Keeping Your Head After Losing Your Job (4 page)

Once you have filled in a few days of activities, and at regular intervals, look back at what you have written and think about these questions:

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Which activities were you engaged in when you felt worse? What were you doing?

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What were you doing when you felt better?

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If your feelings change depending on what you are doing, what does that mean to you?

4: Your feelings depend on what you are thinking

Like a lot of people who are unemployed, you believe that you have too much time on your hands. You may be sitting at home, dwelling on lots of negative thoughts that you just automatically believe. Try to see if your feelings are related to what you are thinking. For example, “I will never get a job,” “I must be a failure,” “I have let everyone down,” and “I will never be happy again.” When these thoughts come to you, you might treat them as if they are proven facts—indisputable. The more you dwell on them, the truer they seem to you.

What if your thoughts are not true? Or, what if they are only 20% true? Your feelings might then have been based on thoughts that were lies you are telling yourself. Imagine if you were employed and you were sitting at home and someone was yelling at you every minute, for hours: “You are a failure” or “You will never be happy.” How do you think you would feel? You don’t have to believe everything you think. You can look into what you
think
and change it.

You can treat these thoughts as annoying, pestering bugs that keep biting at you. The way to defeat them is to recognize them for what they are—just thoughts.

EXERCISE: CHALLENGE YOUR THOUGHTS

Write your thoughts down, then keep a tally, and plan your attack. For example, you can challenge each of these thoughts with the following:

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What am I saying to myself? If I didn’t believe this thought, how would my feelings change?

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What is the evidence for and against this thought?

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What advice would I give my best friend if they were out of work and they had these thoughts?

For example, Claire was saying to herself, “I must be a loser. I don’t have a job.” This made her feel sad, hopeless and ashamed. She realized that if she didn’t believe this thought she would feel a lot better—more hopeful, more accepting, more able to enjoy her life right now. She realized that the only “evidence” that she was a “loser” was that she didn’t have a job at this moment in time, but there was a lot of evidence that she was not a loser—she had graduated from university, she was a good person, she had worked well at her job and on other jobs that she had held in the past, and she had a number of good friends. She said, “If I had a friend who thought this I would be supportive and tell her that unemployment happens to millions of people—good people—and it doesn’t say anything about you as a person.”

EXERCISE: CHALLENGE YOUR NEGATIVE

Write down some of your negative thoughts and then alongside this, list the evidence in favor of the thought and against the thought. Here’s an example of how to do this

Negative thoughts	Evidence in favor of thought	Evidence against thought
I am a failure	I don’t have a job	I graduated from university. I had a job for several years. I did well in my job. I have a wife and two children and I am a good father. I have friends.

When you look at the evidence in favor and the evidence against your thoughts, what do you conclude? Take the thought, “I will never get a job again,” for example. What is the evidence in favor of this thought? You might say, “I don’t have a job, I have been looking for a while and the job market is pretty bad.” The evidence against the thought might be, “Almost everyone eventually gets a job, there are always changes in the job market; I am willing work, I have skills that other people might need.” How does this affect how much you believe the thought about never getting a job? Do you believe it any less than before? Why or why not?

EXERCISE: WHAT ADVICE WOULD I GIVE A FRIEND WHO IS OUT OF WORK?

Write out your negative thoughts about being unemployed and your life right now and then list all the advice you would give a good friend who was thinking in this way. Are you more supportive to your friend than you are to yourself? Why or why not? Here’s an example of how to do this.

My negative thoughts	Advice I would give a friend
I failed	You didn’t fail. There are millions of people out of work through no fault of their own. It can happen to anyone. Look at all the good qualities that you have, all the things that you have done that are good. You are a good friend and a good family member. I still care for you and respect you.

A lot of times we are much more objective, realistic and kind to a friend—or even a stranger. Are you being unnecessarily tough on yourself during this difficult time? If you were as supportive to yourself as you would be to a friend, how would your painful feelings change? Try “The Best Advice to a Friend” for the next few weeks and see how you feel.

5: Observe your feelings without getting hijacked by them

Sometimes you might start feeling anxious about not having a job and you get revved up, more and more anxious, and you even find yourself getting anxious about the fact that you are anxious. You are getting hijacked by your emotions. If this has happened to you—and it probably has—you are more and more afraid of what you feel. You might even try to suppress those feelings only to find that they keep coming back. And this makes you even more afraid of your feelings.

When you are unemployed you are likely to have a lot of painful feelings. But you can develop a different way of experiencing them. One way that is helpful is the “mindful way.” Let’s take the example of being mindful of your breathing. When you are mindful of your breathing you are simply standing back, noticing your breathing and keeping your mind on the fact that your breath goes in and out. You are not judging your breathing, you are not controlling it—you are observing it. You are standing back, watching the moment come and go.

By standing back and observing your breath without controlling or judging, you gain a distance from your thoughts, you learn that your breath—like your thoughts and feelings—can come and go. By practicing mindful breathing you will be able to observe your negative thoughts without getting hijacked by them. You can notice them, then let them go. Breath to breath, thought to thought—each is one moment that passes. Practicing mindfulness can help you address the root causes of your worry: your fear, your tension, your mistaken belief that you are in continual danger. It will help you to stay in the present, where anxiety does not exist. Anxiety is built on thoughts of what has happened in the past and fears or expectations about what will happen in the future. When we are anxious we have left the present moment to worry about a future that may or may not ever happen. By staying in the present you let go of that worry, let go of the future, and live your life in this moment. The same is true about your rumination and anxiety about the past. Let it go, let it stay in the past, and live in this moment now. Mindfulness will calm your mind and relax your body. If you keep at it, you may find the strength of your anxiety diminishing considerably.

Try this exercise every day:

EXERCISE: MINDFUL AWARENSS OF YOUR BREATH

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Begin by sitting in a comfortable position. It doesn’t have to be cross-legged, it can be kneeling on a cushion or sitting in a chair. It’s helpful if your spine is erect. Close your eyes.

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Start by bringing your attention to your breath. Notice how it goes in and out, rises and falls. It does this by itself: you don’t have to “do” anything to make it happen. Continue observing the breath, moment by moment, as it flows onward.

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What you will notice next (probably within seconds) will be the mind wandering away from the breath into the world of thought. Perhaps you will be distracted by some worry of yours, perhaps apprehension around how you will “perform,” perhaps a feeling that you need to be doing something instead of just sitting here.

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Or, hearing certain sounds, you may start wondering what’s causing them or what they mean. You may begin to think about tonight’s dinner, yesterday’s football match, or how things are going at work. It doesn’t matter what the content of the thought is. The key is this: as soon as you become aware that the attention has wandered, bring it gently but firmly back to the breath, back to the moment. Do this without comment or judgment; just bring it back.

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As many times as the mind drifts off, simply notice this and restore your attention to the breath. Do this for as long as you like.

As you practice mindfulness, you’ll probably be both able and motivated to do it for longer periods.

Why mindfulness is helpful

None of this may seem at first to have much to do with the major “issues” of your life—but it does. That’s because the practice of mindfulness is connected in a very deep way with our thoughts—or rather with the relationship we have with our thoughts. Being in the present moment means being attuned to whatever is going on: our breath, the sound of a clock ticking, a pain in the back. But what’s happening in the moment also includes our thoughts. Thoughts are events to which we can direct our attention. Like the sensations of our breath, thoughts arise in the mind and pass away, coming in and out of existence with no apparent effort on our part.

We don’t often treat our thoughts accordingly. We treat them as though they were reality or, rather, pictures that infallibly describe reality. If we think something is So it is so. We form an abstract concept like “This traffic is unbearable,” or “My life is a mess,” and accept it as truth. If we think of someone as a good or a bad person, then that’s what they are. Conceptual thinking drives us—never more completely and powerfully than when we are anxious. We worry that something terrible is going to happen, and presto, the threat is real. We assume that our anxiety is informing us of all the things “out there” in the world that we need to be concerned about. Anxiety, more than almost any other human feeling, depends on the belief that our thoughts are accurate descriptions of reality.

Recognizing that our thoughts are not reality

We can view our thoughts in a different way, however. We can see a thought as just a thought—an event in the mind, with no necessary connection to what goes on in the world at all. Rather than getting caught up in the content of our thoughts, we can simply notice them in the moment—just as we did with our out breath. It’s possible, in short, to be mindful of our thoughts. This changes our entire relationship with them. When we see our thoughts as part of the flow of consciousness, when they’re simply phenomena passing through the mind rather than descriptions of reality, their power over us suddenly looks a lot smaller. Instead of reacting with “This is awful,” or “I’ve got to do something right away,” we can say “Ah yes, there’s that thought again.” Watching our thoughts come and go, we realize how ephemeral they are, how tenuously connected to anything important. We don’t have to “obey” them anymore.

The same thing can be done with those feelings that you have. You can observe your feeling at the moment. You can say to yourself, “I notice that at this moment I am feeling sad.” You don’t have to judge it, you don’t have to control it, you don’t have to get rid of it right now. Instead, you can simply say: “At this very moment I notice sad feelings.”

Your attention will be drawn to sensations in your body when you are feeling anxious or sad. Perhaps you notice your heart beating rapidly, or the tension in your shoulders, the tingling in your fingers. Perhaps you perceive your sadness when you are feeling a heaviness in your chest, your face feeling tired and droopy, your eyes closing. What are the sensations that go along with your emotions of sadness: anxiety, anger? Where are you feeling it? Try this exercise.

EXERCISE: BREATHE THE SADNESS AWAY

When you have those sensations, watch them in the same way that you have been watching your breath:

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Observe them and describe them to yourself. For example, ”I notice that my shoulders feel tense right now.”

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You can then stand back, aware, observing and not judging, just for now—not trying to change it. You might say, ”I notice that I am having a heavy feeling in my chest at the moment.” And then return your attention to your breath for a few minutes, and with each out-breath say to yourself, “Letting go.”

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Moment to moment the breath, the sensations, even the thoughts, are coming in and then going out. Letting go for a moment. Just for a moment.

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You can imagine your sadness is the breath—it comes in, you notice it, and you let it go—for this moment in time. Coming and going, taking in and letting go. Like all feelings, all sensations, all breathing in and out—it is temporary, it returns, then it is gone.

Use the list below to guide you through your mindfulness practice:

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Stand back and notice what you are feeling.

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Are there physical sensations that are part of the feeling?

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Don’t judge or control the feeling, just watch it.

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Practice Mindful Breathing every day.

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Imagine that you are breathing in and out, and with each out breath the feeling goes away.

6: Improve the moment

When you are sitting at home feeling down about not having your job, you might feel stuck in that feeling. It’s as if the thoughts and feelings show up and take you prisoner. You have nowhere to go—but down. Whatever the down moment is, though, there is always something else to do. You need to have a plan for improving the moment—something to take your mind off things, something else to do.

Let’s start with a reward menu. I think of this as a list of things to do that will continue to get longer and longer each day that you engage in activities and think about rewarding things to do. You can start your reward menu with recalling what you have enjoyed doing in the past: listening to music, watching a movie, connecting with people online, exercising, taking a walk, playing with your pet, reading, talking with your family members, calling up a friend, taking a warm bath, cooking a delicious treat. The possibilities could go on and on. The essential thing to realize is that there are other things to do rather than getting hijacked by your thoughts and feelings. If you make up your reward menu before the difficult moments, you will be ready to change the moment when it arises. You will have rewarding things to do.