Hi all,

Welcome to the latest Dr C post in which we’re going to talk about going with the flow. Look, life can be filled with setbacks and rarely do things go to plan. Naturally, feeling annoyance, grief, frustration, or misery can occur & learning how to get unstuck & adapt can be a hard skill to learn or be good at – particularly when situations are out of your control. It is your choice whether you decide to question, resist & give up or instead go with the flow and adapt. Choosing to go with the flow can help you cope in these scenarios and master big feelings. This is how you do it. But before we dive in: don’t forget to visit me on Instagram, TikTok and on Amazon for more tips, videos, and livestreams covering this and other similar topics!

First, imagine a bright red stop sign & then tell yourself “STOP”. Doing this will help stop you in your tracks so you can gain some space from your thoughts. This skill is called thought-stopping & is a great exercise to practice when you want to bring awareness to unhelpful or distressing thoughts so you can then replace them with more helpful ones.

Ignoring, avoiding, or wishing the situation were different isn’t helpful & doesn’t move you towards calm or a solution. It may actually move your even farther from it. What we want to focus on is figuring out what WE CAN change in that particular situation. Try making a list of everything you DO have control over. For example, we can control our attitude towards the situation. We can also control our effort. We can control our breathing, our self-care, our diet/and fitness – many things that might improve the situation.

It is also true, however, that some situations can’t quite be changed. But learning to accept things as they are doesn’t mean that you gave up or that you like your present but instead that you’re only moving past a situation that is out of your control & potentially focusing on what you can do to improve it.

So whether you need to accept that something bad happened to you & you couldn’t do anything to stop it, that we can’t please someone or get someone to like us, that we have an illness that we can’t cure, learning to focus on what you have control over & your attitude towards it may be the only way forward. This is how we will feel empowered and cope better.

You can’t stop the waves but you can learn to surf.

Xo,

Dr C