Learn how to deal with life’s problems in a healthy way

I would not like to start this text with a cliché. But he is inevitable: problems are part of life. And, more than that, setbacks, mistakes, mistakes, setbacks, bad luck and misfortunes predominate. Perhaps Murphy’s Law and its sentence that “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong” comes to mind. She is even worse. The original sentence, and in its entirety, states that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong at the worst possible time”.

And, well, our everyday experience proves this pessimism. The bad wave tends to attract another. This incomprehensible cascade is in the public domain. After all, who doesn’t know popular maxims like “a misfortune never comes alone” or the conformed “a little misfortune is silly”? as there is not
what to do, so as not to fall into despair, we can only accept and console ourselves with other maxims, such as “God writes straight with crooked lines” and “there are evils that come for good”.

life is fight

Regardless of the theme or intensity, the truth is that the problems will always be ahead of us. Perhaps for this reason, the best definition of philosophy about what life is is Nietzsche’s: “life is struggle”. Since they are inevitable and there is nothing we can do to stop them, what is in our control? It’s the way we fight, how we face these problems.

There are people who succumb to the slightest setback, others face setbacks with serenity, others see problems with magnifying glasses and transform a simple misfortune into a tragedy. Faced with the same setback – the cancellation of a flight, for example – there are people who are overcome by disappointment and apathy. Others scream against fate – and the closest official. And there are those who, with balance, begin to look for alternatives.

there will always be problems

In the department of our misconceptions, perhaps the biggest one is the search for a “problem-free” life – for many, synonymous with happiness. We make this mistake a lot, especially in relationships. Many divorces have this deceit in their genesis.

Tired of the problems of life together – from complaining about the towel on the bed to irreconcilable incompatibilities –, they dream of a “free and trouble-free” single life. After a long wear and tear, the rupture comes, and behold, they are single again. Are all the problems gone now? No. Married life problems are over, now you have to deal with single life problems. The problems remain.

Confrontation, guerrilla warfare and flight

In the fight against misfortunes, we are not good on all fronts. There are people who deal well with financial problems, but deal badly with illness, for example. we can have patience for a setback today, but not tomorrow. In this equation, another variable to consider – perhaps the most relevant – is time – or duration, as the French philosopher Henry Bergson prefers.

There are those who, faced with a crisis, receive the impact, suffer, retreat, but tend to recover within hours; at most days. Others ruminate what happened and suffer for months. Others recover, but internalize the suffering as a mark, a scar. And there are others who never recover. They interiorize, transform the setback into a chronic wound, always open, always raw.

The longer with the same problem, the more damage. The prolonged rumination of a misfortune dulls the present and makes the future unfeasible. Not only does it prevent life from moving forward, but it transforms the unresolved setback into psychic illnesses, such as melancholy, anxiety, depression and other disorders.

facing the problems

Our “resistance to problems” may have an expiration date. That is, if you’ve been patient so far, it doesn’t mean you’ll always be. This is what the study by Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi shows. For almost three decades, this pair of psychologists followed the lives of a group of a thousand New Zealanders and how they faced problems related to physical and mental health, finances and relationships.
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Known as the Dunedin Study, the document shows that, in the period leading up to middle age, 83% of the people analyzed were not able to deal with their problems. Setbacks such as divorce and job loss were not overcome and still ended up being converted into mental disorders – depression and/or anxiety – of short or long duration. That is, for different reasons, in this age group, most curled up and ruminated on their problems instead of moving forward.

Now, when this phenomenon was verified, all the focus was on the remaining 17%. Why, for them, did the ability to deal with problems remain intact? Would they be wealthy – financial setbacks make their days bitter – or physically healthy, or intelligent – ​​with greater strength and repertoire to evaluate and find answers to problems? None of that came to pass.

What the study showed was that those 17% were active people who got involved and embraced life. Something like a blessed personality. When bad things happened, they managed their stress and didn’t overreact, stayed calm, and moved on. Did they do it alone? No, when setbacks hit, they surrounded themselves with supportive people. Other attributes such as stable and reliable, tolerant and non-confrontational, sociable and people-oriented completed the picture.

How to be part of the 17%?

The question that follows is: how do you have this type of personality that handles problems so well? The German philosopher Martin Heidegger argues that part of inner strength is structural. We were born with it. Psychoanalyst Isa Zimermann agrees. For her, the ability to deal with life’s misfortunes is as much born as acquired. However, for her, most of it is acquired, in our constitution, in the environment in which we are inserted. That is, it is an aptitude taught by our caregivers.

“If the subject received good care, from a sensible, integrated, coherent person, he builds his own security. It takes those references into his experiences,” she notes. And this structure ends up being constituted also from the reference of others that are part of its surroundings. Those emotional resources Lifetime skills mentioned by Isa also appear in the 17% of the Dunedin Study.

Skills that help overcome problems

Separate studies, Isa Zimermann identifies some emotional resources that help to deal with problems. The first of them is to endure frustrations. How do you do this? Assimilating that we can’t do everything. “What we want is not always possible to achieve. It’s accepting the ‘no’s’ in life”, she says.

Another resource is the awareness of one’s own limits. “Assuming ‘not knowing everything’ is a great human qualification”, reaffirms Isa. And, above all, it is knowing how to make expectations flexible. Avoid all-or-nothing thoughts. It wasn’t this time, but another time it might be. “Having hope that another day can be different, that there is continuity and that we can remake, try again”, concludes Isa Zimermann.

Importance of calm and rationalization

The summary of the opera is that, in order to deal well with problems, until the end of life, we need skills that start in the cradle. Well, we know that not everyone is lucky enough to have balanced parentsthat privileged routes are rare…

Do we still have time to do something? Yes. Knowledge, rational and reflective thinking, therapeutic help – and even this text – can help. When you run into more setbacks, stop. Calm the heart. Rationalize. Act. With repetition and practice, we will get better and better.

facing setbacks

I recently went through yet another one of these exercises. After failed reservation attempts at two restaurants, we decided to use the delivery service. We chose the dishes, the desserts. Everything was going well when, suddenly, the route disappeared from the application and the status “order delivered” appeared. How is it possible?

We called the restaurant, they [os funcionários] they couldn’t do anything. The system said the food was picked up and delivered to the customer. We called the “system” which said the phones were busy. I thought we should go out and find a restaurant, but then I remembered the ripple effect of setbacks and decided on a quick fix that depended only on my action. I looked at the set table and started making the simplest dish I know. Just three ingredients: pasta, cheese and black pepper, the wonderful cacio e pepe (literally, cheese and pepper).

And so we face the setbacks that life presents us with. There is always time for new achievements. And we can, yes, begin the path to building such a blessed personality. Tolerance, acceptance of setbacks, the search for alternatives, the attitude of the “live and let live” it’s not just skills that help us deal with hardships. They work like a lubricant that facilitates the fluidity of the march and functioning of the world. Of our world and that of others.

By Margot Cardoso – Vida Simples magazine

He is a journalist, master in philosophy and columnist for the Vida Simples portal. It turns to great thinkers to also deal with its problems.but.