Humans are complex. We’ve got a complex mechanism when it comes to facing disappointments. It’s not like you can instantly find some logical negotiations and deal with it.
It’s always an uncomfortable feeling. And when it happens, we feel like our world is going to collapse. It’s not just anger that we feel associated with, we feel hurt and cheated, and tons of other emotions that start flowing through our consciousness.
And at that very moment, our whole perspective towards life changes, we don’t feel sanguine anymore. Now it’s not about being positive but we simply feel exhausted and helpless.
And the worst thing about disappointment is that it can leave you confused and demotivated. You lose the good perspective about your life because of this giant hole, disappointment created in your heart.
Therefore, you must deal with disappointment so that you don’t lose a good perspective and enjoy whenever life challenges you next time. Here are some ways.
1. Accept what just happened
Sometimes our self-disappointment can hit so hard that we are in shock for several days and weeks or maybe months.
In that process, because we are fighting with ourselves and we are angry with ourselves—we often don’t want to accept what just happened.
Because of that, it can get really hard to forget ourselves. Instead, what we should really try to achieve is this: emotions like grief and disappointment are part of our journey.
Therefore, if we don’t accept all the parts of the journey, how can we reach our destination in our life. Therefore, the best thing to do here is to accept what just happened or what went wrong.
You’re not going to win anything if you keep on glorying your anger or your broken self-worth. So if you feel like going outside for a walk or maybe offering yourself a nice meal—then do it.
If you feel like crying your heart out, then do it. We all have been there, it’s painful to bear all these emotions at once. And if you want to wallow for some time, then you must do that also.
Whatever helps you feel light-hearted. But after this moment of losing yourself, you must come back. You must brush yourself off and understand where things went wrong.
Stand in front of a mirror or don’t be that dramatic, but say this out loud anyway, “I feel this way because I didn’t see the results I expected.”
After a while, you’ll realize that it was a whole process and in that process or episode, something didn’t turn out as you expected. And at this moment, you simply realize:
“I was punishing myself for no reason, this can happen to anyone at any given moment.”
2. Get some air and perspective
Understand this, you must allow some space as you’d to a friend. Oftentimes, we forget that we should be our own friends too.
So in that way, you’d never say something like this to a friend: “You disappointed me, you could’ve done better.” Instead, we would help them to get over this phase.
We would provide them with space and time so that they can reflect on the situation and develop a new perspective.
That’s exactly the reason why you should treat yourself like a friend. Be supportive, be kind, be forgiving, and don’t be so hard on your friend (yourself).
Eventually, you’d learn to ease the blame and stop punishing yourself. This will help you to develop and see the third perspective which is grey and not just white or black like previously.
3. Understand your unreal expectations
Disappointments are directly associated with our unreal expectations. It’s as simple, we expect big but most often than not, it breaks our heart when we don’t get that.
With the mix of these exceptions and wishful thinking we set for ourselves, an inevitable disappointment is certain.
It’s nothing new, we can track this mix even when we were kids. We use to expect a lot from small events and as a result, it used to disappoint us all the time.
Although big expectations are not something evil but they should be measurable from start to finish. For example, if we want to start a successful business, we must be ready to sacrifice our leisure time and get all the hard work needed.
Only then it’s unlikely that our expectations would not meet. However, the best practice would be to enjoy the process and not think about the results at all.
In this way, we would have nothing to lose but—only to learn.
4. Distract yourself if needed
After these methods, after you’ve settled with your emotions, it’s still possible that you might feel discouraged and gloomy.
So to entertain yourself, you can distract yourself in a healthy manner. Binge-watch your favorite tv show, play some video games, or other activities which can help you take your mind off.
However, indulging mindlessly in these activities is not going to get you any help or cheer. Instead, you might end up where you started—feeling lost and gloomy.
So to avoid that, you can reach out to something relatively healthy. Meet up with your old friend, finish your favorite book you always dreamed about reading, visit a place you wanted to take yourself, or do something else which you know can cheer you up.
Once you start enjoying these things, you would be reminded once again that life is perhaps too short to waste in self-pity.
5. It’s time for some reflection
It’s almost a cliché now—failure makes us wise or failure makes us stronger and tons of other quotes of the same nature.
However, it’s only true if you do it the right way. Meaning, if you set a goal for yourself without proper measurements about the loss, risks, the ratio of success and failure then you might learn nothing from the experience.
Therefore, it’s crucial to learn from our mistakes and set new plans accordingly. that’s what you’ve to do next time.
You’ve to figure out what went wrong so that you can learn from your mistakes and become wiser from your failures or such experiences.
So the questions related to self-reflection can look something like this:
- Did I expect too much?
- Did I do the hard work needed?
- Was I being unreal?
- Where did things go wrong?
- Am I learning something from the situation?
Proper analysis of these tough questions is necessary for your development. That’s the proper way to find faults within.
But if you’ll avoid this part, you will not learn anything and soon it will become a vicious circle.
Stand up again
Remember when we were kids we use to fall from our bicycles all the time. We would get hurt all the time and by doing silly mistakes.
But what we did eventually? We would cry initially, dust our clothes, and get up to play again. Literally, every single time.
But as we grow up, we lost our strength to get up and play again. We know that our adult life is more challenging and all. But that should be an excuse.
We must stand up every time and play again—only this time, the game is called ‘real life’.
Therefore, no matter what happens, we should always forgive ourselves and get ready to fight another battle. Only this time we would be more prepared.
This time we have learned from our experiences and have done proper self-analysis and are ready to take the action.
Conclusion
There are instances in our lives that break us and shatters our self-confidence. They have the intensity to make us feel negative.
Disappointment is one of them. Whenever it happens, we often learn something or we are totally broken and are unable to survive.
Therefore, this guide helps you to deal with your disappointments and the feelings associated with them. If you can implement these practices, you’d be able to see what went wrong and learn from your mistakes.
