The First 4 Things You Should Do When Something Bad Happens

Welcome to Mission Elite’s Official Newsletter

^{Mission Elite is an organization that has impacted World Champions and National Championship-producing teams to leading executives and groundbreaking companies. The author of this newsletter and CEO of Mission Elite, Raheel Manji, specialized in Executive Leadership at Harvard and High Performing Teams through Stanford, where he finished in the top 3 of his class. He is trained in Psychology of Performance and is a former 4X professional title holder, ITA National Summer Champion, and NCAA Sweet 16 coach.}

Understanding Emotions

We know that most of the positive emotion you will experience in your life comes from making progress towards a goal. The more meaningful the goal, the stronger the emotion.

But it’s not just positive emotion that you experience; it’s all the psychological and physiological beneficial effects that come with it. The reason we feel the positive emotion is because we are experiencing what is called a dopaminergic response. Dopamine is the neurochemical for motivation, drive, and focus. This is also an analgesic response, meaning the pain centers in your brain begin to shut off, enabling us to withstand more discomfort and push farther to achieve the goal.

It’s important to note this: No goal, no positive emotion. This is why it is important to set goals and create meaning around them. How can we do this? By thinking through our goals and making sure there is a great and meaningful reason behind achieving them. This is important because it is what will bring you a greater sense of contentment and satisfaction.

But what happens when the meaningful goal you’ve been aiming for, or a cherished dream, or something vital to your identity collapses? What do we do then? Well, that is what we will be uncovering today.

So if we understand that most of the positive emotion, the dopaminergic response, and all the motivation, drive, and focus that come with it are experienced from making progress towards a goal, we must also understand what happens when we are not making progress, are regressing, or worse, the goal itself collapses.

This is what we experience after being heartbroken by someone we love or getting fired from a job we cherish. Not only do we feel the negative emotion, but we also experience a lack of motivation, drive, and focus. The more meaningful the goal, the more we experience this. But we also experience anxiety and depression. Why? Because to be anxious is, in a metaphorical sense, to be lost in the woods. We don’t know where we are, where we need to go, or what’s coming. That is a terrifying place to be. Meanwhile, depression reflects the brain’s struggle to adjust to a world without the structure or hope provided by the goal.

So what should we do when this is the case? Well, when your life or dreams seem to be falling apart, or you’ve had a terrible event happen to you and you are feeling the psychological and physiological effects of such, these are the recommended steps.

Go To Sleep

First, prioritize 7-9 hours of sleep. Literature on sleep research, such as that from the National Institutes of Health, documents that 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night is optimal for emotional recovery. During this period, the brain processes and reorganizes traumatic experiences, allowing you to wake up with a reduced emotional burden. In this case, the saying "time heals all" holds true—but it really should be "time + 9 hours of sleep each night heals all." We need to allow ourselves that 2-hour window of sleep experienced between hours 7 to 9 for emotional reset. The more strong nights of sleep you have, quite literally, over time, the pain will go away.

Get a Diary

Next, write about the experience. Writing forces individuals to confront the complexity and structure of their ideas and is one of the most effective ways to process difficult emotions. A study from The Journal of Traumatic Stress found that expressive writing helps individuals think, reduce anxiety, and increase clarity. Many psychologists believe that writing is, in fact, the greatest form of thought.

Call a Friend

After that, discuss and speak about the experience with those you trust, while making your best attempt to figure out what you should do next. It’s important to understand that while writing helps you formulate your thoughts due to the explicit structure it requires, speaking will help you organize those thoughts. Likely, there will be an intrinsic desire to speak about what you have written or thought about. There is a reason for this: when one has a lot of thoughts or ideas surrounding an issue, there is an urge or need to organize those thoughts to gain clarity and to have a more manageable way to live with them. As mentioned, speaking is a form of organized thought and, therefore, is essential to do.

Research also shows that speaking provides emotional relief, and verbalizing emotions activates the brain’s prefrontal cortex, reducing the intensity of negative feelings. After you have spoken enough about the event, it is important to make an attempt, with your trustees, to find a solution and figure out your next steps. Their lack of direct victimization with the experience, combined with your new processing of the event, should help turn responses from being emotionally motivated to more logical.

What happens through the writing and speaking process is that it helps you turn the chaos—the collapse of your meaningful goal or the painful event—into order.

Whenever chaos takes place in our lives, we have to evaluate how to turn chaos into order.

Through writing and speaking, you begin to transform the chaos of the collapsed goal into a sense of order and control.

Walk Forward

Finally, set a new goal and take your steps forward. Why? Because you want to get to the point where you reexperience positive emotion. In military structures, they teach you that when you are lost in the woods, the worst thing to do is to stay put or go nowhere. Aim at a destination point and start walking, even if you don’t know where it will lead you. Why? Because you take control of your journey, and as you move towards your new goal, you gain feedback that can potentially help you course-correct if needed.

You will not reexperience positive emotion without a new and meaningful goal or direction forward. Well, that’s not completely true. The reason why I mentioned in the beginning that most of the positive emotion you will experience in life comes from making progress towards a goal is important here. However, there is still some positive emotion that can be experienced in a different way. This way is through what’s called consummatory reward. It takes place in the more hedonistic or immediate gratification forms of pleasure, such as partying, eating junk food, watching Netflix, scrolling endlessly, or shopping.

There are dangers in these kinds of rewards, as they make you feel pleasure in the moment but typically at the expense of the future. Additionally, as you engage more in consummatory rewards, it requires increasingly more of the same kind to experience the same amount of pleasure. The danger of taking this path to experience positive emotion becomes clear, yet it is the path that tends to be taken when a new meaningful goal is not created. You have to take initiative following the collapse of a previous meaningful goal and create a new one.

Overcoming Crisis

After you have prioritized sleep for enough nights, worked through the negative event through writing, organized your thoughts through conversation, set a new goal, and begun taking your steps forward, you will have taken the best approach possible to heal from the past, reexperience positive emotion, and reestablish a sense of direction and purpose for the future.

With this knowledge, you can feel confident in having a way to reach a better place, even after the darkest moments in your life.

This would have a major impact on overall performance.

Final Thoughts

For more on high performance, mindset, and success, follow us on Instagram at Mission Elite Performance and Mission Elite Mentality.

For a deeper dive into the principles that fuel success, check out my book, 17 Principles of a Mission Elite, available on Amazon or through our website.

If you would like us to support you and help your team or leadership, visit www.missioneliteperformance.com or contact our administrative team at [email protected].

Sincerely,

Raheel Manji
CEO, Mission Elite