How To Deal With Despair?

How can we define despair? This term refers to the loss of hope, to a feeling of inner emptiness, to the thought that there is nothing left around us, that all our efforts are now in vain. How can you cope with this loss of strength to move forward? How can despair be dealt with?

When we are invaded by this feeling, we are flooded with doubt why we should keep trying, what good is getting up every day. People who have experienced this emotion have felt without energy at work, in their daily lives, in their commitments, preferring to abandon themselves to pain to stop suffering.

Despair can become one of our worst enemies, because it puts a veil in front of our eyes and takes away our strength and energy. It prevents us from seeing beyond the darkness from which we are blinded at that moment. He whispers in our ears that the pain will not go away, that our condition will not improve, that it is all over and that we can only resign ourselves to this new state of affairs. Faced with this scenario, how can we deal with despair?

Despair must be faced with patience: working little, but making great efforts, taking small steps, but achieving great results. Surrounding us with huge people to help us get out of the black hole by showing us how there are still wonderful reasons to continue living and fighting.

Despair: our worst enemy

When despair assails us, the worst thing we can do is to be kind to our new guest. Once in, it is important to make an effort and (above all) to be intelligent so that he leaves as soon as possible. Despair is very cunning, it knows the fears of those who attack and feeds on them. Consequently, if we learn to manage our fears, despair will have nothing to feed on and will be forced to leave.

With this in mind, all the emotional management tools we have can help us deal with despair. The range of options, in this sense, is wide: we are talking about all those tools that shorten negative thought cycles, but also about those that make us skilled in socializing and intelligent in choosing strategies.

If we cannot see anything beyond that black veil that obscures our sight, we must not forget that we ourselves can and must become the most powerful focal point : just find out how to “ignite” our full potential. Despair mostly affects people who spend too much time organizing their thought patterns.

“Despair is based on what we know, which is nothing, and hope on everything we ignore, which is everything”

-Maurice Maeterlinck-

The best weapon to deal with despair is the will to live

The most important concept to keep in mind is that we are much more than the situation we live in. We have faced and overcome situations, we are capable of achieving very important goals. Above all, we are our faith, and it is important to keep it. Our mind processes what happens to us, but it processes even more what it thinks might happen. In reality, more than what we think, we are what we believe or what we are willing to believe.

We have experienced even more difficult situations in the past, and we have overcome them. Moreover, thanks to those same situations we have developed thought processes that have made us stronger. In the immediate future, we are offered the opportunity to move forward immediately. In the more distant future, however, we can afford to plan. These are ambitions that never cease to be the seed for the reasons that make us move.

This approach is as simple to elaborate as it is difficult to put into practice, due to our fears or all those times that luck has turned its back on us. Still, it is an approach that is entirely worth pursuing. Just as we continue to be surrounded by people who stay close to us even if we find ourselves in a difficult time and we recognize that we are not a great company. If they believe it, why can’t we give ourselves a chance too?

Put another way, despair is nothing more than an illusion. An impossibility: that of making us blind to the alternatives that would make the way out easier for us. As difficult as it may seem, facing despair is possible if we choose courage in the face of fear, confidence in ourselves rather than anxiety.