Life is unpredictable. The tough times will inevitably come. They will challenge your strength, resilience, and ability to adapt and push forward.
Whether it’s a personal crisis, a professional setback, a financial burden, or a deep emotional challenge, all of us have those moments in our lives when we feel like we can’t take one more step.
But you can make it through the tough times. You can not only survive but grow stronger through adversity with the right mindset and strategies.
How To Stay Strong And Survive Tough Times
1. Allow Yourself to Feel
Contrary to all the advice about “staying strong” and “keeping positive,” one of the most effective and rarely discussed tactics for surviving tough times is to allow yourself to feel your feelings. As a culture, we value strength over weakness and productivity over unproductivity.
It’s not weakness to admit you’re in pain, sad, angry, or frustrated. Let yourself grieve, even if what you’re going through isn’t technically a “loss.” In tough times, it’s natural to feel a multitude of emotions, including grief, anxiety, panic, anger, or frustration.
Allow yourself to feel them. Don’t push your feelings away or judge them. You don’t have to act on your feelings; you just need to allow yourself to feel them.
If you’re going through a rough period, make time to journal or just write down how you’re feeling. You can also let yourself feel your feelings through other creative forms, like art, music, or even creative writing.
Related: 15 Tips To Improve Yourself In 2026
2. Make Self-Care Non-Negotiable
Most people associate self-care with bubble baths and occasional indulgences, but in the context of tough times, self-care should be non-negotiable.
It’s easy to let physical and emotional self-care slide when life becomes overwhelming, but remember: keeping a consistent routine of self-care is one of the best ways to stay strong.
Make time each day for self-care that prioritizes your body, mind, and soul. This could be:
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Physical self-care: Sleep, exercise, and nutrition are more important than ever in tough times. Stress and anxiety can make us forget to prioritize our physical needs, which in turn makes it harder to emotionally cope.
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Mental self-care: Practice mindfulness or meditation; you don’t need to carve out a separate hour for it. You can practice mindful breathing, eat a meal mindfully, or take a few minutes to simply be still and quiet.
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Emotional self-care: Spend time with loved ones who uplift you, pick a creative hobby, or give yourself permission to enjoy yourself for a few minutes each day. Watch a funny show, read a good book, or journal. Express gratitude.
Find what feels nourishing and restorative for your body and soul and make time for it every single day.
Related: How To Focus On Yourself
3. Change Your Relationship with “Failure”
Life’s challenging times are often the direct result of something that didn’t go our way. A project didn’t pan out, a business failed, or an opportunity slipped away. It’s easy to let this experience of failure immobilize us with its weight. But one of the quickest ways to combat the paralysis and stagnancy that can come with life’s hardships is a mindset shift. What if you changed your relationship with failure?
Stop thinking of failure as a sign that you’re not good enough or that you’ve lost something permanent. Try thinking of a failed project, opportunity, or experience as a lesson, a valuable life experience, or a redirection.
What could you learn from this failure? How did it make you more resilient, patient, or creative? Did it teach you to reach out for support? Or did this experience just mean that the right path for you lay elsewhere, and this failure is just a bump in the road?
Develop a growth mindset and embrace mistakes as part of the learning process.
4. Build Your Own “Emergency Toolkit”
When life feels like it’s spinning out of control, an emergency toolkit can be like a life raft. In your toolkit, you should have all the go-to resources and support that remind you of the tools that will help you survive.
The emergency toolkit isn’t a physical box with literal tools in it (although if that appeals to you, by all means!), it’s more about a list of mental, emotional, and practical resources you can fall back on when times are tough.
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Emergency mindset: Keep a go-to mantra or affirmation you can remind yourself of in times of need. It can be as simple as “This too shall pass” or “I am strong and I can handle this.”
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Emergency relaxation tools: Have a breathing exercise, progressive muscle relaxation, or a simple stretching sequence you can do to relieve tension and calm yourself down quickly.
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Emergency support: Keep a list of go-to people (friends, family, therapists) you can reach out to when you need to vent or ask for help.
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Emergency creativity outlet: You can draw, paint, write, make music, or engage in any other creative activity that helps you express yourself. These don’t have to be productive; they just need to provide a creative outlet.
Once you have all of the resources in your own personal “emergency toolkit,” keep it in a place you know will remind you of it (and allow you to come back to it) when you need it most.
Related: How to Become Mentally Strong
5. Reframe Time
Tough times have a tendency to drag on and on, lingering long after we expect them to end. When times are hard, it’s important to reframe the concept of time. If a week feels too overwhelming, break it into days; if days feel overwhelming, break it down into hours.
Think about what you want to do or achieve in these smaller timeframes. Set smaller goals for the day, hour, or even the moment, and focus on them.
Focus on the tiny victories, on what you can control and what you can check off your to-do list. Remind yourself that eventually, all the days, hours, and moments add up to something bigger.
6. Practice Radical Acceptance
Radical acceptance is a term used to define a mindset of fully accepting reality. This could be a painful reality, a new situation you’re not happy about, or an uncomfortable change you didn’t want.
Radical acceptance is the practice of not resisting, denying, or struggling against whatever it is you’re going through, but instead accepting it as it is—even if it sucks.
Of course, this is easier said than done. But radical acceptance can be a useful tool in your survival toolkit. Radical acceptance does not mean passivity; it means accepting those things that are truly out of your control and then focusing on the things you can control (your attitude, the choices you make, how you react, etc.).
7. Reconnect with Your Purpose
When life is difficult, it can be hard to see beyond the present struggle. However, one of the most important things you can do when times are tough is reconnect with your sense of purpose or with the things that bring your life meaning.
You can do this in a number of ways: revisiting long-term goals, recentering on what’s important to you, or finding ways to contribute to a community or society at large. Volunteer work, passion projects, or simply reminding yourself of your core values can all be useful ways to reconnect with your purpose and find a sense of direction and hope when you feel lost.
8. Practice Self-Compassion
One of the biggest challenges when we’re going through tough times is being kind to ourselves. When things go wrong, our inner critic often amplifies, berating us for failing, not being good enough, or not trying hard enough. But a big part of surviving the hard times is being kind to yourself.
Extend to yourself the same patience, understanding, and compassion you’d offer to your dearest friend going through a tough time. Talk to yourself the way you would talk to someone you care about. Celebrate your strength, resilience, and ability to show up, even when things are hard. Allow yourself to not have everything figured out.
9. Connect With Others
It can be tempting to isolate yourself when you’re going through a rough time, but a big part of surviving is staying connected with others. Be it friends, family, coworkers, or online support groups, the power of human connection and shared experience is an incredible well of strength to tap into.
Connection reminds us that we’re not alone in our struggles and that others care about us and support us. By allowing yourself to be with others, share your experiences, and receive validation and encouragement, you can find comfort and strength. You never know what you might learn or how you can grow from these shared human connections.
10. Look for Silver Linings
When you’re going through the most challenging times in life, it can be difficult to see any positives in a situation. However, finding the silver linings, no matter how small, can help you change your perspective and stay the course.
It’s true that tough times rarely come with obvious or immediate silver linings. It takes effort and intention to look for them, but they are often there, in some form or another.
Maybe you learned an important lesson, maybe you found a new opportunity, or maybe you found a new path forward. Try to reframe painful experiences in a way that is helpful, rather than as a negative source of power.
Conclusion
Tough times don’t last, but tough people do. Surviving life’s challenges and tough times is not about never falling or never struggling.
It’s about how you react to the adversity in your life. By allowing yourself to feel, building strong and non-negotiable self-care practices, reframing your relationship with failure, and leaning on your community and support network when you need to, you can not only survive the tough times in your life but come out on the other side stronger, more resilient, and more powerful than you ever thought possible.
After all, if we never fall, we will never learn to pick ourselves back up. Each time we fall, we have a new opportunity to use the unconventional tools and tactics we need to face and survive the tough times in our lives, all while preserving our mental, emotional, and physical well-being.
We can go beyond mere survival and start to thrive through our challenges. Remember: strength is not enduring in silence; it’s in allowing yourself to feel, heal, and move forward.
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