Most of us believe, somewhere beneath our awareness, that our “okay-ness” is determined by what’s happening around us. 

That we can be okay once the hard thing passes, once the situation resolves, once conditions become more preferable.

It’s one of the most common beliefs we carry. It’s also one of the most limiting. 

I want to tell you a story about how I know this, what I’ve come to believe is possible instead, and how this can help you in your life, too.

What I walked into

I visited my son at college recently, expecting a light weekend. What I found was a young man who’d been silently drowning. 

He hadn’t been sleeping or eating, he’d missed classes and fallen behind on work, and had been trying to “outgrind” a hole that kept getting deeper. 

As he drove up to my hotel to meet me, I watched him burst into tears before he even got out of his car. He made a b-line to embrace me, and I held him as he sobbed.

He’d been carrying it alone. Underneath all of that emotion was a belief he hadn’t yet learned to question: “I can’t feel good until the stressors and demands of my life lighten up first.”

The workload had become overwhelming, some social anxieties and self-blame had led to insomnia and “all nighters”, which led to waking up late, which led to missed classes and not enough time to get to the dining hall, which led to more shame and self-condemnation. 

His nervous system was completely dysregulatedand his body depleted. 

Yet, he wasn’t struggling because he lacked capability. 

He was struggling because he wasn’t aware that he could interrupt the downward spiral by thinking a different thought. 

A thought that wasn’t a self-condemning thought, but one of forgiveness, redemption and possibility. So that’s what we worked on.

The tools that turned it all around

I want to be clear that the ideas that shifted things for him were not dramatic or complicated. They were small, simple, and repeatable adjustments.

We started with his body’s basic needs. Water, food, sleep, shelter: these are the four things a human being needs before anything else can work, and for whatever reason, shelter was taken care of, but he hadn’t made the other three a priority. 

He started to see that his body and mind relied on each other, and when one was depleted the other didn’t work very well.

I taught him a breathing exercise that we did together for five minutes. He said it was the first time he’d felt calm in months.

I noticed that most of his comments were about what he hadn’t done, the mistakes he’d made and how he just wanted to be done with college. 

I invited him to list, on paper, everything he’d done that day, not what remained undone, but what he’d actually accomplished. When I asked how he felt afterward, he said, “happy”.

What impressed me the most was his willingness to step out of the “lone ranger” role. 

When he received an email with an “at risk of failing” warning, instead of spiraling deeper into despair, he emailed his professors, asked for help, and discovered that people were ready and willing to meet him where he was, and support him.

By the end of the weekend, he’d gotten all his late assignments submitted and gone from believing he was going to fail out of school to being on track for passing all of his classes. 

Most importantly, he had a confidence and self-belief that I hadn’t before witnessed.As a mother, this was a “heart bursting with admiration and pride” moment. 

For maybe the first time as an adult, he’d taken ownership of his success.

Not because the circumstances had magically resolved, but becausehe was willing to entertain a different thought, “What if I can turn this around? What if it’s easier than I think it is?” 

This is the kind of curiosity, in the midst of a challenge, that sparks inspired ideas, new opportunities and brave actions, and that lands us in an entirely new universe of results.

This isn’t just a story about my son. This is all of our stories. We each have so much more authority over our circumstances than we’ve been led to believe.

This is how it works…

In simple-ish terms, a thought causes us to feel feelings that correspond to the thought.  

Thoughts of curiosity and possibility cause what’s called an “open-focused” brain, eliciting a cascade of “feel good” neurotransmitters, changing our inner physiology and causing a parasympathetic-dominant (safe, relaxed, creative) response in our nervous system. 

Knowing this, you can imagine how helpful it is to monitor your own thoughts and choose a “better feeling” thought, if you want to feel calm, focused, productive and attract any number of uplifting, expansive results.  

There’s usually a much more freeing way to look at things when we allow ourselves to think beyond the initial  “knee-jerk” reaction of “Oh boy, this is bad!”.

This is not about sugarcoating or pretending difficult things aren’t difficult. It is not about performing optimism you don’t feel. It is about recognizing that your inner state doesn’t have to be a hostage to outer circumstances.

My son believed he was doomed. That belief felt like a fact. It was actually a perception. And when the perception shifted, even slightly, everything else became possible!

The same is available for you and me.