When Bad Things Happen and How to Deal With Them

I have been having some frustrating events happen to me recently.  First my car broke down on my last trip between New York and Cape Cod for the Fourth of July.  We had already been travelling for over three hours on what should be a four hour trip maximum and we still had several hours more to go.  The holiday traffic was terrible and my air conditioning was not working well.  All of a sudden my car just died.  We had friends in the car to make matters worse (more embarrassing!).  Eventually we got towed the remainder of the way (after waiting two more hours and paying $600).  We arrive around 10:30 pm, about 8 hours after we left New York.

Then my internet went out for over 12 hours last week.  I couldn’t blog, use the internet or watch any of my favorite shows OnDemand.  I continued to have internet problems over the weekend but I no technician is available to look at it until Thursday night.  Yikes!  Then my server went down for my blog and I was quoted “several hours” until it would be back up and running.  In the meantime it was error-message-city.

I have several student loans from law school that I pay every month.  I set them up to direct debit from my account so I don’t have to worry about paying my bills on time, plus I get 0.25% deducted from my interest- woo hoo!  Well, my loans are constantly being sold and transferred to new service providers.  Don’t ask me why, I don’t begin to understand the intricacies of these grad school loans but what I can say is that for some reason when they do this, my direct debit gets cancelled and I find out (too late) that a payment is due and I am now “delinquent.”  The worst part is that the blame always falls squarely on me for not being more cognizant of the transfer of my loans.  Frustrating indeed.

Why am I telling you all this?  Am I looking to vent, complain and just generally get things off my chest?  Well, sorta.  There is something cathartic about sharing these frustrating experiences with you but mostly I want to talk about dealing with these issues.  I can’t say I’m the best under stress.  I get anxious easily and I worry non-stop about the worst case scenario.  The Hubs always says to me that there is no point in worrying because what will happen will happen and I can’t change it whether I worry or not.  That does exactly nothing to help me stop worrying but he IS right.

So how do you deal with these challenges?  Life throws millions of them at you so rather than becoming frustrated, it is my new goal to attempt to deal with these challenges in a more constructive manner.

Reacting

I guess the first issue I need to overcome is reacting.  When something goes awry it is so easy to fly off the handle and let it BUG you.  But getting upset is not really going to help you deal with the issue is it?  So my new goal is to take three deep breaths before thinking, saying or doing anything related to the problem.

Dealing

The next step is dealing with the issue in all of the above scenarios the solution to dealing with these issues was to call someone and get the problem fixed.  Sure, it was not always an ideal situation but rather than focusing on all the reasons why dealing with this problem is frustrating, I need to focus on just dealing with the solution.  Sure, there are plenty of reasons why these issues are legitimately frustrating but focusing on that rather than the solution is not productive.

Outcome

The outcome of the above scenarios:

Car- We eventually got to our destination safe and sound and we are picking up our new car this weekend. Overall Outcome?  Better off than we were before!

Internet- It seems to be back up and running without any glitches –knock on wood!  I will probably cancel our service for Thursday.  Overall Outcome?  Just as good as before the outage!

Server- It eventually got fixed and I was back up and running; obviously since you are reading this now!  I was down for about a day, which did kind of tank my stats.  But the Overall Outcome was that my site was up and running and I didn’t really suffer that much! 🙂

Student Loans- I paid them as soon as I found out, I am re-setting up my direct debit and I’m planning on pursuing a few avenues to make loan communication more clear.  The delinquency did not seem to affect my credit too much (see no. 1 re: car above), so the Overall Outcome: Just as good as before.

The outcomes to all of my recent frustrations left me in just as good, if not better position than I was before the frustrations.  Yes there were some momentary issues and concerns but in the end, everything worked out ok. My takeaway?  Going forward, I need to remember that in the end, I will most likely be back to where I started and that’s not a bad thing!

So tomorrow when my bus is late or I can’t find some important paperwork I’m going to React calmly, Deal with the issue and Focus on the outcome.

Readers, how do you deal with stressful and frustrating situations?  Do you use techniques to help you stay calm?