When we suffer loss or grief, that can lead to anxiety or defeat, how can we manage to come through it as best we can.

The point here is we can come through it, even though at times we feel we never will. 

We human beings are incredibly resilient; we sometimes forget that as we can become so engrossed in the problem we currently face while sometimes feeling we can never feel ‘normal’ or ‘happy’ again. What we can do is to remember:

• Resilient people understand that ‘shit happens’. Stuff happens within our life often connected to grief, loss, overwhelm, and anxiety. Those shiny happy photos on Instagram and Facebook denote other’s happy lives while we feel low, stuck, or overwhelmed. That’s wrong. These pictures are just pictures, a snapshot of a second in time and not the reality of life at all.
• We can choose carefully where we select our attention to be placed. Focus on things you can change and accept the things you can’t change.
• All of us are all hard-wired to notice negative emotions, whereas positive emotions often bounce off us like Teflon. For example, we want to go outside to see the beautiful rainbow we noticed from the corner of our window.  We walk out our front door. We see a damaged garbage bin at the front of our house. We focus on the damaged garbage bin. We focus on that and ignore the rainbow. 
• Choosing to release our trauma or overwhelm, once we know how, helps us move forward faster. Helps us to refocus on the positives.

 We can all choose what we focus on.

To survive, we need to focus on some positives. We call this benefit finding. 

•  Set 3 things to be grateful for every day. Research indicates that when we focus on three good things each day, we achieve higher rates of gratitude and happiness with less depression and sadness. We often need permission to feel grateful and happy (especially if experiencing grief) to focus on what is good in my world. 
• We ask ourselves – Is what I am feeling helping or harming me? Am I doing something that is causing me more distress or hurting me? If we are, then Stop it, at least until a later time you can manage better. Is holding on to old feelings of anger or frustration, helping or harming you.

 Losing someone dear can devastate us. Continuing to look through all the happy snaps can drive us further down, especially in the initial days, weeks, and months. Asking yourself if this thought, behaviour, or feeling is harming or helping me puts you back into the driver’s seat. Maybe putting them away for a while to focus on the here and now, the 3 good things we have in our life to focus on each day – perhaps it is other family members, our health, a great job, opportunity, ability to help others.

Simple things like getting better sleep can aid our processing to function better and move forward faster.

Resilience is within our own hands. Resilience requires ordinary processes we all have, and we can all give it a go. It may not remove all the pain, but it helps us to live with possibility and gratitude. The choice is ours even if we feel …..

Read more from Dr Karen