Not every crisis in your head is really one…

I mentioned this a lot before, some people, myself included just love to plan. It gives us a sense of security and being in control. The problem with people that love to plan is, that unfortunately life sometimes does not work in a way where everything always goes according to the plan we made. Therefore, when life hits us again with unexpected events, we almost always go into a state of extreme anxiety. Even the smallest of things can become a major crisis in our head. Of course, this is not great for our health, both physically and mentally and needs to be worked on.

If we are constantly anxious, our body and mind are on high alert or crisis mode all the time. This can lead to the feeling of constant stress, which will make us deal with the smallest, unexpected things happening in a very bad way. If we constantly feel on edge, we make our life and especially the life of the people around us very stressful.

We therefore have to work on our mindset. Things happen in life whether we like it or not. And they happen all the time, out of our control. The key is to understand that not everything that might be happening to us in an unpredictable way, is to be interpreted as a major crisis that will affect our life in a bad way. As an example, let say an appointment we had gets cancelled last minute. While this is unfortunate and may affect our plan for the day, it certainly should not be seen by us as a life crisis that we cannot deal with. We will just have to rebook and so this another day. Now of course, when we love to plan our life and are used to the comfortable routine of things going to plan, we might not like these kinds of situations, but we should not always go into crisis mode.

We therefore have to adjust our mindset here. We need to build some resilience for when things are not going to plan for us and when unexpected circumstances block us from our achievements. The key is to understand that not everything is immediately against us when this happens and together, we can always find a solution and a way that works.

A great technique here is to take three deep breaths every time something unexpected happens that we perceive as negative. This will allow us to go back from an emotional to a rational state of mind. In an emotional state of mind, we are guided by our emotions, while in a rational state of mind, we are much better able to evaluate things and see the consequence sudden changes really might have for us. It is also much easier to find a solution when we are thinking rationally. This allows us then to fall back into a state of control.

All in all, not everything is a major crisis, learn to think in a rational, controlled way and the life crisis might just turn into a mini hick up.