Tips for Making the Right Decisions at Life’s Crossroads
Good physical health is most often tied to a sense of good mental and emotional wellness. However, when challenging situations and circumstances happen in life, we are provided with a crossroads which can affect both mental and physical wellbeing.
One leg leads to a path of purposeful and adaptive thought processes, ultimately producing peaceful resolution and continuance. Whereas the other path can often compound problems, invoke hard feelings, inflict emotional pain, prolong grief, and even create long-term consequences for actions or inactions. Ask yourself, which path do you typically choose?
The Crossroads
Human nature compels us to seek a ready means of easing mental/emotional stress while countering pain with pleasure. Unfortunately, it is all too often that the most readily available coping mechanisms are of the unhealthy variety.
At one point in my own life, I gravitated toward food (especially sweets) to cope with problems. As a result, my weight topped out at a whopping 354 pounds! Ultimately, I was trading one set of problems for another.
I am most certainly not credentialed as a mental health practitioner. However, in 20-plus years as a wellness professional and certified life coach, I have had numerous opportunities to share in, witness, and coach clients through many of their challenges and tragedies.
This experience combined with formal education, and what I have learned first-hand in my own life is what inspires the informed perspective that I have to share with you today. I hope that you will take away useful ideas that will help you to positively cope with life’s stormy seas.
Tips for Choosing the Better Path
Remind Yourself That If You’re Going Through Hell – Do Not Stop!
Though bad situations are difficult, life still moves forward, and you need to prepare for the next chapter. To allow yourself to become bogged down in current circumstances can prolong stress and leave you unprepared to manage what the next day brings.
Seek Support from Others in Similar Situations
Whether it be in a grief support group, widow’s/widower’s club, singles groups, weight loss forum, etc. Relatability goes a long way in finding constructive pathways to resolution. Few situations are often unique. The experience of others who have traveled the same path can prove incredibly useful in providing ideas to navigate hardship.
Establish Positive Coping Mechanisms
Food, alcohol, illicit drugs, pornography, and even isolation are all examples of common destructive coping mechanisms. Rather, choosing things that are creative, recreational, healthy, and contributory (like volunteerism) provide much healthier means of positive reinforcement. Choosing this approach also limits the likelihood of exchanging one problem for another or creating compounding consequences.
Open the Flood Gates of Communication!
Whether it be talking to a friend, family member, counselor, or even just writing your thoughts/feelings in a journal. The act of openly communicating what you are dealing with can be incredibly liberating.
It is best to write emotionally charged thoughts/feelings in a journal first. This provides you an opportunity to express those feelings and place them in suspended media while deciding whether or not sharing with others would be beneficial.
Prepare Your Mind and Body for the Day Ahead
Beginning each day with just a half-hour of meditation and deep breathing exercises produces a significant difference in how both your mind and your body handle and cope with stressful situations. This practice has also been shown to counter the adverse effects of elevated cortisol (stress hormones) on mood and metabolism.
Regardless of your age or life experience, nobody is immune to life’s challenges. However, when provided with your next crossroads – I hope you feel inspired and empowered to choose the path to a healthy sense of peace.
Let’s Have a Conversation:
What was the most recent crossroads that you experienced? How did you decide which way to go? Looking back, do you think you made the right decision?
I was at a crossroads 2 years ago. A final blow that broke the came’ back as they say was served up to me by a spouse. I had enough, took the serve and filed for divorce. It’s been the best 2 years. Took what seemed like forever to get him out of my house but the stress and weight lifted off me with each item taken out of the house by the movers. I definitely made the right decision and haven’t looked back. Life is very very good!
I am currently at at crossroad. I’ve been dealing with chronic facial nerve pain for over a year. Constant pain with many doctors, I have now decided to include an Eastern medical approach. Starting a Mindfulness Stress Reduction Therapy course . It’s a specific 8 week course and available through many universities medical hospitals. Used a lot with cancer patients. Including this in my health care is a new road that I’m believing is the “good road,”.
You mentioned meditation and there are lots of different types. Many guided types can be found online.
I think just staying open to new paths is the secret of loving life
is it available by Zoom? or do you know about online options?
jim, google it. It is available worldwide. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D, started it years ago in Massachusetts.
may i ask: do you know if any such course is available on zoom/online?
Janice, this is fantastic. I teach it and my students have found it really helps. It sure helps me. Please let us know how you like this – what it does for you. Best of luck!
It was 25 years ago. I chose not to continue in the marriage. Took me years to get over it, years to develop a more healthy emotional self. Grateful to be at a really good place now.
I am at a crossroads right now with my marriage and depending on how I feel, vacillate between doing things that entertain me, to eating ice cream, while telling mymyself I should meditate. Being in that in between state is challenging.
my husband died suddenly almost 6 years ago. I was so devastated that I threw myself into activities for emotional distraction. I don’t think I really processed the loss.
christina, I think it does take years to process this. How are you now?
I did that too after my husband died, he was my world, my everything. I was shy on girlfriends (lesson in that!) so I dove into my kids lives (not good either!). I picked up new hobbies, took classes, any distraction I could do but I learned I was avoiding dealing with my grief. Grief will not go away so I had to stop seeing every situation as a crossroad and just be right where I was. I had to acknowledge I was in an uncomfortable and painful place and had been running from it and so I had to consciously choose to heal. Crossroads are great markers in life that i now welcome as I know a new chapter is about to begin. I have learned to stop and check in with myself before I leap in a new direction as I was using my crossroads as a means to avoid.