How to Live Bright In Spite of, Well, Everything
Sometimes learning to locate the brightness in your life in spite of what’s happening around you is a fundamental survival skill. You know how flight attendants remind us that, in case of an emergency, we should put on our own oxygen mask first? These days, the equivalent safety instruction is to remember to take care of ourselves in order to be at our best for others. Learning to find moments of peace amidst uncertainty helps us cultivate calm and resilience. It’s good for us, and it’s also good for everyone around us.
When uncertainty abounds, helping people to be “bright in spite” is particularly challenging—and important. Since the early days of 2020, just about everyone has felt loss, disappointment, or grief, and we’ve all made seismic shifts in how we live, work, and play. Given all these adjustments, it helps to be disciplined about what we choose to focus on during times of strife.
We can even explore the possibility of seeing the upside in difficult times. Have you considered that our collective suffering can create strong bonds, increase empathy, and make us more compassionate toward others?
Stretching your mind to find the light in the darkness is good for your brain, too. Bringing your curiosity rather than your worry to a situation provides a hit of serotonin (the same chemical that’s released when you fall in love) to your tired or overwrought brain. That, in and of itself, can help boost your resilience.
Here are a few ways to live “bright in spite,” as well as three strategies to help you do it.
Choose your response
Best-laid plans aside, we never know what’s waiting for us around the next corner. Given that uncertainty is the only true certainty, all we can really control is how we respond to a sudden curveball (yes, that includes a pandemic). At Live Bright Now, we call it exercising your “response-ability.”
When we’re trying to manage stress, sadness, or pain, it’s easy to default to, “I can’t change how I feel.” Figuring out how to live bright in spite of sorrow or anxiety doesn’t mean ignoring or tamping down your feelings. In fact, it’s about doing the exact opposite: connecting deeply to your emotions in order to experience life based on what’s truly happening for you at this moment.
One helpful trick is to observe your feelings as if you’re looking down at yourself from above. In doing so, you create a space between the stimulus and the response. That helps you make room to choose how you think, act, and feel—the ultimate in response-ability.
Ditch black and white for shades of gray
As human beings, it’s natural to see things in black and white. This is good. This is bad. I will succeed. I will fail. The reality is that none of us really knows how anything is going to turn out in the future. Your lost job may get you to a better role. Your divorce can lead you to find the perfect partner. The loss of a loved one can deepen your appreciation for the impermanence of life. When you give yourself the chance to embrace the nuances of a moment, maybe you’ll discover, as author and life coach Martha Beck puts it, that something that seems devastating is actually “the antecedent to the best thing that ever happened.”
Resist the urge to judge
When you resist your urge to judge, you might find a little brightness hiding away in nooks and crannies. What could possibly be good about the pandemic? In some cases, families get stronger, you have more time for the people you love, you discover the freedom of working from home, you get in better shape with more time for exercise, and you have time to experiment with home-cooked meals.
What other brightness might be lurking behind the troubling headlines? One of my teachers, Dr. Srikumar Rao, says, “Good news, bad news, we don’t know.” When you choose to curiously watch a situation unfold, you’re more likely to find a silver lining.
Choose a new thought
When challenges arise, many of us become our own worst enemies. Our primal brain takes us on a trip to the very bad neighborhood that’s located right between our ears. It’s a dangerous place to hang out, and we’ve all spent way too much time there at one time or another. One reason it’s so hard to stay grounded when we’re caught up in panic or despair is that we start over-worrying about what might happen next. These thoughts carve a pattern in our neural pathways in the same way a flowing river carves patterns on a canyon floor. But we do have a choice about what we give our attention to. Try focusing on a different thought, and see if you can disrupt the pattern before it’s etched too deeply.
3 ways to notice the moment
One way to stop ourselves from trying to control the uncontrollable or future-tripping to a dark and frightening place is to zero in on the here and now. Here are three simple exercises that can help.
Plant your feet. Stop yourself where you are and ground your feet—literally. You should feel the pressure of the soles of your feet against your shoes or the surface you’re standing on. Now, ask yourself, “Am I okay at this exact moment?” Chances are, the answer is yes. At this precise moment, you are fine. Reminding yourself to “be here now” can prevent you from “worrying forward” and spiraling into fear.
Practice rituals. Rituals can help us stay calm and present because they’re familiar, trusted, and comforting. Rituals build a kind of emotional muscle memory, too, which means you can quickly access positive feelings by repeating a familiar practice. What rituals help you feel centered? Maybe it’s a morning run, an afternoon yoga session, or a candle-lit meditation before bed. Maybe you share gratitude at dinner with your kids or have a regular Zoom call with your closest friend. Whatever rituals work for you, be extra diligent about keeping them going during this time.
Take an awe walk. Being fully present in the great outdoors is like stepping through a portal into another dimension, where everything is just a little bit brighter. Dial up your presence, joy, and optimism by leaving your phone behind, getting outside, and seeing what catches your attention. Take a deep breath, open all of your senses, then pause for 15 seconds … close your eyes, listen carefully, and feel the sun or breeze on your skin. Now take another breath, exhale, and slowly open your eyes as if for the very first time. Notice how everything is a bit brighter and that the colors are more rich and vivid. Allow yourself to be amazed by what you’re seeing.
These exercises should help keep your worries, fear, and anxiety in check so you can focus instead on how to live bright in spite. Here’s what Erma Bombeck had to say about fretting: “Worry is like a rocking chair: It gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere.”
Before we go, keep this in mind: Worrying about what could or might happen is a waste of your precious energy and time. As Mark Twain put it, “I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”
Need help figuring out how you and your team can “live bright in spite?” Get in touch.