It’s 7am on Saturday morning. Suddenly, construction starts on the apartment building next door. As an irritating metal grinding noise enters your bedroom, you realize that your one day to catch up on sleep this week has vanished. Grumpily, you to try to fall back asleep to no avail. Your bad mood ruins the rest of the day.
Unforeseen negative events have a way of knocking us off course. Not only are they bad in themselves, but they also cause responses in us whose aftershocks can continue well after the event has passed. For more trivial matters, like the example above, they cause us to be irritated and frustrated for the rest of the day. For more serious events, like a death in the family or a new medical diagnosis, they can debilitate us for months if not years.
So what can we do?
I always hated this saying growing up: “Every cloud has a silver lining.” It’s not that it isn’t true; but the way everyone always said it implied that what you were going through wasn’t really that bad, or worse, was actually a good thing.
I’m not here to tell you that. Sometimes bad things happen, and the negatives of those bad things outweigh any number of “silver linings” that you can come up with. If your parent died suddenly or your partner abandoned you to raise two children on your own, I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you that something great just happened to you. It did not.
But it is precisely because these events are so difficult to deal with that we have to try to give ourselves every possible advantage when facing them. Trying to think of any positives that came out of a negative situation can help.
Let’s quantify it. Say your significant other dumped you. We can call that a -100 on the negative scale.
Regardless of how you felt about the relationship, it’s probably safe to say that you’re shaken up right now. You’re probably reflecting on what you just lost and anything you could’ve done differently to save the relationship. That’s natural and 100% acceptable.
What you’re probably not doing is sitting around trying to think of the positives your new circumstances could be adding to your life. Because it is not natural to think of these positives, we must do so intentionally. Otherwise, we might miss them all together.
For example, in this situation, you might have a lot more time on your hands. Maybe you can use that time to reconnect with your friends that you hadn’t seen as much during the relationship.
Now our table looks like this:
Or maybe you don’t have to hang out with your significant other’s friends anymore:
And so, you’ve moved from a -100 to a -80 on the happiness scale. No, the overall event is not necessarily a positive one. But the emotional difference between a -100 and a -80 could be what you need to get out of bed in the morning. And maybe, slowly, that leads to another small step, and another, and another, until you finally overcome the breakup. It all starts with intentionally trying to see the positives.
Sometimes we can add enough “silver linings” that make us realize that a seemingly negative event was positive after all. Maybe when construction starts on your apartment early on a Saturday morning, you use that time to go to an empty gym and have a better day than you would’ve otherwise.
But sometimes, there’s not going to be much we can do to mitigate a negative event.
After experiencing a sudden loss in the family, a friend once told me that he received some great advice: try to think of the best part about the person you’ve lost and incorporate it into your own life. “If you always admired the way that person stood up for those that couldn’t stand up for themselves,” he said, “do the same in their honor.”
No, incorporating the virtues of the person you lost into your own life isn’t going to bring them back. And no, it won’t erase the gaping hole their loss left you with. But maybe using the loss as a way to reflect on the person’s life and acting on it might give you the small measure of power you desperately need in a situation in which you are otherwise powerless. And that might make all the difference.
