Priya Mistry

Tough times are inevitable. Wellbeing and resilience expert Lucy Hone shares the three straightforward tactics that she used to get through her darkest days.

I’d like to start by asking you some questions.

Have you ever lost someone you loved? Had your heart broken? Struggled through an acrimonious divorce or been the victim of infidelity?

Have you ever lived through a natural disaster? Been bullied? Or made redundant from a job?

Ever had a miscarriage or an abortion, or struggled through infertility?

Finally, have you or anyone you loved had to cope with mental illness, dementia, some form of physical impairment, or suicide?

Chances are, you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, and that’s true for most people. Adversity doesn’t discriminate.

If you are alive, you are going to have to deal with some tough times.

I started studying resilience a decade ago at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. It was an amazing time to be there, because the professors who trained me had just picked up a contract to train 1.1 million American soldiers to be mentally fit as a complement to their physical fitness. You don’t get a much more skeptical, discerning audience than American drill sergeants returning from Afghanistan. For someone like me whose main quest in life is trying to work out how we take the best of scientific findings out of academia and bring them to people in their everyday lives, it was a pretty inspiring place to be.

I finished my studies there and returned home to Christchurch, New Zealand, to start my doctoral research. I had just begun that study when the Christchurch earthquakes hit, so I put my research on hold and I started working with my community to help them through that terrible post-quake period. I worked with all sorts of organizations — from government departments to building companies and all sorts of community groups — teaching them the ways of thinking and acting that we know can boost resilience. I thought that was my calling, my moment to put all of that research to good use.

Sadly, I was wrong. My own true test came in 2014 on Queen’s Birthday weekend. We and two other families had decided to go down to Lake Ohau. At the last minute my beautiful 12-year-old daughter, Abi, decided to hop in the car with her best friend Ella, also 12, and Ella’s mom, Sally, a dear friend of mine.

On the way down, a car sped through a stop sign, crashed into them, and instantly killed all three of them. In the blink of an eye, I found myself flung to the other side of the equation, waking up with a whole new identity. Instead of being the resilience expert, I became the grieving mother, trying to wrap my head around unthinkable news with my world smashed to smithereens.

Suddenly, I was the one on the receiving end of all the expert advice — and I didn’t like what I heard one little bit. In the days after Abi died, my husband, Trevor, and I were told we were now prime candidates for family estrangement, we were likely to get divorced, and we were at high risk of mental illness. “Wow,” I remember thinking, “Thanks for that.”

Leaflets described the five stages of grief: anger, bargaining, denial, depression, and acceptance. Victim support services arrived at our doorstep and told us we could expect to write off the next five years to grief. I know the leaflets and the resources meant well but in all of that advice, they left us feeling like victims, totally overwhelmed by the journey ahead and powerless to exert any influence over our grieving whatsoever.

I didn’t need to be told how bad things were; I already knew things were truly terrible. What I needed most was hope. I needed a journey through all that anguish, pain and longing. Most of all, I wanted to be an active participant in my grief process.

I decided to turn my back on their advice and instead to conduct something of a self-experiment. I’d done the research, I had the tools, and I wanted to know how useful they were now in the face of such an enormous mountain to climb. But I have to confess: At this point I didn’t really know any of this was going to work. Parental bereavement is, after all, widely acknowledged as the hardest of losses to bear. But, five years on, I can tell you that you can rise up from adversity — that it is utterly possible to make yourself think and act in certain ways that help you navigate tough times.

The following are my go-to strategies that I relied upon and saved me in my darkest days. These three tactics underpin all of my work, and they’re readily available to all of us.

1. Know that suffering is part of life.

This doesn’t mean resilient people go so far as to welcome it in — they are not delusional. However, when the tough times come, they seem to know that suffering is part of every human existence. Knowing this stops you from feeling discriminated against when challenges arrive.

After Abi died, never once did I find myself thinking, “Why me?” In fact, I remember thinking, “Why not me? Terrible things happen to you just like they do everybody else. This is your life now — time to sink or swim.”

The real tragedy is that not enough of us seem to know this any longer. We live in an age where many of us feel entitled to perfect lives. Shiny, happy photos on Instagram are the norm when, as all of us know, the very opposite is true.

2. Carefully choose where you’re directing your attention.

I’ve found that resilient people have a habit of realistically appraising situations, and typically they manage to focus on the things they can change and learn to accept the things they can’t. This is a vital and learnable skill.

As humans, we are good at noticing threats and weaknesses. Being wired in this way is important for us and has served us well from an evolutionary perspective. When we were cave people, our ability to ignore a beautiful rainbow and to concentrate on an approaching tiger instead ensured our survival.

The problem is we now live in an era where we are bombarded by different kinds of threats — from unrealistic deadlines and toxic colleagues to mounting bills or just someone stealing a parking lot from us — all day long and our brains treat every single one of those as though they were a tiger. Our stress response is permanently dialed up.

Resilient people have worked out a way of tuning in to the good around them. One day, when doubts were threatening to overwhelm me, I distinctly remember thinking, “You cannot get swallowed up by this — you’ve got so much to live for. Don’t lose what you have to what you have lost.”

In psychology, we call this “benefit-finding.” In my new world, it involved trying to find things to be grateful for. At least, our dear girl hadn’t died from a terrible, long, drawn-out illness. She died suddenly, instantly, sparing us and her that pain. We also had a huge amount of social support from our family and friends to help us through. Most of all, we still had two beautiful boys who needed us and deserved to have as normal a life as we could possibly give them.

When you’re going through a difficult time, you might need a reminder or permission to feel grateful. In our kitchen, we’ve got a neon-pink poster that says “Accept the good.”

In their work with the US Army, psychologists framed it a little bit differently — they phrased it as “hunting the good stuff.” Find the language that best works for you. Whatever you do, make an intentional, deliberate, ongoing effort to tune in to what’s good in your world.

3. Ask yourself: “Is what I’m doing helping me or harming me?”

This immensely powerful question is used a lot in therapy, and it was my go-to question in the days after the girls died. I’d ask it again and again.

For example, I asked myself: “Should I go to the trial and see the driver? Would that help me, or would it harm me?” For me, the answer was a no-brainer; I chose to stay away. However, Trevor eventually decided to meet with the driver at a later time.

Late at night, I’d often find myself sometimes poring over old photos of Abi and getting more and more upset. At a certain point, I’d ask myself: “Is this helping you, or is it harming you?” I realized it was far kinder to myself to put away the photos and go to bed.

This question can be applied to so many different contexts. For example, you might ask yourself: “Is the way I’m thinking and acting helping me or harming me in my bid to get that promotion? To pass that exam? To recover from a heart attack?”

I write a lot about resilience, and this one strategy has prompted more positive feedback than any other. I’ve gotten scores of letters and emails from people saying what a huge impact it’s had on their lives. By asking yourself whether you really need to drink that extra glass of wine, spend another hour on social media, or rehash the same old argument with a family member, you’re putting yourself back in the driver’s seat. It gives you control over your decision making.

Contrary to what many of us think, resilience isn’t a fixed or elusive trait that some people have and some people don’t. In reality, it requires the willingness to try basic strategies like these.

We all have moments in life — when the path we thought we were taking veers off into some terrible direction that we never anticipated and certainly didn’t want. It happened to me, and it was awful beyond imagining.

If you ever find yourself in a situation where you think “There’s no way out I’m coming back from this,” I urge you to lean into these strategies. Know that struggle is part of life, don’t let your attention get fixated exclusively on the negative, and consider if the way you are thinking and acting is helping you or harming you.

I won’t pretend that thinking like this is always easy and it also doesn’t remove all the pain. However, during the last five years, I’ve learned that thinking this way really does help. More than anything, it’s shown me that it is possible to live and grieve at the same time.

This piece was adapted from a TEDxChristchurch Talk. Watch it now:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lucy Hone is a codirector at the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience and a research associate at AUT University in Auckland. She is also the author of the book Resilient Grieving.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Eugenia Mello

People who have greater levels of self-compassion tend to be more motivated, less lazy, and more successful over time. But just as important, they like themselves even when they fall short.

Psychologist Susan David explains how you can cultivate this quality.

One of the great myths of self-compassion is that it’s about lying to yourself. Or, that it’s about being weak or being lazy. Another myth is that it’s about pushing aside your difficult thoughts and saying, “Now I’m going to tell myself five positive things.”

That’s not self-compassion. When you are self-compassionate, you’re actually doing something very specific for yourself — you’re noticing difficult thoughts, showing up for them, and creating a sense of psychological safety for yourself.

You’re creating a space in which you feel able to take risks. If you beat yourself up whenever you fail or fall short, this naturally inhibits you from trying new things and taking chances. But when you’re self-compassionate, you know that even if you fail, you’ll still like yourself. In this way, self-compassion gives you the ability to experiment and explore, and to be courageous.

In research studies, people who have greater levels of self-compassion tend to be more motivated, less lazy, and more successful over time. They still recognize where they’ve gone wrong, but rather than getting caught up in blame and judgement, they can learn from the experience and adapt and change course for the next time.

So how can you cultivate self-compassion? Start by ending the tug-of-war inside yourself. In a research study that looked at more than 70,000 people, I found about one-third of the participants judged their normal experiences and emotions as being “good” or “bad”, “positive” or “negative”. When you evaluate your life in such a black-and-white way, you’re entering into an internal tug-of-war — you criticize yourself whenever you feel “bad” or “negative” emotions and whenever you don’t feel “good” or “positive” emotions.

To stop the tug-of-war, simply drop the rope. When we experience a challenging emotion like sadness or disappointment, many of us respond by telling ourselves: “This is bad; I shouldn’t be feeling this. Why can’t I be more positive?!?” And then we follow up this judgement with more judgement — we berate ourselves for not being self-compassionate. Next time that happens, try saying to yourself, “I’m feeling sad. What is this sadness a signpost of? What is it pointing to that’s important to me? What is it teaching me?”

Think of your difficult emotions and thoughts as data. They can provide you with valuable information about who you are and what really matters. Self-compassion allows you to acknowledge and accept all of your feelings, even when they’re negative. For instance, you might notice that you’re feeling really frustrated at work. So ask yourself: “What is that frustration a signpost of? What is it telling me about what’s important to me?”

For one person, frustration might be a signpost that their voice isn’t being heard. For another person, that frustration might be a signpost that they’re not growing in their job. By asking questions about your uncomfortable emotions, you’re gaining a greater level of perspective about yourself and engaging your curiosity about who you are as a human being.

When you can get curious about your experiences, you’re 50 percent of the way to being self-compassionate. Because at that moment, you’re not judging yourself and your emotions. Instead, you’re looking at them and learning from them. You can also use this process to figure out the wisest action to take. Follow up your observations by asking yourself: “What could I do in this situation that would best serve me, my values and my goals?”

If you find yourself having trouble being self-compassionate, don’t beat yourself up. When you’re having a lack-of-self-compassion day, it’s really important to not criticize yourself. One thing that can help is to look at yourself from a different angle. We’ve all got a child version of ourselves who lives inside us.

Imagine if a child came to you and said, “No one wants to be with me” or “I’m feeling sad” or “I tried to do well in this project but I wasn’t successful,” would you punish them? Of course not. You’d put your arms around them, you’d love them, you’d listen to them, and you’d see them. Sometimes, as an adult when we lack self-compassion, it can help to connect with the child in you and find out what they need. So when you’re struggling to access self-compassion, ask: “I notice that I’m feeling X emotion. What is it that the child in me needs right now?”

Ultimately, self compassion is about recognizing what it means to be human. Discomfort, stress, disappointment, loss and pain are all part of the human journey. If we are not able to enter into a space of kindness to ourselves, we’re putting ourselves at odds with the reality of life. Another hallmark of humanity is imperfection: To be human is to be imperfect and to make mistakes. Self-compassion is a necessary part of our journey; it’s about recognizing that you are doing the best you can — with who you are, with what you’ve got, and with the resources that you’ve been given.

Watch her TED Talk now: 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan David is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, cofounder and codirector of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, and CEO of Evidence Based Psychology, a business consultancy.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Jenice Kim

Here are three common-sense tips to help you feed your hunger and not your emotions, from dietician Eve Lahijani.

Imagine if eating were as simple as, say, refueling a car. You’d fill up only when an indicator nudged towards E, you couldn’t possibly overdo it or else your tank would overflow, and you’d never, ever dream of using it as a treat.

Instead, for many of us, eating is anything but straightforward. What starts out as a biological necessity quickly gets entangled with different emotions, ideas, memories and rituals. Food takes on all kinds of meanings — as solace, punishment, appeasement, celebration, obligation – and depending on the day and our mood, we may end up overeating, undereating or eating unwisely.

It’s time for us to rethink our relationship with food, says Eve Lahijani, a Los Angeles-based dietician and a nutrition health educator at UCLA. She offers three common-sense steps to help get there.

1. Reconnect with your hunger.

So many things drive us to eat — it’s noon and that means lunchtime, it’s midnight and that means snack time, we’re happy, we’re anxious, we’d rather not bring home leftovers, we’re too polite to say no, we’re bored, and oh, wow, has someone brought in donuts?!?

Similarly, we suppress our appetite for a myriad of reasons — we’re too busy, we’re sad, we’re mad, nobody else is eating, it’s too early, it’s too late, we’re too excited.

Now try doing this: Eat only when you’re hungry; stop when you’re full. “It may seem obvious to you,” concedes Lahijani. Still, think over your past week: How many times did you eat when you weren’t hungry?

She suggests that we think about our hunger and our fullness on a 0-10 scale, with 0-1 being famished and 9-10 being painfully stuffed (as in holiday-dinner stuffed). She says, “You want to begin eating when you first get hungry, and that correlates with the three or a four on the scale and [to stop] … when you first get comfortably full, a six or seven on the scale.”

The reason you shouldn’t wait until you’re starving (or, 0-2 on the scale) is because that’s when people tend to make nutritionally unsound choices. If you’ve ever gone to the supermarket when you were ravenous, you probably didn’t fill up your cart with produce; you gravitated towards the high-calorie, super-filling items.

Lahijani says, “It’s also wise to eat when you first get hungry because you’re more likely to enjoy your food [and] you’re more likely to eat mindfully … When you let yourself get too hungry, chances are, you’re eating really fast and not really paying attention. In fact, one of the biggest predictors of overeating is letting yourself get too hungry in the first place.”

2. Feed your body what it is craving.

When Lahijani was a stressed-out college and graduate student, her eating took one of two forms: she was either dieting or bingeing. As she says: “Whenever I was on a diet, the diet told me what to eat,”; while on a binge, she’d eat whatever was convenient or go all out on foods forbidden by her then-diet. Developing a different relationship with food meant stepping out of those patterns. “Instead of listening to others’ opinions of what I should eat, I became silent and I tuned into my own body,” she says. “I fed my body what it was craving.”

It turns out Lahijani didn’t crave junk food. She says, “I was actually tasting things for the first time, because my mind wasn’t filled with judgment and guilt. I actually found that my body actually craved nurturing, nourishing foods like vegetables and fruits. I actually liked my sister’s kale and quinoa salad.”

3. Try not to use food as a reward or a punishment.

It’s not surprising that we do this. After all, as children, we quickly learn that rejoicing and parties come with cake, while transgressions result in … no cake. But one of the great things about being an adult is, we can establish our own associations. By all means, let’s continue to mark our birthdays with cake — or with fresh fruit and a stockpot of homemade veggie chili if that’s what you prefer. Or, celebrate in ways that have nothing to do with eating. You can set your own rules now.

When Lahijani’s fraught feelings about food eased, she was surprised to find these effects go beyond eating. “What’s really interesting is to see how making peace with food affected other areas of my life. As I learned how to listen to myself, I became better at listening to others, I became more empathetic,” she says. “As I made a point to trust myself, I became more trusting in my relationships and more vulnerable, and as I became more loving to myself … I learned what it meant to love someone else.”

Watch her TEDxUCLA talk here:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daryl Chen is the Ideas Editor at TED.

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Who taught you how to identify and manage your emotions, how to recognize them when they arose, and how to navigate your way through them? For many adults, the answer is: No one. You hacked your way through those confusing thickets on your own. Although navigating our inner landscape was not something that was taught to us in school, it should be, contend a number of researchers. They believe emotional skills should rank as high in importance in children’s educations as math, reading, history and science.

Why do emotions matter? Research has found that people who are emotionally skilled perform better in school, have better relationships, and engage less frequently in unhealthy behaviors. Plus, as more and more jobs are becoming mechanized, so-called soft skills — which include persistence, stress management and communication — are seen as a way to make humans irreplaceable by machine. There has been a growing effort in American schools to teach social and emotional learning (SEL), but these tend to emphasize interpersonal skills like cooperation and communication.

Kids are often taught to ignore or cover over their emotions. Many Western societies view emotions as an indulgence or distraction, says University of California-Santa Barbara sociologist Thomas Scheff, a proponent of emotional education. Our emotions can give us valuable information about the world, but we’re often taught or socialized not to listen to them. Just as dangerous, Scheff says, is the practice of hiding one emotion behind another. He has found that men, in particular, tend to hide feelings of shame under anger, aggression and, far too often, violence.

How does one go about teaching emotions? One of the most prominent school programs for teaching about emotions is RULER, developed in 2005 by Marc Brackett, David Caruso and Robin Stern of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence. The multiyear program is used in more than 1,000 schools, in the US and abroad, across grades K-8. The name, RULER, is an acronym for its five goals: recognizing emotions in oneself and others; understanding the causes and consequences of emotions; labeling emotional experiences with an accurate and diverse vocabulary; and expressing and regulating emotions in ways that promote growth.

As a strategy, children are taught to focus on the underlying theme of an emotion rather than getting lost in trying to define it. When an emotion grips you, explains Stern, understanding its thematic contours can help “name it to tame it.” Even though anger is experienced differently by different people, she explains, “the theme underlying anger is the same. It’s injustice or unfairness. The theme that underlies disappointment is an unmet expectation. The theme that underlies frustration is feeling blocked on your way to a goal. Pinning down the theme can “help a person be seen and understood and met where she is,” says Stern.

RULER’s lessons are woven into all classes and subjects. So, for example, if “elated’ is the emotional vocabulary word under discussion, a teacher would ask students in an American history class to link “elated” to the voyage of Lewis and Clark. Instruction reaches beyond the classroom, too; kids are prompted to talk with their parents or caregivers about when they last felt elated. Researchers at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence has found RULER schools tend to see less-frequent bullying, lower anxiety and depression, more student leadership and higher grades. So why isn’t emotional education the norm rather than the exception?

Surprising fact: While scientists and educators agree on the need to teach emotions, they don’t agree on how many there are and what they are. RULER’s curriculum consists of hundreds of “feeling words,” including curious, ecstatic, hopeless, frustrated, jealous, relieved and embarrassed. Other scholars’ lists of emotions have ranged in number from two to eleven. Scheff suggests starting students out with six: grief, fear, anger, pride, shame and excessive fatigue.

While psychology began to be studied as a science more than a century ago, up to now it has focused more on identifying and treating disorders. Scheff, who has spent years studying one taboo emotion — shame — and its destructive impact on human actions, admits, “We don’t know much about emotions, even though we think we do, and that goes for the public and for researchers.” Or, as Virginia Woolf so beautifully put it, “The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted.”

Parents can start to encourage their kids’ emotional awareness with a simple prompt “Tell me about some of your best moments,” a phrase Scheff has used to initiate discussions with his university students. But he and Stern agree that schools can’t wait until academics have sorted out the name and number of emotions before they act. “We know we have emotions all day long, whether we’re aware of them or not,” Stern points out. Let’s teach kids how to ride those moment-by-moment waves, instead of getting tossed around.

Art credit: TED-Ed. Author bio: Grace Rubenstein is a journalist, editor and multimedia producer in California. Note: The article above has been adapted for TED-Ed from this Ideas.ted.com article. To read daily coverage of the world of ideas, check out Ideas.ted.com. To read more great articles about education, sign up for the free weekly TED-Ed newsletter here >>