How to Live with Life in the Storm

By Werner Nell

It is only a matter of time before you’ll have to face one of life’s storms... When the time comes (if it hasn’t already), will you know how to deal with it? Helping you do so is what this book is all about. Drawing on some of the very best cutting-edge tools, techniques, and perspectives from the social and behavioral sciences and life-coaching, these pages are jam-packed with practical and highly effective strategies you can apply right away to deal with any bad weather that might be heading your way. Whether you’re in the midst of an acute crisis, dealing with its aftermath, or stuck with a chronic problem situation, these techniques and approaches will help you to live gracefully with life in the storm.
In this book you’ll learn:
•How to get yourself out of an emotional tailspin as quickly as possible
•A powerful process used by life coaches to help you create and implement effective plans and strategies for dealing with any problem
•A magical formula of human psychology that will help you take back control of your life, your emotions, and your behavior
•Tips and tools for identifying and safeguarding the parts of your life that are most at risk of being hit by incoming storms, and building up your resilience
•How to use mindfulness to tame stormy emotions and physical and emotional pain
•How to transcend even the most serious of life’s hurricanes by cultivating more hope, meaning, and purpose in your life
•How to take a red pill that will enable you to wake up to and step out of the matrix that might be the unseen cause of your storm (if you want to know more about this you’ll just have to look inside)
•And much more!

So, if you’d like to have someone at your side to help you deal with life’s storms, then grab a copy of this book and let’s get started!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Werner Nell
• Release date: Sep 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005957780

Werner Nell

Werner Nell is an Associate Professor and social science researcher in sociology and psychology at a major South African university. His research focus centers on psycho-social well-being, and he is particularly interested in topics such as hope, meaning, mindfulness, and happiness, on which he has published a number of national and international peer reviewed articles and book chapters. Werner is also a qualified life coach and has a burning life-long interest in esoteric subjects such as astrology and the Tarot, which he has been extensively studying and researching for the past two decades. His passion is all about synergistically integrating the best of what the scientific and esoteric fields have to offer in support of self-development, personal empowerment, and flourishing, and sharing this through his writing and teaching.When he has a few free moments, you will likely find him traveling, scuba diving, enjoying himself on a wine farm, experimenting in the kitchen with new cuisines, or spending time in nature. Connect with Werner at Aquarianlight.com

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Life_In_The_Storm_-_COVER.jpg

Werner Nell, Ph.D.

HOW TO LIVE WITH LIFE IN THE STORM

Copyright © 2022 by Werner Nell

Werner Nell, Ph.D. published with Smashwords

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author or publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

Disclaimer notice: Please note that the content of this book is for educational purposes only, and is not in any way aimed at providing legal, financial, medical, psychological, or professional advice. Use of the information contained herein is at the reader’s own discretion and risk. Neither the author nor the publisher accepts any responsibility for any damage or losses, direct or indirect, that are incurred as a result of the use of the material contained in this book.

Cover Design and layout by Kim Pillay

Author Photo: Werner Nell

First Edition: September 2022

Introduction

Life isn’t how you survive the thunderstorm, but how you dance in the rain – Adam Young

A storm is coming...

In fact, given that you have picked up this book, you might already be in the middle of one right now. Perhaps you have to battle pain, fear, worry, suffering, anger, or grief on a daily basis, and you’re exhausted and tired of it all. Or maybe you’re concerned about what the future might bring in a world that to many might appear to be becoming an ever more uncertain, volatile, and unstable place. Whatever the case might be, sooner or later every one of us will get caught in life’s bad weather. Some of these storms will be relatively mild and short-lived, like an afternoon hailstorm. It could be a flat tire, a minor health problem, a fall-out with another person, a sudden unexpected expense, or a stolen wallet. Other storms might be acute and immensely destructive, such as when an F5 tornado hits your life, leaving lots of damage in its wake. They might come in the guise of the loss of a loved one, being diagnosed with a potentially terminal illness, being the victim of a serious crime, experiencing societal collapse, or a messy divorce. Yet others might be chronic bad weather systems that drag on for a very long time, like an icy arctic winter. They might take the form of challenging relationships, chronic health problems, consumer debt, addictions, a hostile work environment, and many others besides. Like it or not, it simply comes with the territory of being a human being on Planet Earth. As such, the question is not whether we will face such storms, but how we could best face them, and how we could reduce their painful and damaging effects on our lives. Answering these questions is what this book is all about.

As a social science researcher, university lecturer, trained counselor, and life coach, I have spent the last thirty-odd years devoting myself to the study of human behavior, and in particular, human problems and the various ways of dealing with them. Much of my academic research has been about topics such as happiness, meaning in life, hope, positive emotions, mindfulness, spirituality, and psycho-social well-being. Apart from formal study, research, and qualifications in sociology, psychology, positive psychology, and life-coaching, I have been actively scouring the self-help literature for the past few decades in search of the most useful and effective methods for dealing with life’s challenges. Over time, certain patterns and common themes began to emerge that distinguished the strategies that worked from those that tended to be less effective. While there are of course no panaceas that will magically solve all our problems, there are nonetheless a number of truly helpful strategies and approaches that have stood the test of time. These ideas crop up again and again in various guises exactly because they are so effective at helping us face life’s storms. In this book, I have synthesized the best of these strategies in a way that you could practically apply to your own life right away to support yourself in dealing with any problem that you might be experiencing. Whether you are in the midst of an acute crisis, dealing with its aftermath, or feel stuck in a more slow-burning chronic problem situation, these techniques and approaches will help.

Here’s a quick rundown of what we’ll be covering in these pages. First, we’ll whip out the psychological first-aid kit and explore a whole array of practical methods for getting ourselves out of a mental and emotional tailspin as quickly as possible. Following this, you will learn about a very powerful model used in life coaching that will show you how to make and implement effective plans for dealing with pretty much any problem situation you might be facing. Chapter 3 builds on this, supporting you in taking back even more control of your life situation by helping you understand how you might inadvertently be contributing towards the storm you are in. Next up, we will discover the incredible impact of the frames and the beliefs we use to make sense of life’s storms, and learn ways to use them to our advantage to transform our experienced realities for the better. Following this, we will hop into a rabbit hole and explore the Matrix, which, as you will find out, is far more real than you might have imagined. You’ll see how it plays a major role in causing, exacerbating, or maintaining many of your seemingly most personal problems. Of course, we’ll also get to grips with various ways of becoming aware of and reducing its influence on us. Then, we will discover how finding meaning in the difficult situations that we are facing can enable us to transcend and cope with even the harshest of life’s challenges. Staying with the same broad theme, we then turn our attention to topics such as acceptance and mindfulness, and explore how these strategies could help us regain our footing in the midst of life’s extreme weather conditions. Having dealt with the storms of the present, we will conclude by shifting our gaze to the horizon of the future. I’ll outline some practical steps you can take to assess the risks you might be facing in various areas of your life, and guide you through a process of proactively making your life more resilient against any incoming storms.

Before we jump in and get to the chorus, there are a few things I’d like to point out that might help you get the most from this book.

As an academic and a social scientist, my default setting is to reference every statement to death with a barrage of peer-reviewed scholarly articles. While this turbo-charged nerdy approach simply comes with the territory in academia (which can get a touch anal, as you might have noticed), it would be of little value in a book such as this. As such, while the content of this book rests on a solid base of social science and other well-established disciplines such as life-coaching, I have purposefully decided not to spam you with endless references to obscure academic sources. This is because these types of peer-reviewed articles can be hard to find if you do not have access to scholarly databases, and even worse, they are usually boring as hell to read. You have to wade through endless methodological waffle and dense subject-specific jargon to eventually get to the small golden nugget of useful information at the end. (Naughty confession: Even after decades in academia, I myself still find reading most scholarly articles to be a chore.) As a compromise, I cited sources that would be interesting to read, widely available, and packed with useful information. As such, with a few notable exceptions, I have generally sought the equivalent of the research-based ideas and strategies outlined in each chapter in readily available popular literature, and cited these as references throughout the book. I used footnotes rather than endnotes, as this enables you to see straight away what source I am drawing on (and few people ever bother to look at endnotes anyway). This way, if you are interested in a given topic, you could immediately identify any books or other sources related to the source in question, knowing that it would be both useful and easy to get hold of.

While we’re on the topic of theory, I might as well say a few more words about that. My objective with this book was to translate useful findings and insights derived from social and behavioral science research (and related helping professions such as life coaching) into practical, usable strategies that you can use right away to deal with the problems you might be facing in your life. As such, I aimed to strike a balance between providing enough theory to clarify any practical principles and techniques involved, but not so much as to get mired down in a nerdy swamp. There is a common misconception that having more knowledge will automatically translate into better application. Quite frankly, that’s nonsense. As someone who has been working in the halls of academia for several decades, I can tell you without any hesitation that many (if not the majority) of the scholarly experts who are highly knowledgeable and qualified in the social and behavioral sciences routinely fail to practically apply the encyclopedic information stored in their heads (and I myself have been guilty of that more times than I care to recall). What we know and understand is indeed important, but ultimately it is only what we apply of what we know that truly matters. As such, it is my hope that you’ll find the chapters in this book to be a good balance between theory, and a discussion of how to translate this into practical, real-life application.

Another thing, keep in mind that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions to life’s problems. There are no strategies or techniques that are guaranteed to work for all people and all problems, all the time. Far from it. Not only are we all different, but each problem situation we face is unique. A tactic that worked wonders in one situation might turn out to be of limited value in another. That said, the many strategies covered in this book address a wide range of conditions and challenges. As such, it is highly likely that you will find a viable storm-busting strategy somewhere between these pages. You do not need to apply them all. Nor do you need to apply every step of every technique. For some, one new approach might be all that is needed, whereas others might choose to launch a full-scale offensive against their storms using many of the methods covered in these pages in combination. Think of this book as providing you with a toolkit. What tool to use, which parts of it to use, and when to use it, will be up to you. See each suggested strategy as a starting point, and experiment to find what works for you. It is important that you adjust and modify it to suit your particular situation, temperament, and needs. Once you understand the theoretical principles involved (which are outlined in the first part of most chapters) you will be able to devise your own applications that might turn out to be even more effective than the specific practical steps I propose. However, do try out the suggested exercises too. There is no need to take my word for it that they work. In fact, it would be better if you didn’t. An optimal strategy would be to approach them with an open mind, as experiments. If there is any convincing to be done, ideally it should come from your own experience in applying the exercises to deal with the actual problems you are facing in your life.

The chapters have been designed in such a way that they could either be read in order, or in isolation. In navigating through them, it might help you to know that the first three chapters are aimed at helping you gain traction on your situation by focusing on practical, action-oriented strategies (Chapters 1 and 2) and by adopting an empowering mindset that puts you back into the driver’s seat (Chapter 3). Chapter 3 is a transitional chapter that serves as bridge between the practical strategies of the first two chapters and Chapters 4 and 5, which are all about putting potent psychological principles to work to tame our storms. From here, Chapter 6 zooms out to a big-picture sociological view of our problems. We continue the upward trend in Chapters 7, 8, and 9 by exploring more transcendent (or if you prefer, spiritual) ways of approaching our problems. Finally, we look to the future in Chapter 10, and learn how to prepare for approaching storms. That said, the optimal sequence of chapters will be unique to each person reading this book, and the specific situation they’re contending with. As such, feel free to skip around between chapters in any order that resonates with your situation. However, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by your current circumstances, I advise you to read Chapter 1 first. Here you’ll find a number of practical strategies for getting yourself out of a psychological tailspin. From there, feel free to explore the book in whatever way makes the most sense to you.

More good news is that as all of these topics emanate from the same deep underlying well of human wellbeing, there is a synergistic overlap between them. As such, no matter where you start, you’ll simultaneously be making headway in the pathways laid down in several other chapters as well. For example, as you draw up an effective action plan for dealing with a problem (Chapter 2), or working with your frames (Chapter 4) or beliefs (Chapter 5) in relation to it, you will automatically also be getting yourself out of any tailspins you might have been in (Chapter 1), taking greater responsibility for your situation (Chapter 3) and reducing the likelihood of experiencing negative future consequences (Chapter 10). Likewise, when you learn to be more mindful (Chapter 9), you also experience greater acceptance of what is (Chapter 8), and redirect your focus into your circle of influence (Chapter 4). As such, don’t get hung up about where to start. Just start somewhere. In this way, each step you take will make it easier to take the next, and the next, and the next...until soon, you will find yourself standing under sunny skies again.

With these preliminaries out of the way, let’s jump right in!

ONE

Practical Strategies for Getting Yourself Out of a Tailspin

Losing your head in a crisis is a good way to become the crisis – C.J. Redwine

Imagine the horror a pilot must feel when his small plane gets caught in a massive storm, loses lift, and goes into a tailspin, spiraling to the ground at a dizzying speed. At that moment there would be nothing that mattered more than getting out of that tailspin and stabilizing the plane. He won’t have the time for making and executing complex plans (which we will be covering in the next chapter). Instead, our pilot would need to do something that would have an immediate positive impact on his predicament. The same is true for the major problems we face in life. There are times when life events (and our initial reactions to them) cause us to go into the psychological equivalent of a tailspin. Our worry turns into full-blown panic, our anger into rage, our sadness into clinical depression, or our sense of loss into debilitating grief. These emotions will in turn act as a filter for our thinking, possibly causing us to lose all perspective and to ironically generate even more debilitating emotional negativity. It could easily become a vicious self-reinforcing cycle from which it will get harder and harder to escape as time goes by, just like a pilot’s tail-spinning aircraft. When we start to spiral like this, what we need most are simple, practical, and effective strategies that could give us an instant handle on our problem and help us to cope with it in the moment. We also need to find ways to deal with the sense of being overwhelmed that usually accompanies life’s major challenges. By now it should come as no surprise that this is exactly what this chapter is all about – pragmatic approaches to life’s storms that will enable you to regain and maintain some control over your inner mental and emotional state, and help you get out of a tailspin and back to level flight. These strategies are not generally designed to solve our problems. Instead, their purpose is to get us out of psychologically debilitating inner states and into more helpful ones. As such, they represent the psychological equivalent of emergency first-aid. From there, we will be in a much better position to apply other strategies to deal with the storm, and to find and follow a route out of our predicament (which we will be discussing in later chapters).

It is essential for each of us to have a few reliable ways of changing our mental-emotional state in our arsenal of coping skills. Success guru Tony Robbins, who regards this topic as one of the most important elements of success, high performance, problem solving, and dealing with life in general, points out that it is critically important that we learn to control our inner mental and emotional state. He cautions that if we don’t, then we’ll also lose control over our own behavior.¹ In other words:

If you lose control of your state, you lose control over your life.

That’s where the tailspin starts. If we allow ourselves to get sucked too deeply into the panic, fear, anger, or depression that might accompany the problems we are facing, we might not be able to reverse the momentum of these strong emotional currents. We need to be alert to this happening and do whatever it takes to change our state into a more helpful and resourceful one. The rest of this chapter is all about practical strategies we could use to get out of such a tailspin and back to level flight from where we will be able to navigate our way out of the storm.

First, take care of the basics

When big storms hit, the trees with the strongest root systems usually remain standing the longest. Likewise, if you are going through a really tough time, you need to cultivate (or at least maintain) a solid foundation to support you. What I am referring to is taking care of essential elements of your well-being like rest, sleep, nutrition, hydration, and so on. In writing this section I am well aware that what I’ll be advising might come across as either being painfully obvious, or patronizing, or both. Here’s why I included this section nonetheless. Having studied various forms of counseling for many years; having done hundreds of hours of counseling myself; having discussed these issues with many psychologists, crisis counselors, and other types of therapists; and having a good dollop of firsthand experience of acute crises (and the consequences of ignoring the basics), two things became really evident:

• How critically important it is to take care of basic factors such as sleep, rest, nutrition, and hydration when going through an acute crisis.

• How many people completely ignore, discount, or forget about these things once they are in a crisis, despite their seeming obviousness.

As such, my hope is that this section will serve as a reminder of the importance of the basics on the one hand, and a motivational nudge to actually do these things on the other, especially for those who might be in the midst of a storm while reading this.

In case it all still sounds a touch too obvious and trivial to you (and thus easy to dismiss), here’s a thought experiment. Think back to a time when you were really exhausted and sleep deprived. Remember how irritable you were? How all problems seemed so much bigger and more overwhelming, and your emotions were that much harder to control? Can you recall what happened to your willpower and your ability to think clearly and make sound decisions? However, do you also remember how much better things felt the next morning after you got a decent night’s sleep?

Our capacity to mentally and emotionally process and deal with problems is greatly reduced when we are exhausted, sleep deprived, undernourished, dehydrated, and in a state of physical discomfort. A few days without proper sleep, rest, and food are all that stand between a wise man and a raving lunatic. Whatever it is that you are dealing with will likely seem far bigger and more serious than it might actually be under these circumstances. Your decision making and judgment will become ever more impaired, your emotions will be harder and harder to manage, and your emotional intelligence will take a nose dive. Everything will seem and feel far worse than it might objectively be, your view of the situation will become ever darker, and your ability to keep it together will rapidly unravel at the seams. Conversely, when we take the time to rest, get enough sleep, eat well in a way that provides our body with needed nutrients, hydrate, and so on, we create a solid foundation upon which we can build by using the other techniques in this book. However, as obvious as this might sound, when we are dealing with a really serious issue, such considerations might be the last things on our mind, and it could become oh-so-easy to completely neglect these basics. The result is a vicious cycle where we end up feeling worse than we did before, which causes us to pay even less attention to our physical well-being. Of course, these are hardly surprising revelations. In fact, we could safely classify it all as common sense. The curious problem is that we seem to ignore this knowledge when life’s storms strike, and often end up paying a steep price for this oversight. As Arnold Schwarzenegger once said to a small boy in Kindergarten Cop – don’t do that! Don’t underestimate the difference it could make to your state of mind and the leverage it could give you to successfully face your storm. In fact, following his in-depth review of 200 years of success literature, Stephen Covey concluded that purposefully engaging in these types of self-care activities constituted one of the seven habits that were shared by the most highly successful people in all walks of life.²

With that lamentably necessary admonition out of the way, here is a rundown of the most important foundational elements to take care of:

• Sleep: Before you dismiss this as being either too trivial or too obvious, keep in mind that lack of sleep causes us to fall apart so quickly that it has been used as a torture method for centuries in many different cultures. Plenty of scientific studies show that the more sleep deprived you are, the more impaired your thinking and judgment will become, the poorer your concentration, attention span, and memory will be, the less energy you’ll have, and the more likely you’ll be to unravel emotionally. If sleep deprivation becomes chronic, you significantly increase your risk for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, worsened immune function, hormonal abnormalities, an increased experience of pain, and mental health disorders such as anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder. Moreover, you will face a greater overall risk of death as well as a lower quality of life.³ In short, fatigue is like fertilizer for problems. I am often surprised at how willing many people are to fork out hundreds of dollars for a few sessions with a good therapist, while they simultaneously deprive themselves of sufficient sleep. To me, that’s a little like buying an expensive bottle of wine and then wasting much of its value by drinking it out of a dirty dog bowl. The difficulty is that we often convince ourselves that a problem is so urgent that we do not have time for sleep, but this kind of thinking is both dangerous and false. Of course, if your problem is an acute one, such as your house being on fire, then taking time out for a power nap would not be a particularly recommendable way to go. But when it comes to more chronic-type situations, getting enough sleep is critical. Your specific situation will determine when, where, and for how long you would need to (or be able to) sleep. You might need to adjust your regular sleep schedule by taking naps, or take advantage of lulls in the problem situation to catch some shut eye. Even twenty minutes could work wonders. If the problem is too overwhelming, you might even consider taking medication to help you sleep. (Of course, I am not a medical professional, so this is something you would need to discuss with a suitably qualified medical practitioner.) This advice seems almost patronizingly simple, I know. But it is really, really important. Neglect it at your own peril.

• Rest: As is the case with getting enough sleep, there seems to be an inexplicably strong correlation between how obvious this is, and how few people heed this advice. If you have any doubt whatsoever as to the importance of rest, just consider how any machine that runs non-stop for too long breaks down. An animal that does not rest is soon so weakened by fatigue that it succumbs to predators, disease, or its own stupid behavior. If we work or battle problems for overly long stretches at a time without a break, our concentration takes a nose-dive and we make more and more mistakes, our productivity drops, and our mood sours. Getting rest or taking a break could take as many forms as there are people. Anything that provides you with a time-out from your problem situation could potentially serve as rest. Sometimes a simple change of scenery does wonders. Other times you might need to take a quick nap (as sleep also provides rest), close your laptop and watch something on TV, go for a walk, go get a massage, meditate, watch the sunset with a glass of wine, have great sex, simply sit or lie down somewhere quietly with your eyes closed for a while, or cuddle a pet. You’ll know best what works for you and what doesn’t. The harder and longer you try to deal with a problem situation without rest, the less effective your efforts become, and the more overwhelming the problem will seem. The time you think you’ll be ‘losing’ by resting will be compensated for over and over by the ensuing gain in clarity, efficiency, and productivity. Yup, I know – this is nothing new and we are all well aware of the importance of rest already. However, when it comes to life problems our knowing means nothing unless it is translated into doing. So help yourself by putting this strategy into practice – schedule rest-promoting activities in your diary and honor them with the same commitment that you might reserve for colleagues or clients. You’ll notice the difference, I promise.

• Nutrition: At the risk of sounding like an overbearing mother, I would be remiss if I did not address the importance of a healthy, balanced diet. Naturally, I am not saying that you need to go all Spartan on yourself with a strict vegan diet of celery sticks and goji berries. In fact, I will turn that on its head right away and say it is important to actually indulge in something you really enjoy every now and then. Eating is one of life’s finest pleasures, and there is no need to deprive yourself of that. However, we also absolutely need vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids, good quality proteins and carbohydrates, fiber and so on in order to preserve our health and vitality⁴. Of course, the topics of diet and nutrition are quite controversial these days, with many disparate philosophies and dietary prescriptions doing the rounds. This is not a book on nutrition, so we won’t be entering that fray. The important point is that most of these different approaches do agree that what we eat greatly affects not only our overall physical health, but also our mood, concentration, energy levels, as well as our ability to deal with stress. So we don’t just eat to take care of our bodies. We all need to do our own research and decide for ourselves what specific kind of diet to follow, based on factors such as cultural and religious prescriptions, genetic constitution, blood type, personal inclination, allergies and intolerances, and a host of other considerations. Besides these considerations, there are some foods that have been shown to play a role in lifting our mood. These include fish rich in omega-3 fatty acids, dark chocolate (which contains mood enhancing substances such as caffeine, theobromine, and N-acylethanolamine), bananas, fermented foods such as kimchi and yoghurt, oats, berries, beans and lentils.⁵ Whatever diet you decide on, the bottom line is quite simple – when you are going through a stressful time, don’t neglect the importance of what you’re putting into your body.

• Hydration: Apart from oxygen, no other substance is as critical to our survival as water. Three days without it, and we’re history. In the context of dealing with problem situations, it is important to understand that even slight