Persevering During Difficult Times

Persevering during tough times can be challenging. There are times of dealing with financial difficulties, or health issues, chronic stress and even grief and trauma. Here are 4 ways to help us persevere during those harder seasons in life:

1. Shorten the viewpoint

We adjust our race to short course running and not a marathon. Instead of looking out to the next year or few years, shorten the viewpoint. Maybe shorten it to just next month. From there, define what you want the next month to look like and identify some small, attainable goals that you can hit. Perhaps it’s reading a book, going for more walks or exercise, spending quality time with loved ones, or getting more regular sleep. Sometimes when we are feeling really depleted or fatigued, it can feel hard to be motivated. For instance, exercising might feel like it’s too much because in your mind that equals doing something intense for 30 minutes, but just walking around for 5 minutes can be a great way to start a new habit. If a new goal feels too overwhelming, shorten it up into even smaller actions. 

2. Focus on being whole achievers instead of high achievers.

High achieving is a great thing, but often times in our pursuit of achievement, we can neglect some key areas of our life. There is one area that specifically tends to get neglected, and that is the spiritual area our life. Our relationship with God or our lack of relationship with God can impact every other area of our life. On whom we focus while we are persevering matters. This verse says we fix our eyes on Jesus and to consider Him, then the end of the verse gives us the why: “So that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” We need to stay connected to Jesus and the Word to really persevere well. 

3. Zoom In and Out

In times of persevering, it’s helpful to live in a balanced perspective of zoom in and zoom out. If we think about a tree, it’s made up of many leaves. If we zoom in, each of those leaves have their own cells and parts that make up that leaf. If we zoom out, we see the bigger picture, the whole tree. Likewise, we each have different experiences: when we zoom in we can see how painful or hard those might have been, but when we zoom out we can see how we made it through, lessons we learned, joy we found after that, and resilience that was gained from it. Living in this balanced perspective of acknowledging how hard life might be right now and knowing this isn’t the end of the story, rather just another leaf in our full tree, will help us to persevere. 

4. Laugh

There are many studies that show the benefits of laughing. In fact, the study of laughter is called gelotology. It uses multiple parts of the brain and because of that, laughing helps strengthens neural connections, reduces certain levels of stress hormones and improves your mood. It provides a physical outlet: it is estimated that laughing 100 times equals a full body workout of 10 minutes on a rowing machine! It also provides an emotional outlet: it is cathartic and can help us release our negative emotion as well.

And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, ² fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. ³ Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart. (Heb. 12:1-3)

Kay Gackle, MS, LMFT is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a clinical member at Transforming Life Counseling Center.