What to Tell Yourself During Tough Times?

Whether you want to believe it or not, tough times are bound to come in your life from time to time. It’s easy to go tumbling down the rabbit hole of despair, to blame yourself, to blame others, or to give up.

It’s easier for self-doubt to seep in and for negative thoughts to take the front seat.

“Why me?”

“This always happens with me.”

“This is how I am going to be always.”

“I won’t ever succeed.”

These are just some of the thoughts that take over our mind when tough times strike. Even if the difficult phase passes, sooner or later it reappears in another form. The sooner you accept that tough times are a part of life, the sooner you will learn to not be fazed by them.

Positive thoughts don’t appear magically in your head during times like these, you have to actively work towards getting that mindset. One thing that is going to get you through difficult patches of your life is a positive and healthy mindset. To achieve that mindspace, there are some things you need to remind yourself and keep working towards.

1. It will pass

“This too shall pass. It might pass like a kidney stone. But it will pass.”

-Anonymous

I don’t know who said it but it makes real sense here. No matter what kind of time you are going through, it is going to pass. Even the most happening days don’t last so why will the tough time. When you make up your mind and convince yourself that this predicament you are in will be over in some time, it is easier to deal with.

A deadline, an end date have the power to drive us through life even when we don’t want to. So, putting a clock on your tough time is a good thing to begin with, you don’t have to know the exact date but just the thought of it being over soon is enough to get you into action.

2. This will make me stronger

“I have no regrets in my life. I think that everything happens to you for a reason. The hard times that you go through build character, making you a much stronger person.”

-Rita Mero

Tough times, negative experiences, glitches in plans, every unfavorable thing teaches you something and that something helps you become stronger. What do you think people mean by being a better version of yourself? It simply means learning from your mistakes and using those lessons to grow yourself as a person. It might not seem like that at the time but once it passes you will realize how it made you a better person.

“Hard times are like a washing machine, they twist, turn and knock us around, but in the end we come out cleaner, brighter and better than before.”

-Anonymous

3. Don’t stop – Small steps go a long way

“If you are going through hell, keep going.”

-Winston Churchill

It is tempting to tuck yourself in your comfy blanket and never get out. When things got tough, this used to be my go-to solution. Just go to sleep and wake up when everything passes but things seldom work as we want them to. After I woke up, the problem that had me in a time like was still there, and albeit calm I was still at the same place as before. No solution, no steps taken to fight this thing.

Then I realized that while feeling safe and hiding inside a bubble might be my preference, it wasn’t going to sustain me in the long run. What I needed to do was find a way out. Once this sunk in, I started finding outrageous ways to get help or help myself out of a situation. Well, the ways, they weren’t exactly outrageous but you get my point. For example, there’s an exam tomorrow and you don’t even know the name of the textbook, and you decide that it is possible to learn a 1,000-page book in the just 8 hours.

While that might seem ideal, it is far from it. What it did to me was put me under a lot of stress. Finally, I understood it was about taking small steps, you didn’t have to win the world in a day, just a small something was enough and that is what helps you win the world one day. Just keep taking baby steps, don’t stop.

In the end, it all boils down to your determination to not stop and to not let whatever it is get the better of you. Your mind is the only thing that is going to drive you in situations you would rather not be, so the only thing you have to do, to build yourself up from the ground, is convince yourself that whatever it is, you can get through it without breaking, and it is going to benefit you, and you are going to win because as someone wise said, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”