5. When things don't go the way you want: the real reason you feel like crap
The Rewired for Good podcast | Episode 5 | 29 October 2024
Notes
In the humanitarian sector, so much feels out of our hands, leaving us drained and defeated. But that’s not the full picture.
This week, we break down why setbacks hit so hard—and, more importantly, how to bounce back, so you can decide on your next best move with clarity.
Transcript
Hello my dears.
I hope everyone is having the best week possible so far.
From my friends, from my colleagues, from the aid workers that I coach, and from myself. I've been getting a lot of "things aren't going the way I want them to", "this shouldn't be this hard", or a lot of "I feel like crap lately".
It's quite common in life, nothing new there, but I wanted to do an episode to talk about this in a general way. Of course, this podcast will be a space to dig more specifically into certain situations, but with this episode I want to have a bit of an overview of what to do when life in general just isn't doing what you want it to do and you feel defeated or discouraged or scared or out of control or helpless and you don't know what your next best move is.
I'm recording this episode from a hospital bed which is actually a perfect illustration of how life sometimes doesn't cooperate. This isn't how I saw my week. I actually feel rather useless, which is, for those of you who know me or who work with me, know this isn't my favorite feeling. But there it is. I'm going to do my best with the cards I pulled out this week. And, you know, hope you get some value out of it.
As humanitarian workers, I'd say that the number of days where life behaves in a way that is satisfactory and predictable and easy are honestly quite low, to say the least. Colleagues that underperform, contractors that don't deliver the way they're supposed to, donors that are setting expectations that just seem unrealistic, love affairs and family and friendships that are just not going as smoothly as they could be because of the lifestyle that we lead.
A lot of the times, our homes don't feel like homes, health is not there when we need it to be. So you know it feels like a never-ending stream of bad news personally on a lot of fronts and there's very little support sometimes from the friends and the family and the colleagues and the organizations. They don't quite get what we're going through.
So as always I wanted to give you some tools, some pathways to make you self-reliant and self-sufficient and help you bring some clarity, to bring your emotions a little bit under control so you can make deliberate decisions and feel less helpless in the face of whatever is happening for you personally.
This work is where it's at. If you can manage your capacity to take on crappy circumstances and crappy emotions, life is yours. You can tackle absolutely anything. So this is really, really important work.
Before we get started, I want to drill down and make sure that we're all on the same page on how feelings work.
As you know, we all have basic survival needs. You know, food, water, heat, safety, social support, love, you name it. All of a sudden, something goes wrong that seems to threaten our ability to get those things. So you have five senses that capture information from the outside world, and they send a signal to your head.
It's processed by a part of your brain that we're going to call the primitive brain. And its job, its terms of reference, are to figure out as fast as possible if something's not right in the world. And if you're going to have a survival problem, right? And to help you react as fast as possible to keep you alive.
So the info is processed based on your history, on your belief systems, on your thoughts in general, good times, bad times you've had, trauma, rewards that you've had in the past. And it has a negative bias. It has a negative bias because it has a tendency to see things worse than they are precisely to make sure it doesn't miss any threat. So it has a very negative risk analysis. That's how we stayed alive.
It's a fantastic system really, if your goal is to stay alive. If your goal is to not be stressed, it's a terrible system because it tends to send more negative signals than are actually warranted, especially in our contemporary society, right?
So you get a signal that things are not going the way you want to go. It sends a freak out signal in the form of cortisol, right? So depending on the amount and intensity or speed of the release, it's going to be labeled as fear or anxiety, panic, terror, stress, disappointment. But it's just this neurotransmitter that is being released to tell you, you need to act and you need to act quickly.
And often times we think we feel like crap because of whatever is happening in the outside world, right? But that's a shortcut. The feeling of feeling like crap is actually produced by the brain. It's actually the analysis of your brain, that processing machine, very sophisticated, that decides what is good, what is bad, and what you need to freak out about, right? Things and events and people have absolutely no emotional power on you. The only thing that has the power to make you feel good or make you feel like crap is your analysis of the situation.
And I know this sounds super self-evident. Everybody knows this, but it's an important reminder because when you're in the thick of things, you tend, I tend, we all tend to give responsibility of how we feel to those external problems, right? The loud neighbor or the obnoxious colleague or the weather or the delay of your flight, whatever it is, you think that's what's causing your crappy feeling. But what's causing your crappy feeling is your analysis of that circumstance.
And this is very important because when you feel that your bad emotion is caused by an external issue, you're also going to look to fix the external issue first. But the real cause of your bad emotion is your brain. So one of the quickest ways to step out of feeling like crap is actually to work on your analysis of the situation.
And this is important because with a better analysis of the situation, with a cleaner analysis, with a less emotional analysis of the situation, you can address the circumstances much more clearly and strategically.
Our brain has not evolved to immediately see that we're not in immediate danger more often than not in our contemporary society. It feels threatened. It feels like something's gone wrong or is about to go horribly wrong. And it's sometimes clouding your judgment and making it hard to have a smart reaction. It allows for fast reactions, but it doesn't allow necessarily for smart reactions.
So the good news is that we humans have developed another part of our brain that can look at the information sent by our senses, can look at the analysis sent by our primitive brain, and can be like, okay, let's look at things more calmly, more factually, and redecide consciously what to do beyond fight, flight, freeze, fawn responses which of course we're all familiar with.
This is why you'll have two people who look at the exact same situation and one will freak out while the other one remains calm. You can have someone laughing about something while the other person is just absolutely devastated by something.
I'm personally right now freaking out at some of the horror that is happening in the world. I'm making it mean so many things about humanity, about my values, about the humanitarian system, about the system about my role on this planet about the blood i have on my hands in the form of my tax returns and meanwhile i'm watching a bunch of other people who are looking at the exact same images and they are totally fine.
So a lot of the times we try to fix what didn't go the way we want by acting on those things directly we try to make it go away we try to change reality and sometimes that's the right call maybe that's the easiest call but a lot of the times it's a losing proposition because you cannot change the circumstances and also because you may also be missing out on an opportunity for growth that you could gain if you didn't make the problem go away and you decided to address it in a more subtle and a more strategic manner.
So if you break your arm you can hide the pain by taking painkillers right, that's a distraction from the problem. But you can also make it go away by cutting your arm off, right? Removal of the problem. My invitation here is that you instead identify the actual source of the pain, which is the fracture of your arm, and then fix your fracture. And then once you have your fracture fixed and your arm is in one piece, now you can decide much more clearly whether or not your arm is worth keeping, right? With clarity.
So if we translate that into a toxic work environment, if you think that the issue is the environment itself and not the actual cause of your discomfort, which is the fact that you analyze the environment as toxic, you will try to escape the environment. You will try to run away. You'll look for different jobs. I find it much more interesting to try to fix your way of looking at their environment, getting the growth that comes from that mind management, and then decide on purpose whether you stay or whether you try to make the environment better or what you want to do about it. But you cannot think clearly if your emotions are very high, right?
So here are some steps that you can take when the world isn't behaving the way you want it to and when your primitive brain is telling you that there's a problem and a threat and you are feeling like crap as a result.
The first thing is to define what happened actually and factually. Like "I woke up with a health issue and I'm familiar with it and it requires that I head to the ER and I had plans that I'm gonna have to change". That's the fact, plain and simple.
If your partner said something that you didn't like, just say, "my partner said words and now I have to respond". There's no emotion, it's not good, it's not bad, it's just what happened.
And after you've clarified what actually happened… I think it's very important for you to be very honest and have a very clear idea of what you actually wish would be happening for you.
Like, if you didn't get the job you wanted, if your partner didn't show the best version of themselves, if you're in the hospital, if your ambiance at work is hard to cope with, what is it exactly that you wish had happened instead? Lay it out clearly.
"I wish I had gotten this job offer."
"I wish my partner had said these words, not these words."
"I wish the office environment did not include conflict."
Right? Once you've gotten clear on what you wanted, then you can ask yourself why you wanted that. What would it change for you? How would you feel if things were happening the way you want them to? Right? So this is the key. This is where your work is.
If you wanted a different job, if you wanted your partner to say things differently, if you wanted your office environment to be different... Why? Why do you want that? Is it because you want to feel more confident? Is it because you want to feel more loved? Is it because you want to feel safer? Is it because you're trying to avoid some sort of discomfort, effort or difficulty? What is it exactly that you were looking to get out of the situation and that is making your alarm systems go off and panic slightly because things didn't go the way you wanted them to?
And finally, you want to decide what your next best move is to bridge the gap between how things are and what you actually wanted, right? So if you wanted a job because you wanted status or because you wanted a change or because you wanted the self-confidence, then maybe you can find ways to bridge that gap and give yourself what you wanted anyway without changing the circumstances.
A lot of the times self-confidence, comfort, self-worth, love, serenity are things you can give yourself right where you are without changing anything in the outside world, which is actually really good news because you can control what goes on in your head a whole lot more easily than what goes on in the outside world.
So remember, the outside world has no ability to create your emotions for you. Your brain, your nervous system, is what has that ability. So when things don't go the way you want them to and you feel like crap, find out what are the thoughts, what are the belief systems, and what are the gaps that your brain is serving you. And then decide on purpose how you want to bridge the gap between what is happening and what you really want and need.
Your brain is very powerful, my friends. Look for solutions in there.
Thank you for listening. Thank you for showing up to listen to something that can really make your life a whole lot more manageable.
I'll be back next week, inshallah.
Let me know if there's something you'd like me to cover. Until then, take excellent care of yourself and I'll go do that too.
See you next week.