By Paula Apfelbach

Perspective, balance, and gratitude: these often-elusive but always-helpful states of mind will help you to cope with life’s stresses and to reduce worry when bad times inevitably come. The next time you’re bogged down, consider some of these methods for rising out of your funk.

Put it in a box

Compartmentalizing is something that we do in many areas of our lives, every time we put something away in a box or bin or other container. Therefore, do the same whenever you’re sad or worried or upset: acknowledge the legitimacy of those feelings, give yourself some time to wallow around in them, but then try to place them into a mental “box” and move on to other thoughts. You can always bring your mental box back out and rummage around in it again later, but if grief and worry are allowed to take their natural courses, they’ll flow throughout the parts of your life that are working well and sully them. So give your upsets their due — but no more than their due.

Appreciation: it doesn’t get any better than this

Enumerating your blessings — especially the basic, humble things — is a powerful reminder never to take even the most mundane element of daily life as a given, and cultivating that “attitude of gratitude” is a goal worth pursuing all year long, not just when the calendar says that it’s Thanksgiving time. Truly, I can’t think of a more effective or reliable way to cultivate balance and perspective than being appreciative and refusing to take things for granted.

Play the “How could it be worse?” game

Okay, so maybe a state of continuous appreciation is a little too Pollyanna for you. If your gratitude occasionally fails and you start to feel sorry for myself, try the opposite approach to regain perspective: engage in the rather morbid-sounding “How could it be worse?” game. The way you play is to think of a negative situation in your life and then mentally turn it into something worse. If you’re anything like me, it will take only about one nanosecond before you realize that any upsetting circumstance you’re now experiencing could be worse — even much worse — and perhaps you do have it pretty good.

Another way to look at this is to remember that everything is relative. What’s awful one day may be only a drop in the bucket the next, and, thankfully, vice versa. Railing against the reality of life’s ebbs and flows will not change that reality. A mantra that I created for myself seems to apply here: “It isn’t fair; it just is.”

You always have options — even when you’re convinced you don’t

I don’t want to “go all motivational speaker” on you, but when life is crushing in on you and every single thing seems utterly imperative, it’s easy to forget that you do have options — it just seems like you don’t. One means to shake off this sense of imperatives is to do a little visualization exercise. My favorite example involves running off to Paris to become a painter creating masterpieces along the banks of the Seine…

“But of course,” you say, “I could never actually do that. What about my family and friends? My business? My dog? My mortgage? My Glee episodes?!” And right then the great majority of people would conclude that abandoning their current lives would be impossible, and they’d dismiss their painterly dreams because their priorities lie much more strongly elsewhere. And that’s not wrong in any way. My only point is that being a Parisian painter actually is an option if it’s of a higher priority than those other life elements. It’s just that it probably seems so ludicrous that most people wouldn’t even view it as an option.

And so it goes with a lot of activities: they seem critically necessary until you realize that perhaps not quite all of them deserve top-priority ranking. So take a while to evaluate how you’re spending your time. If you then choose to continue as you have been, you can feel great about living according to your highest values. But if you discover that there’s room for change, then exercise those options that you perhaps didn’t even know you had.

Accepting your limitations empowers you like little else

We’re all familiar with theologian Reinhold Neibuhr’s “Serenity Prayer,” about accepting the things we cannot change, changing the things we can, and having the wisdom to know the difference. It reminds me that there is relatively little in life that any one individual can control (despite our wishes to the contrary), so we have very little to complain about! In other words, why fret about something you can change, and why fret about something you cannot change?

Fill out a “life report card”

Most of us stopped receiving report cards a long time ago, but they might be worth reinstating. Create a list of all of the major areas of your life — relationships, occupation, leisure, spirituality, health, fitness, intellectual pursuits, finances, and whatever else is important to you — and grade yourself in each area. If you like your grades, celebrate! But, if some disappoint you, figure out what you can improve. Remembering that you can’t control everything might come in handy here, but recalling that you do have options might also come in handy. If you’re tempted to claim that you absolutely cannot change some aspect of your life, think twice: can you?

Perspective, gratitude, and balance: All are within reach, and they’ll help you to cope when things inevitably go wrong. Truly, it could always be worse.

Paula Apfelbach began her business, Breathing Room Professional Organizing, in May 2005. She transitioned out of organizing in the fall of 2010, but continues to write a free mini-zine called “exhale” and accepts freelance assignments on the subjects of organization and life simplicity. Paula lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

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