How to Survive Failure: Hacks to Memorize for Daily Life 

Sometimes even great efforts don’t bring the expected results, and in the end, we reproach ourselves for failure. As a result, we try to escape from negative thoughts, entering a betting app or eating our favorite food. But that’s only a temporary solution. How not to get stuck in negative emotions and what methods help survive failure?

What Failure Is

Before you start to achieve your goal, a person usually imagines himself at the end of the road — what emotions he will experience and what benefits he will get. For example, a marketer has prepared a 10-page analysis of competitors and is sure that his boss will praise him for the report. But at the meeting the manager says that the information is insufficient and the conclusions are superficial. A person’s first reaction to not getting the desired result is shock. Then they may feel disappointed in their abilities, resentful that the supervisor didn’t appreciate their efforts, and confused because they don’t know what to do next — this is the feeling of failure.

What the Reaction to Failure Depends on

The attitude to the same unpleasant event can differ from person to person. It depends on three factors:

• The structure of the nervous system. A more sensitive person will have a harder time experiencing failure.
• The environment of growing up. If a person grew up in an environment where he was criticized or indoctrinated about how important it’s to be the best in everything, any misstep provokes feelings of guilt and shame.
• Emotional Intelligence. If a person doesn’t know how to regulate and live emotions, failure will become an excuse for a tantrum or outburst of anger.

How to Survive Failure

To get over a failure, it’s important to sort out your feelings and analyze what happened. Some practices make it easier to cope with failure in the future.

Sort Out Your Feelings and Calm Down

Immediately after a failure, think about your emotions and try to name them. Psychologist Robert Plutchik’s “flower of emotions” technique can help with this, which collects the basic states that a person experiences.

If the palette of emotion names doesn’t help you identify them, body signals will. Some emotions are felt in the body as follows:

• Anger: breathing increases, cheeks burn, hands clenched into fists.
• Sadness: heaviness in the chest area, tears come.
• Fear: heart rate increases, sweating, breathing becomes heavier.
• Shame: stiffness, shortness of breath.
• Confusion: rapid breathing and heartbeat, sweating.

Thoughts after a failure can also help you understand emotions:

• Anger: “That’s not fair!”, “I’ll show them!”
• Sadness: “Why do things always end this way?”, “I’m so sorry.”
• Fear: “What’s going to happen next?”, “I’ve got to run!”
• Shame: “I wish no one would notice my shame.”
• Confusion: “What to do next?”

It’s worth discussing these emotions with a psychologist or supportive loved ones.

Grieve and Analyze What’s Happened

When emotions overwhelm, it’s important not to run away from them, but to acknowledge the feelings, feel sorry for yourself and support yourself.

It’s important for a person to think about what he did before the failure, how it happened and what led to it. Dividing the failure into small fragments helps understand where the failure occurred and not to make the same mistake in the future.

You can remember past mistakes and think about what they led to. Not always failures have negative consequences. It happens that they bring you to a new level.

Help Yourself Bear Defeats More Easily in the Future

If a person has heard all his life that mistakes are bad and unworthy, it’s important to change this attitude. For example, when making mistakes, realize that the value of a person doesn’t decrease, and life doesn’t become worse. If you can not change the attitude yourself, you can turn to a psychologist. They will help form positive beliefs: for example, “Failures don’t define me as a person,” “Mistakes are part of the journey and experience,” “Without failures there can be no growth.”

Remember that not everything is within a person’s area of responsibility. Reflect on what was within your sphere of influence at the time of failure and what was outside of it. Realizing this fact helps you accept the limitations of reality and give up omnipotence.

To get an objective assessment of the actions that led to the defeat, you can turn to a specialist in this area. For example, if the specialist failed to pass the interview, it’s useful to sort out the mistakes with a career counselor.

Focusing not only on failures helps keep a diary of achievements. You should include big and small victories. The diary helps to maintain a sense of self worth even in difficult periods.

A large-scale goal should be divided into small stages, so that you don’t try to “conquer Mount Elbrus” at once and then get frustrated that it didn’t work out.

What to Do if You Are Afraid to Try Again After Failure

Often, fear is a fantasy. A person relies on a negative experience, transfers it to the future and fears that defeat will happen again. Several techniques can help cope with fear.

Alternative Scenarios of the Future

It’s necessary to analyze the consequences of the action that a person plans to commit, in a negative, realistic, and positive way. For each option to prescribe evidence that it can happen or not, as well as to predict the probability that each of the options will come true. Next, it’s worth assessing whether the consequences of each outcome are really so dire, especially if the negative and positive options are equally likely to occur.

The technique will help you evaluate all possible outcomes and realize that many of the consequences of defeat are exaggerated.

Checking the Validity of the Thought

To check if the fear is valid, it’s worth analyzing the thoughts.

Provide evidence that the thought is indeed true and, conversely, unfounded. For example, a person is afraid to go to a job interview because he or she will be rejected again. It’s worth spelling out the reasons why the interview will fail again and vice versa, why it might not.

Offer an alternative thought without catastrophizing. For example, the thought “I’m afraid to go to the interview because I will be rejected again” can be transformed as follows: “So far, I have not been able to find a job, and I am frustrated. But I know my strengths and weaknesses and I will be able to find something that suits me.”

Assess the validity of the alternative thought. It’s worth thinking about what in reality there are confirmations of the new attitude, evaluate past experience or rely on feedback from colleagues and relatives.

Bringing the Absurd to the Point of Absurdity

It’s necessary to formulate what is frightening in action, and bring the situation to absurdity, asking the question “And then what?”. For example, “I’m afraid to go to a job interview because I’ll be rejected again” → “What’s next?” → “I won’t get a job in this company” → “What next?” and so on.

It often turns out that the consequences are not as devastating as they seem.

If you feel that you are constantly thinking about failure, facing repetitive scenarios, reacting to mistakes with hysteria or aggression, think about going to a psychologist.

What Not Knowing How to Handle Failure Can Lead to

Failure to process the negative emotions of failure can lead to destructive feelings: shame, anger, fear, and guilt. This is destabilizing and leads to stress, which has at least four consequences:

• Against the background of constant worries, well-being deteriorates: frequent headaches, insomnia, digestive problems appear. Anxiety disorders, panic attacks and depression can also develop.
• Self-esteem decreases.
• Bad moods, apathy, and reluctance to try new things occur more often.
• Addictions to food and unhealthy substances become a way to drown out worries.