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hey guys I'm Heidi Prib welcome back to my channel or welcome if you're new here this month on this channel we've been talking about resilience and one of the things we've gone over is what the difference is between trauma so
Heidi Priebe shares strategies for navigating hardship: accepting periods of surviving, building an emergency response system, and applying the 'one thing a day' principle.
Key Takeaways
- Acknowledging that you are surviving rather than thriving is the critical first step toward getting through hardship meaningfully.
- Adjust expectations deliberately to avoid shame, burnout, and self-criticism during difficult periods.
- Prepare an emergency response system in advance, with minimum standards and a simplified daily focus.
- Let go of non-essential demands and protect rest, connection, and basic self-care during crisis.
What the video covers
- Heidi distinguishes trauma (nervous-system disorientation) from hardship (challenging circumstances that call for self-reflection and growth).
- Healing does not mean living in constant thriving; it means being able to move between thriving and surviving, drawing on Pete Walker's CPTSD work.
- Step one is surrender: identify that you are in a period of surviving and minimize time spent resisting what is happening.
- Accepting reality prevents secondary problems such as shame, self-belittling, and burnout from holding yourself to normal standards.
- Step two is building an emergency response system: a pre-set set of adjusted expectations for hard times, based on what helped in past challenges.
- Identify bare-minimum standards (basic care, essential responsibilities) and survival needs that must be protected at any cost.
- The 'one thing a day' principle reduces overwhelm by choosing a single crucial task each day and treating it as enough.
- Ease up on non-essential commitments to regain energy, while being stricter about rest, social connection, and time outdoors during distress.
- Hardship periods can be times of grief and letting go, and the speaker encourages listening to what the body and spirit actually need.
- An 'ideals audit' examines values during difficult times, and the emphasis is on staying attuned to what feels right and wrong.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Trauma vs. Hardship
- 01:27Thriving vs. Surviving After Healing
- 02:55Step One: Surrender and Accepting the Challenge
- 04:26Step Two: Building an Emergency Response System
- 05:46The One Thing a Day Principle
- 08:28Grief, Humility, and Letting Life Unfold
- 12:24Ideals Audit and Staying Attuned to Values
- 15:15Closing: Investing in Low Periods
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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something that causes internal disorientation particularly in our nervous system and hardship so hardship being a challenging circumstance that we move through in life that causes usually to do some form of self-reflection and or growth work in order to overcome and move through so
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what I want to talk about today is what we do when we find ourselves in those periods of hardship so I had kind of an aha moment around this when I was reading Pete Walker's CPTTSD: From Surviving to Thriving which if you've
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been around this channel for a while you know is one of my all-time favorite books and you don't have to have CPTSD to relate to what I'm going to say next but I remember picking up this book and
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having this kind of fantasy that reading it and absorbing everything in it and in particular doing all the healing work that was required of me would get me to a place where I would always be thriving and never just surviving again and I do
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actually think that there's a part of the book that specifically addresses the fact that to be healed does not mean that you live in a perpetual state of thriving it means that you're able to switch back and forth between periods of
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thriving and surviving well and unfortunately this turned out to be very true of life no matter how much healing work I did hard times still came up periods of hardship and external challenges still arrived into my life but I do like to think that I've gotten
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pretty good at accepting those periods and moving through them as effectively as possible and when I say as effectively as possible I mean in the most honest and direct way possible so in this video that's exactly what we're
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going to talk about what to do if you find yourself in a period where you are not thriving and in fact you need to focus for a while on just surviving and getting through essentially what we're talking about today is how to suffer
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well the first thing that I personally try to focus on anytime I notice that my life is not going the way that I've wanted it to or some change is coming and forcing itself upon me that I do not
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want is to identify that I am in a period of surviving rather than thriving and try to minimize the time that I am spending in resistance of that fact now there are always going to be periods of our lives where things happen and we're
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like uh this isn't quite the way I want things to be going and spending a little bit of time in resistance of those things pushing back against them seeing if we can actually not go into that situation that we don't want to happen
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can actually be fruitful right so a lot of the time this is an exit route but sometimes some form of challenge or strife arrives in our lives in a way that is just proving itself to be persistent and there has to be a point
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where we reckon with that cleanly and directly and accept for ourselves right now i am in the middle of a challenging period i am going through something regardless of how much I do not want to be going through it and so it might be
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time to manage my own expectations when I am thriving and full of energy and firing on all cylinders or even just in a period of relative calm and stability there's a lot of things I can do and a lot of ways I can operate
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that are just not quite as accessible to me when the stakes of my life are down and I generally find when I'm going through it in whatever capacity this step alone is the single most defining one of whether I'm going to make it
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through this period in a way that feels meaningful and growth oriented or not because this first step is the step of surrender accepting something that I do not want to be happening is happening and I'm going to have to adjust to that
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in some way or another whether I want to or not so this is our decision however reluctantly to welcome in the challenge that has happened upon us and accept that we are going to be in relationship with it for some time moving forward the
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reason that this is important is because when bad things happen to us and we do not adjust our expectations for ourselves and what we are going to be capable of as we move through it we end up with a lot of secondary problems like
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shame and constantly belittling ourselves or being down on ourselves for not being able to do what we're normally doing or burnout if we just keep pushing ourselves to meet the same standards that we normally meet under different circumstances so this is about being
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real with ourselves about what is happening and about the fact that we are going to have to make some adjustments if we want to move through it well which leads us to step two step two for navigating hardship and this is one that
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I've been honing for myself over a number of years is have an emergency response system already in place so what does that mean an emergency response system is essentially a set of expectations you will have for yourself that are different for when you are
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moving through a hard time than from when you are in periods of stability and ease the way we develop this emergency response system is by reflecting on other challenging times we've moved through in life and picking out what
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really helped us authentically navigate through those well versus what simply drained our energy and worked against us so we want to identify a couple of things one what are our bare minimum standards for ourselves and our lives so
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the things that we absolutely do not want to let drop at any cost this can be something like if you are a parent caring for your child making sure that they are fed and getting sleep and going to school on time if you are not a
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parent it can be things like taking basic care of yourself making sure that you do not get fired during a period of challenge might be something that's a priority to you and it might not be also but it might be so things like that what
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are our very basic survival needs that we just need to make sure we are attending to even if we cannot attend to anything else right now so something that I like to employ during periods of struggling is the one thing a day
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principle i try to pick only one task a day to do some days that's getting to work other days that's getting exercise other days it's cooking one healthy meal but as soon as I feel overwhelmed and in over my head in some major way in life I
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try to boil each day down to just one most crucial thing that has to happen that day and allow myself to consider it enough if I have only done that and that's usually my response system to something quite intense like depression
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but other things we want to look at during this step are just things like what can we be a little bit less strict with ourselves about right now not because we want our whole lives to go to hell but because there might be things
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that we are dayto-day spending a lot of energy and willpower on that we actually kind of need some of that energy and willpower back from right now so can I ease up a little bit on some of these
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commitments that in the face of this new challenge are just not as important for me to focus on right now so where can I gain some of my own time and energy back from the areas that are not that
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important to me when I'm in a state of distress and on the flip side where might I need to be a little bit more strict with myself right now so when I'm really struggling I try to be stricter
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than average with myself in areas like getting enough social interaction going outside every day getting enough rest so doing things that under normal circumstances we might be able to kind of power through without but when the stakes are really down we actually need
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to attend to heavily so this is going to look totally different person to person and it's probably also going to look different for you crisis to crisis based on what's happening in your life at any given point in time but just developing
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a bit of an idea of where you might be able to naturally relax some of the standards that you normally hold yourself up to in order to give yourself more energy back and which resources socially financially or otherwise exist
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in your life that you might be able to withdraw from a little bit more heavily during these periods is going to give you a sense of normaly there's a quote that I usually hear applied to things like military training but I think it
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applies in lots of areas of life that goes "We do not rise to the level of our expectations we fall to the level of our training." And I think that that is so relevant for moving through hard times
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in our lives when we prepare for them when we expect that they are going to come at some time or another and we develop plans and systems that we can put in place as soon as we realize they're happening it takes a humongous
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amount of mental load off of our plate so we have more time and energy available to us to simply respond to what is happening and so those systems are things we might just want to get thinking about when we are not
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struggling so that we have plans in place for what we can do once we are third thing to focus on when going through a hardship is learning to accept that some things simply cannot be understood or reworked until we have
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moved through them because the perspective that we often so direly want can only come from getting some distance from the experience itself so this lesson is going to be particularly pertinent for those of you who like myself really like to hinge onto the
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idea of if I can only understand something everything will be okay some periods of our lives are just periods where things are falling apart and we don't yet have a clear sense of what is going to come next i was actually
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thinking about this this past winter because I got hit with the flu like a really bad totally knocked me out for weeks flu and the thing about having a virus like that in your system is that you just have to wait it out yes you can
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take care of yourself as well as you possibly can yes you can make sure that you're getting enough rest and you're getting enough fluids and all of that good stuff but at the end of the day sometimes we just have to endure things
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until they work their way out of our system and the same is true of many life scenarios many things that will later on absolutely become part of the story that you tell yourself about your life that you will find ways to make sense of and
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grapple with and accept while we are moving through them we just cannot possibly have that perspective on yet and so the things that become really important during those periods are just having realistic expectations for ourselves compassion for ourselves care
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for ourselves and our lives and the things that matter to us that we do still have and the ability to just keep enduring until we can get to the place where it will someday all make sense in retrospect so the point here is that if
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we want to be healthy human beings we sometimes just have to let life humble us and it will we cannot expect every experience we go through to be this immediate humongous learning opportunity or thing that we can reframe for the
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better sometimes we just have to take the L let life kind of pummel us for a little bit and then wait for the authentic signals in our bodies to tell us when it's time to get back up and
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fight again i went through this period last year where after resisting and resisting and resisting all of these different ways in which life was just kind of dealing me blows i eventually went I think the only move I have here
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is to just get on my knees spiritually and emotionally and accept that I don't know what's coming next i hope it's better than this but right now all I can do is move through this and hope that there's something better on the other
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side of it eventually and of course there always is which brings us to step four once we have accepted we are in the thick of something we have our emergency responses in place we have the opportunity to start examining some of
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the reasons why we may have ended up here so often I find that when I'm going through a really challenging period that I have a lot of resistance to it's often because I'm holding on to some ideal or
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some hope that actually doesn't really make sense anymore so something I like to talk about is doing an ideals audit when we are going through it in life and really examining what are my values what am I pushing myself towards and do I
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still feel truly aligned with all of those things sometimes when we're experiencing a lot of resistance in a way that does not feel like it's growing us in our lives it's because actually we're pursuing old passions or old goals
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or old ways of doing things that no longer really align with who we are now so periods of hardship or challenge can be really good opportunities to check in with ourselves and ask is there anything that my body is just begging me to let
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go of is there a relationship or a scenario that genuinely just needs to be grieved and moved on from in my life and if so now might be the time to attend to that and to let there be a little bit of
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a void before something new comes in to take its place you're going through it anyways right if you are in a pit of despair might as well leave some things that have expired in your life down there so that your climb is a lot
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lighter on the way back out fifth thing that I think is incredibly important anytime we are moving through a period of hardship particularly when we are in the middle stages where not a lot is making sense to us where it just feels
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like things we care about are falling apart and nothing new is arriving to take their place yet this more than any other time in our lives is the time to stay super attuned to whatever feels right and wrong in our lives so even if
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we are feeling very depressed or very alone or very hopeless where can we nonetheless perceive our bodies in very subtle ways saying yes to anything however disconnected from our overall goals and plans for our lives so for example this past winter I went through
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a really challenging period where I was grappling with a lot of loss and the only thing my body wanted to do the only thing was write and walk that was it and so I decided at some point after a long
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period of resistance you know what i'm going to give myself one month which I luckily could do as a self-employed person to only listen to what my body wants and what my body ended up doing was walking for several hours a day and
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working on a writing project for several hours a day and the writing project at least thus far didn't go anywhere i never published it but I was very surprised to find that almost every day whatever came up in my writing project
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was something that needed to be processed about the period of time that I was going through so my body knew I needed time and movement and space to make sense of my experiences in a way that would allow me to integrate them
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and actually move into the next stage of my life having grieved the things that needed to be grieved but for you it might not be writing or walking that your body needs it might be something totally different but this is the time
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to just get as quiet with ourselves as we possibly can and listen to any subtle nos or yeses that your body might be pummeling you with now more than ever it's likely time to take those things seriously and follow those tiny threads
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of aliveness however small and however nonsensical to where they want to go because this is the very thing that is going to connect you with the energy you need to start rebuilding your life in a new way or reconnecting with the things
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that matter to you in a new way all hardships if we actually are able to surrender to them change us and give us new ways of relating to the world and ourselves and other people on the other side of them which leads us to the sixth
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and penultimate thing that I want to talk about when it comes to going through a hard time which is recognize any opportunity that you do have now to invest in yourself so this is an adage that I love so much that I recently
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picked up from the author Brianna Wuest who has a ton of amazing books i was at an event for her last book tour where she was saying "When the stakes are down in life kind of think of it like the
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stock market we sell when it's high we invest when it's low so when we are at our lowest when life has already knocked us off all of the pedestals we were standing on now is the time to think
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about are there changes I want to make that I haven't bothered to spend the time or energy on when my life was going better now is probably a great time to invest in myself in new ways and start
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charting the course towards where I want to go in life next and again this can only happen after a period of allowing ourselves to be humbled by life to adapt to our circumstances to listen to ourselves and what's important to us now
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and then we get to be at choice about where we start heading next and again this is a really great opportunity to explore new areas that we may have been neglecting when we were busy with our lives going well maybe we can use some
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of that extra time and energy we've cleared out for ourselves to try out a new passion project or follow a new hobby or have some of those hard conversations that we've been putting off for a really long time so how do we
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actually use this period of hardship as an opportunity to capitalize on some of the areas that we generally leave neglected in favor of supporting the parts of our lives that are thriving this is the beginning of stepping into
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that new future that once you follow it long enough down a particular path is eventually going to give you the perspective you need to make sense of this time and what you were able to take out of it which leads us to the last
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step step seven listen to your body's cues to get back to life so when we get good at things like surrendering to life and grieving things that are gone and moving through our pain effectively and with presence and awareness what we also
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want to be paying attention to is when is this period of suffering letting us know that it wants to be over so just as there is a time to be humbled there is also a time to stand up and start facing
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the fire and in order to figure out when that time is we have to be really honest with ourselves so one of my favorite exchanges that I ever saw on Twitter was someone talking about intuitive eating and they were saying "If I did intuitive
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eating," so this kind of dietary philosophy that focuses on following what your body naturally and instinctively wants to eat they were saying "If I did that I would just eat pizza all the time this makes no sense." And someone responded saying "If you are
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only listening to your cravings for junk food or sugary stuff you're not actually practicing intuitive eating because the body is also constantly signaling you towards the healthy things that it wants and you have to be paying equal attention to those as you are to the
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sugary cravings if you want to be in balance." And this is the exact attitude that I think we need to take towards our mental health and our spiritual and emotional health as well we need to know when it's time to lie down and accept
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the losses in life but we also have to listen to our bodies and notice when what they are craving is for us to stand up practice courage and start charting a new course in some direction and we have
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to be really honest with ourselves about when it feels like it is authentically time to do each one so if you have gone through a long period of struggle but you're starting to feel positivity and excitement and hope return to your
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worldview engage with those things follow them go where they are trying to lead you because those feelings are indicative of the natural return to life that happens after we have gone through authentic grief and those are just as
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real and valuable parts of the human experience as any of it we got to listen to the body's signals that it's time to go into a period of surviving and listen to the calls that indicate to us that
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it's time to go back into a period of thriving all the same all right that's all I'm going to say for today on this topic but as always any thoughts comments perspectives any pieces of advice that you would love to share with others
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about what you do when you are in these periods of just needing to get through something in life please leave in the comments section below as always I love you guys i hope you're taking care of yourselves and each other and I will see
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you back here again really soon [Music]
Topics:resiliencehardshipsurviving vs thrivingCPTSDemotional resiliencecoping strategiesself-care during crisisHeidi Priebemental healthsuffering well
