Are You Letting Your Disappointments Destroy You?

How do you normally deal with disappointment? Do you block them out of your life? Do you sleep them off and hope that you will feel better when you wake up?

How You Should NOT Deal with Disappointment

Many people are caught like fish out of water when they face disappointment. Because they are not taught to properly deal with disappointment in school or in life, they deal with it in a destructive way instead. Do you deal with disappointments with any of these methods?

1. Numb yourself with other activities

The first negative way is to drown out your disappointment with random activities. Party, eat, sleep, go shopping, or play games. For some people, they turn to sex, alcohol, or even drugs. The goal here is to dive into random, mindless activities, to avoid being alone with disappointment.

While it’s okay to play games or sleep to shake off negative feelings, the problem comes when you use them excessively to deal with unhappiness, rather than face the problem head on. 

Rebound relationships work on the same basis. The person tries to get over their previous partner by jumping into a new relationship, to avoid dealing with the pain of breakup.

While distracting yourself with other activities make you feel happy in the short run, they do not resolve the issue. Soon, you face another situation which leads to disappointment again. Instead of resolving the problem, you turn to more distractions. This results in a downward spiral.

2. Deny your goals

The second way is to block out your goals, pretending they don’t exist. On the outside, you pretend you don’t care. But deep down, you do care. You condition yourself not to set any expectation, since disappointment will not happen when there are no expectations.

For example, people who have been scarred by negative relationships tend to develop barriers to love. On the outside, they appear aloof and uninterested in love. On the inside though, they long to find their special someone. Because they fear getting hurt, they deny their desire for a relationship and refuse to let others into their lives. This denial catches up with them down the road and creates a backlash effect. Have you met such people before? They look like they don’t care, but on the inside, they do care. As they block out their desires, they become more miserable in the long run instead.

3. Give up on your goals

The third way is to give up on your goals. This is perhaps the worst of all 3 methods. While you long for your goals, you resign yourself to a fate that you will never reach them. You self-depreciate, devaluing your worth and thinking that you are not meant to achieve anything. You spend each day trying to convince yourself and others around you that you cannot achieve your goals, when they are fully within your reach.

Source:https://personalexcellence.co/