PULSE Magazine | April 2020 Issue

Discover

Linings

Little rays of light, these silver linings, are imperative to our health right now. It’s okay to share them. It doesn’t mean you’re putting your head in the sand. It doesn’t mean you’re ignoring the facts or being careless. It doesn’t mean you aren’t taking COVID-19 seriously and doing your part.

What it does mean is that you are taking care of yourself and your family. Because even if they only last a minute, we all need these silver linings now more than ever. It’s okay to see the wonderful and peaceful through this mess. It’s okay . When you see something that brightens your day during this whole situation and you share it with friends, family, or on social media, it can be contagious.

Silver linings have the power to ignite a spark in other people. Not only do you reap the benefits from your little win, whether it’s painting your nails, donating money, taking your dog for a walk, or seeing co -workers on a virtual meeting, your joy and hope just might be the thing that makes someone else feel a little more at ease. It may be the thing that helps you parent a little better. It may be the thing that makes you sleep a little more soundly. And a bunch of thankful snippets will be the stepping stones that get us through. So share those silver linings. The world needs them now more than ever. For example, the expression “Every cloud has a silver lining” focuses on finding something positive in a gloomy situation. Just because it’s hard to notice silver linings during dark times, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any. Focusing on positive things doesn’t make your problems any less serious—but it does make the situation easier to bear. Here are a few positive things that came come out of challenging times: 1. You become more compassionate and less judgmental. Experiencing suffering yourself can make you more compassionate towards others who are suffering. Often, when witnessing others’ hardships, people look for reasons to blame the victim for their plight (e. g ., “He’s struggling financially because he doesn’t work hard enough," or, "She’s sick because she worked too hard and didn’t take care of herself’), thereby reducing their own sense of vulnerability. But when you’ve suffered deeply, you’re more likely to recognize that everyone is vulnerable, and that bad things happen to good people all the time. Someone else’s suffering no longer represents a threat, but rather can be a source of connection and kinship. 2. You discover that you’re stronger than you thought you were. In the early stages of a negative life event, you may think to yourself, “There’s no way I can get through this.” But somehow, day by day, you manage to put one foot in front of the other, despite the pain you may feel. One of the things that hardship does is show you your true strength the strength you didn’t know you had until it was really tested. Supporting this idea, research on affective forecast- ing suggests that we tend to overestimate how devastated we’ll be by negative life events and how long the pain will last—in other words, we’re more resilient than we think. 3. You learn who your true friends are. In difficult times, certain relationships are likely to deepen, while others may fade away. Discovering that some people are fair-weather friends, disappearing when you need them most, can be painful, but it’s also an opportunity to develop a new appreciation for the people who do stick around, and to focus your energy on those relationships. Research suggests that sometimes even weaker social ties— people you weren’t very close with to begin with—can rise to the occasion and prove to be very supportive in high- stress situations. 4. You get greater clarity on what you want in life. Sometimes a crisis can jolt you into re-evaluating your life in a major way. It can force you to ask yourself if you’re really doing what makes you happy and spending your time how you want to, or with the people you want to spend it with. Jarring as these re-evaluations can be, they can push you to make positive changes that may not have seemed like realistic possibilities before, for one reason or another— fear of failure, concerns about what other people would think, or just the inertia of the status

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