amazing classes so you can usually pick up an entire course for pennies on the dollar.
There’s really no excuse not to learn something now. It’s easier than ever today. There’s a whole universe of ideas out there just waiting for you.
But all the riches in the world are nothing if you don’t do something with them so let’s go. Find a way to get started.
Challenge your mind to stay alert and alive.
News and Social Media Fasting
Right now, it’s trendy to hate social media. Today we love to blame it for everything from the downfall of western civilization to the rise of hatred and violence across the world.
I’ll let you in a little secret.
Humans have always been hateful and nasty at times.
Every generation has something they hate and fear and blame for all their problems. TV. Video games. Radio. Photography. Yes, really photography. Every single one of those has been demonized as the root of all evil. None of them are evil. They’re just expressions of us.
When we didn’t have mass communication networks we did it with word of mouth and paper and pen. They didn’t have social media before WWII and they still managed to spread propaganda and hatred with ease. We love to blame the mirror when we should blame ourselves and human nature.
Social media is the great equalizer. In the past, only a few people could get their voices heard by running through a gauntlet of gatekeepers. Now anyone can get their voice heard on any subject. It also lets us stay in touch with friends and family who would have long ago faded from our lives. I’ve met people on Twitter who’ve become close friends and who I never would have met in real life.
But that doesn’t mean social media is all wine and roses. It’s easy to find all kinds of things that get you furious or fill you with fear.
Fear and dark emotions drive clicks.
People love to post without thinking and to post things that piss off people from different view points. It’s hard not to get mad when you see someone posting something so mind-bogglingly dumb that you can’t believe someone like that even exists. It’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole where you’re rage-responding to someone you don’t even know online, wasting your time and energy when you could be doing something else.
The news is the same. There’s strong, well researched, intelligent news out there and there’s junk food for the brain. The worst of the news is nothing but propaganda and paranoia masquerading as news.
The problem started with the rise of the 24 hours news cycle. CNN rose to power during the first Gulf War when people suddenly wanted news around the clock on what was happening. But most times in life there just isn’t 24 hours worth of news. There’s barely enough news to fill a week or an hour a day. That means big content publishers need to fill the Internet and the airwaves with garbage dressed up as news. Celebrity rantings. Opinion polls. Talking head shows where they just rage at the camera and try to get you fired up and pissed off too.
The best thing you can do is turn it all off or take it in small doses. I regularly take news fasts. I don’t look at Twitter or Instagram or Google News or my phone’s news feed. I ignore it all.
There are even blocking apps to help you. I use them sometimes when I really need to tune it all out. They’ll stop you from getting to any sites you don’t want to see for a few hours or a few days. Download one and get started.
But I also encourage you to develop the discipline to do it without the apps. Use them to help you get started or when you’re really struggling but build up your own willpower and discipline. Refuse to get sucked into the whirlwind.
Maybe you think you’ll miss something important?
Don’t worry. You won’t.
Seriously. You won’t.
If something really, really big happens you’ll hear about it.
Your friends or family or co-workers will mention it or it will get through some other way. Trust me. I’ve ignored news for weeks at a time and not missed a thing. Most things in life just aren’t that important and don’t really have all that much to do with your life.
My mother messaged my the other day about riots all over Berlin, where I live now. For some reason the messenger app didn’t notify me and I missed it. I saw her message a few days later. She was really worried because “the Berlin riots were all over the news” in America. I hadn’t heard or seen anything and I had no idea what she was talking about at all. I quickly looked at some local news sources to see if it was serious and all I found were some local protests that got heated and turned to pushing and shoving with the police. Nobody got shot. Nobody smashed up businesses and set them on fire. There were maybe a few thousand people protesting in a city of 3.6 million. Somehow that got reported as a “riot.”
I wouldn’t have even know about it if my mom hadn’t messaged me.
The protest had absolutely nothing to do with my life, didn’t effect me in any way, wasn’t near me and didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. Here’s the thing, protesting in Berlin is practically a national pastime. People are always protesting something. In general the police and the protestors deal with it really well and nothing happens. It’s a great way for people to get their voices heard and make their position know to the powers that be.
I didn’t need to know about the “riots” because there was nothing to know. If there had been real, wide-spread riots, with people looting and smashing up windows and burning down buildings, I would have surely known by just looking out my window, or when friends in the city started messaging me to watch my step. Otherwise that news meant nothing to me. I don’t need to read it and if there’s something really big going down I’ll hear about it for sure.
Life is hard enough. You don’t need to get yourself all worked up with news and social media that’s designed to get your all worked up.
Go on a news fast and watch how quick your blood pressure drops and how fast you get your emotions in check. Stop refreshing the corona stats ten times a day. When you’re under stress you don’t need anyone else making it harder to cope. The more worked up you get about things you can’t control the more you put yourself in danger of spiraling into a depression when you’re just trying to get through the day.
Do yourself a favor and tune it all out for a bit to get your balance back.
Hope
Humans run on hope and fear but it’s better to run on hope.
What’s the secret of the people who survived the worst experiences in the world? Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi death camps in the 1940s and the essence of his message in Man’s Search for Meaning is simple:
Have something to hope for in the future.
“We who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
When we lose our purpose, we lose our way. Having a purpose gives us meaning and something to go after. Choose something to dedicate yourself to now. For me, it’s writing. It’s been that way for two decades. No matter what else is going on in my life, I can sit down and write and in no time my troubles melt away.
If you don’t have a burning passion like writing, that’s all right. Not everyone does. But have something to hope for, something you’re working towards: a project; a destination in the future; a better body; travel; a new partner; a career change. Have a goal. Any goal. The bigger the better. But little ones work too.
But this is not about wishing for it only. It’s about doing something towards it every day. If it’s something like traveling, then that means saving up a little money. That means having a plan and sticking to it. Maybe you need to sacrifice that extra Starbucks coffee every day or not buy another thing you don’t need on Amazon, so you can put that money aside. It might mean making a budget and checking in on that budget regularly.
If it’s about losing weight and feeling healthy then it’s making a plan to work out and doing it.
If it’s a simple project, like hanging all the pictures in your house then it might mean ordering a stud finder and a buying a drill and watching videos on how to use them properly.
Of course, will smaller goals, you’ll need to keep finding new ones. That’s why it’s better to have a bigger purpose to keep working towards. But it never hurts to have both bigger and smaller goals too. Have little projects around the house. Plan a trip with your significant other. Get a gift for your friend and find the time to wrap it and wrap it well. Little goals make a big difference too.
Embracing Uncertainty
We all live in a house of cards, built on quicksand. We can never find certainty for very long before it’s ripped away from us once more.
Everything we have can be taken away, as Viktor Frankl so beautifully illustrates in Man’s Search for Meaning.
Everything except our choice.
We can continue to choose to fight back against the chaos outside our doors. We can learn to live with uncertainty, get used it, expect it. Instead of being constantly surprise by stupid people doing stupid things or the constant shifting nature of life, we can embrace it. We can stop focusing on the things that are out of our control and focus on the things we can control.
We can control how we eat and workout and how we prepare for the day and how we take care of ourselves and how we respond to adversity. Every day we can make a choice to do the little things in life that make a big difference. As we get hit with each little bump we can learn to adjust and change.
This isn’t easy. There are days you won’t get it right. You’ll wake up depressed or a-motivational or run down. On those days, I just focus on trying to do one thing that will get me over the hump. If I can just start my exercises, then that’s usually all I need to get going and get my mind working again. By the second or third round of sets I can literally feel the sadness and lack of motivation melt away. My mind kicks into a higher gear and I can take on the day. I don’t need to focus on doing 50 pushups, I just have to break through the fog and do that first one and the one after that too. Once I get in motion, it’s hard to stop me.
But there are some days that even that doesn’t work. I had one of those days last week. I woke up super depressed about the state of the world and money and a thousand other things. I somehow managed to not only start my workout, but to do a full work out. But unlike most days where working out was enough to fire me up and get me motivated, it didn’t work. I felt like I was a wet log all day, dragging myself forward. The workout was just enough to keep me focused to get the bare minimum at work done, to eat, and put my sweat pants on but that was about it.
That’s all right. Embrace the down days too. Let them happen. Plan for them and let them come.
We are not machines. We’re not meant to be productive 24x7 all the time. That’s just a myth. Somedays we won’t have it in us to focus and get things done. It’s all right. All your tasks will be there tomorrow. I promise. They won’t go anywhere and the world won’t fall apart if you’re not holding it up like Atlas.
But if you do all the things in this article every day, you’ll have a lot more good days than bad. You’ll have better and better health and more joy and more quality of life, even in the midst of chaos. You’ll feel good more than you feel like mud on the side of the road.
But if you skip them, you’ll slide down the side of that mountain faster and faster. The farther you fall, the harder it is to climb back up. So do the little things every day. Find a way, no matter what.
And then one day you’ll look in the mirror and realize you made it through the storm of the winter of your life and now it’s summer once more and a time to live and love and dance again.
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I’m an author, engineer, pro-blogger, podcaster, public speaker. My upcoming book, Mastering Depression and Living the Life You Were Meant to Live brings together all my wisdom on battling depression and living a life that makes you excited to get out of bed every single day.
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