I've been where some of you are now and often spend too much time thinking about the purpose of life, which eventually turns into the unfairness of life.
I have to actively avoid playing the "why me" card and force myself to look for the "what doesn't suck" cards. I will find them if I look hard enough.
I will share the one thing that has helped me cope after 7 decades and it is one simple phrase I repeat to myself over and over until I take myself out of that mood I can so easily slip into being a rather moody individual. "Everything is temporary". It's simple but effective for me and allows me to detach from my present feeling and actually look at it objectively.
And I can tell you the best therapy you will ever have to take you out of a dark mood or place because what is happening is that we are in a state of brooding. We don't intend to be but we get there just the same. Find something, anything, to make yourself laugh. It's not only cathartic and mood breaking, it takes you to another place, a better place.
I went to this laugh seminar with my wife about 15 years ago. That is unusual in that the people who were there that know me think of me as the funny guy. Why would the funny guy need to laugh? During this 4 hour exercise facilitated by a doctor who had experimented with his patients during therapy and a pattern began to fall in place to him, I became self aware that while I could make others laugh, I was not laughing because making myself laugh was not the objective. He led his patients in laugh therapy and noticed that during this shared experience, they felt closer to one another even though some had never met. I met with him on two other occasions, privately, and I had no idea what lay ahead that was going to cause me to use this therapy. He had asked to meet with me because when we did this exercise the first time, he heard people asking me to make them laugh. And he had already picked me out at one of the more serious looking people in the group. I've never been known as a smiler, still working on that.
Next time you're feeling burned out, stressed out, pissed or just down in that hole and need some help out, try this. Lie on your back on the floor and just start to laugh. If you can think of something funny it helps but most people can't when they're assigned to but don't worry about that, just start laughing with your hands on your stomach. Your goal is to make your hands move by using laughter to move your abdominal muscles, this is the elusive belly laugh, and the more you do it, the harder it becomes to not laugh. The first time we did this, I saw people with tears on their cheeks and exhausted from laughing and they were smiling and most had not been before that exercise. The ones that couldn't get a laugh going wanted to try it again because they realized they were being reserved in front of others, the most common obstacle that he had faced.
Science has no proof of the healing attributes of laughter. They've actually measured it to see if they could because they actually wanted to prove it did. But some people believe, as this doc does, that it has qualities that cannot be measured. He told me he'd had much better results prescribing laughter because it was the safest drug.
So, when it's getting you down and life is closing in, push it away with laughter. Lose yourself in laughter, let yourself go. The reason you are on the floor is in case you pass out and I actually did that one time, saw those little white lights right before I blacked out because I was truly lost in laughter. And you lose yourself in laughter; you change your perspective. Tensions released from the body and endorphins in the brain and whatever or whoever was getting you down is no longer important.
