How the Worst Christmas Ever Became the Best Gift of My Life
7 ways to approach any obstacle you face
11 years ago my Christmas season absolutely sucked. My first love dumped me, my grandfather died after 10 years of battling Alzheimer’s Disease, and my childhood dream of playing baseball ended. It was only 6 months after college and my life was complete chaos. According to my doctor, my brain was mostly empty of any “happy” molecules.
11 years later, I hardly recognize this version of myself.
If you spend enough time on earth you will experience some level of depression. It’s one of the best gifts that you could ever receive. Whether you have had depression or not, there is a rock bottom in all of our stories. Wherever you are on your journey, here are 7 ways you can take life’s difficult experiences and upcycle them into powerful personal growth.
Embrace the full spectrum of uncertainty
Hitting rock bottom taught me the importance of getting comfortable with uncertainty. No matter what the status quo is for any area of your life, it will change. If you embrace that reality and release your expectation of certainty, you gain control of your life.
It is easier to embrace the positive uncertainty that comes with new experiences delivering joyful emotions. These are the moments where gratitude comes freely because the feelings they create have a lightness to them. They elevate us.
What takes strength and courage is finding gratitude in moments of pain and despair. When you’ve lost someone or something you admire and cherish, can you find time to recreate moments of joy you shared together? Choosing to ask yourself empowering questions in moments of negative uncertainty forces your mind to deliver an answer. Your answers will surface from your subconscious and remix the cocktail of negative emotions you are feeling towards the experience.
When I lost Grandpa to a decade-long battle with Alzheimer’s, I was angry, frustrated, and confused with the universe. He was an iconic figure of my childhood. Stories of his athletic prowess and work ethic were a staple during family dinner conversations. As young children, we often adopt a heroic perception of our grandparents when we hear stories of their success. They seem invincible and infinite because it is all we’ve ever known.
We all take different lengths of time to process loss. My shift towards healing happened when I shifted from victimized to empowered internal questions. At first I asked questions like “how could this happen?” and “why did the universe do this to us?” and my mind would swirl into a tornado of negative thoughts. When I learned to ask “why was I so lucky to have such a strong grandfather?” and “how can I continue his legacy for our family?” the environment in my mind adopted a state of gratitude and inspiration.
Embrace the uncertainty by responding with empowering questions. You will be surprised how your emotions shift when you change your internal dialogue.
Decouple action from emotion
If we let our feelings paralyze us, we surrender our personal power. Yet this is the most important time to do something. Rather than looking for the right feeling or motivation to start taking action you simply need to act alongside your emotions. That doesn’t mean you ignore or avoid the emotions themselves. If you are angry, feel angry but still do something. If you are sad, you can still be sad and take action at the same time. The simple act of doing something will build the positive momentum you need to overcome your challenge.
There is a multiplier effect in the strength you gain when you take action in the moments you least feel like it. If you are facing those moments right now, just take one tiny step forward towards the progress you seek. It will be worth it.
If you are reading this and have already defined a rock bottom moment in your past, take a moment to recognize the actions you took to move forward. You carry that resilience with you right now.
Your body is your laboratory, you must own the science
I am a very curious person. After seeking help and being diagnosed with depression, denial, guilt, shame swarmed my body and my mind. But I needed more than a one-word answer.
Studying the disease and learning as much as possible about it was a form of empowering myself to move forward. Over time and with help, I began to see this experience for what it was — a change in my brain’s chemistry in response to intense negative stimuli. From this perspective, I was able to separate myself from the condition and take ownership over my body chemistry.
Did you know your body creates morphine? Endogenous morphine is a term that means internally produced morphine and is commonly known as endorphins. Endorphins reward you for healthy behaviors by filling your body with feel-good chemicals.
Putting myself into motion was one of the critical changes I made to start building positive momentum in my body chemistry. When you move your body consistently, your body chemistry will support a more empowered mindset.
Ironically, I was working as a strength coach in the middle of my experience with depression. But moving while you are working is not the same as dedicated exercise time. Release your expectation that you need to exercise for more than 30 minutes or it isn’t worth it. When you are at the bottom of a difficult challenge, *anything* is better than nothing.
Over time you will slowly embrace the infinite beauty of your body. Underneath your skin, there is an abundance of chemistry happening and when you take ownership of it, you become a powerful scientist.
Hug your thoughts
The power of thoughts and their impact on your life is mainstream now. The next step is embracing this knowledge and applying it to our daily reality. One way to apply more control to your thoughts is not to control them at all. Let them run free and appear in abundance. Attempting to control the speed and content of your thoughts is futile. Your brain is a fertile playground and forcing any control on it will stifle your potential to create.
Instead, a more productive way to harness the power of your thoughts is to hug them. Regardless of the content of your thoughts, picture in your mind that you are hugging them with full acceptance. Give them the biggest, strongest hug you mentally can. This practice can transform your relationship with yourself.
After you’ve done this you have created a space to then decide how you will move forward with that thought. Will you accept it as worthy of future repetition? Does it serve what you really want? Or will you acknowledge it as a thought from the version of yourself you are moving away from?
Treating your thoughts in this way has a softening effect on their intensity. You are separating who you are from what you think and giving yourself the power to choose how you filter thoughts in the future. In some ways, you become a Tai Chi master of your thoughts capable of ebbing and flowing gracefully around the dojo of your mind.
Hugging your thoughts is a powerful practice you can infuse throughout your day. Whether you devote a specific time to existing with your thoughts during meditation or you are moving throughout your normal daily events, you are always having thoughts and you can always give them a quick hug.
Your achievements are not your identity
Leading up to my rock bottom, I defined myself by what I achieved. Baseball games won, racing medals earned, high grades, Ivy League caliber SAT scores, attractive partners, the list goes on. Each of these achievements is a transient moment that has a fleeting effect on our mind’s chemistry. It feels great to have a dopamine rush after winning a game, achieving a grade, or getting into a top college. Those moments need to be hugged just like our thoughts and filtered for what they are: moments in time.
If you define yourself by brief moments of achievement, your identity becomes transient like clouds rather than immoveable like mountains.
The act of separating your identity from the challenge you face creates the space you need to start moving in the direction you want. You are not your condition or your current circumstance. The condition or circumstance just exists at the same time that you exist. I had to stop telling myself “I am depressed” and start telling myself “Depression is a temporary state that exists right now.” This state was a valley on my mountain. A subtle yet powerful shift happens when you use internal language to separate yourself from where you don’t want to be.
Seeking support is a sign of strength
The hardest lesson I learned during the worst Christmas of my life was the power of people. Each of the lessons above is a way to tackle adversity on your own. One critical way to amplify the work you do on your own is by getting support.
With an identity built on personal achievement, I had the limiting belief that everything I did in life was done by me and me alone. Asking for help was weak and I was strong. I failed to recognize that the clouds I reached were really mountain peaks supported by those around me. In order to benefit from the power of support, you need to consciously acknowledge that other people are necessary to overcome any challenge.
When we speak with others, the sounds of our voices send vibrations into each other’s bodies. At a deeper level, findings in physics reveal that every cell in our body is vibrating all the time. These vibrations within us and between us physically influence each other. These interactions can have a healing effect if you let them. They allow you to take the mess in your mind, put it into the physical world, reorganize it, restructure its meaning, and release it.
You don’t need to have a doctor diagnose you with depression to leverage this power. Any adversity, big or small, can benefit from the power of people. Whether the people you seek for support exist in your social circle already or if you need to recruit outside help. Leverage your support today to overcome your challenges. Your willingness to do this builds strength.
Be your own benchmark
Life is relative. Convoluting any negative emotions you have about your current situation and associating it with glimpses of other people’s lives will deepen your wounds. It is not a method of healing. The only comparison you need to make is with yourself.
When it comes to emotions, you can only ever be your own benchmark because only your emotions have ever infused your body’s blood vessels. The symptoms of these emotions are experienced similarly between people and that is how we are able to relate to each other. But we can never be each other. You can only compare levels of emotion that you feel now with what you have felt in the past. Making this comparison allows you to properly calibrate yourself with respect to your life.
Because I hadn’t put in the time to define life beyond baseball, I assumed I should be doing what other people did. Creating this impossible benchmark only made measuring progress and success impossible. Be fair to yourself and only compare where you are now to your own history.
Looking at the current state of someone else’s life should not make us feel less of ourselves but it can. We can paralyze ourselves with the thoughts that our journey needs to look like their journey. That’s not possible. Their journey can also never look like your journey. If we focus exclusively on how to improve our journey then you can only ever compare yourself to yourself.
What we can know for certain is the current state of ourselves and how we are reacting to our lives right now. It is healthy to think of where you were and where you are today as long as you embrace this objective truth.
You are the oldest and more experienced than you’ve ever been right now.
Whatever happens next will only add to that experience and provide you with a deeper sense of perspective.
Every challenge we face has a lesson to glean and learn from, even depression. The intensity of the lessons we learn is coupled with the level of emotion we associate with the experience. If you are facing any challenge in your life right now, no matter how big or small, these are 7 ways to help you persevere.
1. Embrace uncertainty as fuel for your growth
2. Act regardless of how you feel
3. Be the scientist of your body’s laboratory
4. Hug your thoughts
5. Isolate your identity from your achievements
6. Seek support for strength, it is not a sign of weakness
7. Be your own benchmark
One last lesson I learned from this experience that transformed the way I perceive every challenge I face is this.
The universe will only ever present you with a challenge you are entirely capable of handling.
If you enjoy learning how to leverage subtle shifts in your knowledge for bold changes in your life, sign up for my newsletter. You’ll get the perspective of an English major turned Engineer for a healthy balance of science and practical experience.
