When The Going Gets Tough, Go Harder

You have assignments due, personal life issues, relationship obligations, work/life balance, mental health, daily exercises, mindfulness routines, and now your pet needs surgery… Sometimes it feels like you can’t catch a break or even take one! Sometimes it feels like you want to give up and hide under the covers or spend an hour in the shower letting the water fall down on you. Sometimes it just feels like it couldn’t get worse.

We’ve all been there, and the most terrible thing about that point in your life is… It can always get worse. But, it can also always get better! We get so involved in our minds, so caught up in our emotions that it feels like our minds are on overdrive, yet stalling to make any progress. Again, we’ve all been there.

So what do you do in those moments? Do you give up? Put your head in the sand and hope that if you ignore these problems, they will go away? Maybe some will, like your relationship, your health, your good habits. More times than not, ignoring your problems only prolongs them and, as a result, stresses you out more.

Instead, go into overdrive, go harder towards your goals. Complete a task and then move to the next. I don’t care how you do it; you just have to. You want to give up? Don’t let yourself. You want to take a break? Get something done first. Break down your goals into bite-sized segments, take on the hardest one first, or go for the easiest one and work your way up. I don’t care, and neither should you. Just do it! The only one who can force you to take action is yourself.

Soren Kierkegaard wrote that anxiety was “the dizziness of freedom”. It is seeing all the possibilities of achievement. However, for most, anxiety is a trap that prevents them from action. All those possibilities and choices give you a paralyzing, crippling inability to act because what if you choose the wrong one. And again, anxiety is like ignoring your goals or assignments or health or lifestyle; if you ignore them, they don’t go away; they may even get worse. When you feel that anxiety, that fear, that feeling of just giving up, remember, you have a choice. You have a choice to act and move forward, of picking one direction out of the hundreds of possibilities in your head.

So go hard, answer your calling and work harder when it gets tough. Motion is movement brought about by force, and you must force yourself to keep going through the good and the bad because if not, you will get stuck. So keep moving forward. Go hard when the going gets tough.