Three Positive Psychology Techniques In Coping With Financial Hardship And Despair
Positive psychology can bring a person out of financial despair and even homelessness. Positive psychology allows us to develop traits such as hope, resilience, and personal strengths. These positive traits have helped many people cope better with financial hardship and despair.
In cases of homelessness, positive psychology has been shown to have significantly reduced their shelter stay.
When we think of homelessness and financial despair, we tend to think of its negativity: addiction, drugs, domestic abuse, etc. While these are salient problems, addressing them is not enough to get a person out of such despair. Only recently positive psychology is being applied to help people focus on the positive things which they can leverage to improve their circumstances.
Like Stress Financial Despair and Homelessness Are On The Rise
Their circumstances are getting more urgent. Homelessness is on the rise in 2022. With worsening affordable housing shortage, stagnant wages, and inflation, homelessness is a likely scenario for not just low-income households, but also middle-class families. Many people have reported earning a good income one year and being on the verge of homelessness the next.
Knowing how prevalent homelessness has become in the U.S. is a consolation. For the majority of homeless cases, it is neither a choice nor a consequence of bad decisions. Being homeless should be normalized as a challenge that anyone could go through once in their life, instead of a social stigma that renders people experiencing it invisible and ashamed.
Homelessness and financial hardship do not define who you are. Maybe the shame of financial despair makes you feel like it does, but this is where positive psychology can benefit you the most.
Destigmatizing homelessness and financial despair requires a shift in perspective, and so does positive psychology. In fact, learning how to shift your perspective is the greatest benefit of positive psychology. Knowing that homelessness can happen to anyone is important for a healthy state of mind. Although the shame of being in in such despair is unavoidable, there is no shame in fighting to get out of it.
What Is Positive Psychology?
Positive psychology is a science that studies our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors with a focus on strengths instead of weaknesses. Positive psychology prioritizes ways to build the good in life, more than just repairing the bad.
Experiencing financial despair and its resulting homelessness may seem like the bad things outnumber the good things in your life. But you may benefit from positive psychology by intentionally nurturing a positive bias towards life. It is a powerful approach to maintaining your well-being in adversity. It can keep you from falling prey to serious mental illnesses or addictions, two obstacles keeping you down for longer.
Positive psychology is more than just the common self-help books. It is a science with decades of research, meaning its solutions have been tested and worked for many people; and they may work for you, too.
Benefits of Positive Psychology
Why should you bother with positive psychology when every day is a struggle and you cannot see the silver lining? Because these techniques are free to try. As coping mechanisms, they are much healthier than substances.
Pathways Out of Financial Despair and Homelessness
Let’s consider a pathway out of financial despair and homelessness. The goal is to find a stable residence, apply for subsidies, and earn a sustainable income. To do this, many people need six to eight months; others take years. How long it may take for you depends on several factors.
Positive psychology techniques help you focus and improve on the factors within your control.
While you can wait for the odds to change, which are out of your control, you can start practicing positive psychology, focusing on things within your control. Positive psychology is a good starting point to improve your situation.
Practicing positive psychology can get you to a healthy state of mind – mentally and emotionally. This healthy state, which is your well-being, is essential to overcome multiple challenges in getting stable housing for yourself and your family again.
Positive psychology helps train your brain to favor the positive things in life, even when you are hard-pressed to name one. It builds your mental and emotional strengths so that one day you will be able to look back and feel proud of what you are going through.
This article provides a trove of exercises and questions that guide your thoughts and actions in getting to a better state of well-being in your quest out of financial despair and even homelessness. Consider doing these exercises when you have a calm moment, or when you feel particularly helpless or frustrated. Here you will find techniques to:
- Celebrate your admirable resilience
- Keep hope alive
- Identify and build your strengths
A disclaimer
If you are struggling to cope with your mental health issues, the best and first place to go is the mental health clinic referred by your shelter or the people who know your situation. This article does not intend to replace help from supportive people around you; but we know that clinics’ waiting lists can be long, and access difficult. The techniques outlined below can help you help yourself while waiting for professional assistance.
Positive Psychology Technique 1: Celebrate Your Resilience
Resilience is the ability to adapt to adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or severe stress. When we have resilience, we do not just adapt, we learn from our hardship and bounce back stronger than before.
Life-changing events are a test of our resilience. Since you have been coping with homelessness, you are more resilient than so many people. You are used to being told no and being disappointed.
The type of resilience you have is adaptive resilience – it is developed when you learn to roll with life’s punches and survive. What you can do is strengthen the resilience reserve already in you. It is a skill that can be learned.
Below are a few exercises that help you recognize your past resilience and know that you can handle scary challenges when they arise.
Explore past resilience
This exercise is adapted from the Positive Psychology guide Exploring Past Resilience.
Recall an emotionally taxing incident that led you to homelessness. Consider how you dealt with it. Answer these questions:
- What was the most difficult aspect of that situation?
- How did you cope at the time?
- How did you overcome the situation and emerge successfully on the other side?
Reflect on your answers, and go deeper with the following questions:
The incident:
- What was your objective at the time?
- What was the result?
- What challenges did you need to overcome?
- What difficult thoughts and emotions do you recall experiencing at the time?
Supportive people:
- Was there someone you successfully turned to for outside support? Who?
Strategies:
- What skills were helpful to you in dealing with the situation? What perspectives or mindsets in particular?
- Rate your resilience in that situation on a scale of 1-100% (where 100% is highest)
- Why do you feel it wasn’t 0%? What, in particular, makes you think that?
- What character strengths, skills, or qualities do you believe were helpful to you?
Solution seeking:
- If you rated your resilience below 100%, how do you feel you could improve it when you encounter similar future challenges?
Wisdom:
- Based on the past experience you just worked through, what is some advice you might give to someone who is dealing with a similar situation?
When you need a reminder of how resilient you can be, refer to these answers. You are stronger than you think.
Develop future resilience: the 4-S Plan
Going along the line of the exercise above, the 4-S Plan guides you to prepare for future adversity. The 4-S Plan below is adapted from Care Clinic’s article the 4S’s of Resiliency.
4S stands for Supportive people – Strategies – Sagacity (wisdom) – Solutions.
- Identify Supportive People
It could be trusted friends, family, people who know your situation and want to help, or professional support.
- Identify coping strategies
Look at your answers for the Strategies section. What would be effective if such an incident were repeated?
- Sagacity (Wisdom)
Keep a record of sayings or quotes meaningful to you. Read the quotes when you need some wise guidance. Let them inspire your actions.
- Solution seeking
Write down some possible solutions that can help you avoid similar incidents.
If they are unavoidable, explore options to cope with and overcome similar incidents. You can do this with the people willing to support you – your support community.
If the incident seems insurmountable, how about learning new skills or simply allowing yourself time to adjust?
Positive Psychology Technique 2: Keep Hope Alive
“Hope is [….] a personal rainbow of the mind” Charles Snyder 2002
Hope is not optimism. When you are optimistic, you expect things will work out well, even better than expected. Hope is more realistic. You may not be optimistic about the future, but you can be hopeful about possible future outcomes based on your current actions.
Hope is also not wishful thinking. Wishful thinking is ambiguous and passive because you do not have a plan. Hope is when you have a plan to seek positive changes.
Hope is future-oriented. When you have hope, you set a goal, devise multiple plans, and try them all out. When you are hopeful, you will be resilient because you will not take no for an answer – you will find multiple pathways to achieve the same goal. When hopeful, you are a lot more proactive: you believe in your agency – your personal power – to make positive changes happen. You look at small, tiny progress as encouraging signs of success. Therefore, hope often goes together with resilience.
What does it mean to have hope?
Staying precariously in temporary housing, not knowing if you, your possessions, and your family are safe, can dim anyone’s sense of hope. When feeling like you are sinking deeper into despair, it may be time to remind yourself what it means to have hope. When you can have a calm moment, guide your search for that glimmer of hope with these questions:
- What does a hopeful person look and sound like?
- How have you used hope in your own life?
- Are there any risks with having hope?
- If an image or tune could remind you of hope every day, what would it be?
- What is the smallest possible change that could increase your hope?
While answering these questions, notice what it feels like when you think about hope. Having been struggling for a while, you likely feel a mix of emotions: grief, nostalgia, envy, sadness, despair, gratitude, and devastation. Gently let go of the negative emotions and stay with the positive ones. These are the emotions that will compel you to act in the right direction.
If this is too hard, imagine you as someone else – a hopeful person. How would it feel to be them?
Retell your story with hope
When you use positive psychology, favor the positive things, even when it is the darkest time. This simple exercise in shifting your perspective may help. Think back to the story of how you got here. Your memories may replay the broken relationship, the debilitating illness, the violent abuses, or the financial hardship that pushed you out of your home.
Let’s reframe this story in the language of hope.
- What was your goal?
- How did you arrive at your goal?
- What was your motivation?
- Was your goal realistic?
- What was your mood during that process?
- How did you overcome the challenges?
- Did you achieve your goal?
- How do you feel about the outcome?
Set the goals that make you hopeful
What distinguishes hopeful people from optimistic or wishful people is that the hopeful people set feasible goals and devise multiple pathways to attain them.
What are your goals?
- Describe your goal in as much detail as possible.
- How much do you desire this goal?
- Describe why you want to achieve the goal. List what is motivating you.
- Imagine you have just achieved your goal. Describe how you think you will feel in this future memory.
- Are your goals realistic? How many resources does it take? It could be time, money, supportive people, agencies, programs, and subsidies that you have access to.
See yourself getting there
Once you have the plans to achieve your goals, you need to believe that you can do it.
How do you get there?
- List the pathways (actions/strategies) you can use to achieve your goal.
- Describe potential barriers for each pathway listed.
- Describe a time when you achieved a goal by overcoming barriers. What were the barriers and how did you overcome them?
- Choose the best pathway and describe how you will overcome the barrier.
- What are two or three things that must be accomplished for you to attain your goal? (This helps focus and saves energy. There are things you may have to STOP doing.)
- Identify people and/or resources in your community who you can rely on as a source of support in pursuing your goal.
Feeling overwhelmed by all the things you must do?
Write down your plan, break it down into small steps, and when you are ready to take action, focus on the first small step.
Whenever you feel like the odds are ridiculous, just narrow down your focus on the next small step. Taking this one tiny step in the right direction is better than doing nothing or going in the wrong direction.
Visualize your plan
For inspiration and faith, you can:
- Visualize: imagine yourself taking the first step in your plan. It could be as simple as asking a supportive person for help. Ask yourself what you would feel like doing it.
- Keep visualizing the next step in your plan. Focus on the next best thing you can do.
- When you feel overwhelmed by the plan, read hopeful stories or talk to hopeful people. There are plenty of people who have gotten out of homelessness after years of being in it. Here are the Ted Talk videos of Rachel Hall, David Raether, and Becky Blanton. They have done it, and so can you.
Visualization is a powerful technique to strengthen your resolve. A lot of strategic thinking goes into visualizing the details of your plan. When you visualize, you are actually doing these things:
- break down the goals into the small, manageable steps
- gauge how you would feel doing it
- gauge how others would react
- estimate the resources it may take
Essentially, visualization strengthens your resolve to overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges. It also helps you bridge the gap between where you are now, and where you will be once you carry out your plan.
Remember, progress is more important than goals. Even if you can manage to do just one tiny thing in your plan, have faith that that small effort brings you one step closer to your goal.
How not to lose hope
Like growing a plant, to keep hope alive, you must keep feeding hope with encouraging thoughts, constructive actions, and supportive relationships, day by day.
Do not:
- Allow yourself to be constantly surprised by obstacles that you can anticipate.
- Panic when reaching a roadblock.
- Conclude that nothing will ever change for the better.
- Take yourself too seriously.
- Get impatient when change is not immediate.
Positive Psychology Technique 3: Build Your Strengths
We tend to fixate on our weaknesses rather than our strengths. This negative bias is particularly painful if you blame yourself for falling into this circumstance. Negative thinking is a survival instinct, but you do not have to allow it to dictate your actions.
Focusing on human strengths rather than weaknesses is a signature of positive psychology. Shifting your thinking to favoring your strengths over berating your weaknesses is a powerful move toward strengthening your resilience and self-control. When you know your strengths, you no longer feel so helpless. You can start believing that there are things in your favor. Your strengths will make you feel more energized and authentic.
Positive psychologists such as Christopher Peterson and Martin Seligman identify 24-character strengths which exist in all of us. We may be stronger in some ways and weaker in others. The point is to identify your strength pattern so you can tap into it and save yourself the easy way.
You can do a 24-core strengths survey here.
What do the results mean? Your best strengths appear on top, and your weaknesses are at the bottom of the list. The weaknesses can be retrained to become less debilitating. Most of all, focus on your top strengths:
- How have they been benefiting you?
- How to use them even more to improve your situation?
An alternative test is the Big Five Personality Test.
Identify your strengths
Here are some questions to guide you in identifying and building on your strengths:
Interests:
- What energizes you?
- What are you good at? What do you think you do really well?
- What do you like about yourself?
Experiences:
- How have you managed to survive this far given all the challenges you have had to contend with?
- Describe a good day. What made it a good day?
- When did you achieve something you’re really proud of?
- What did you enjoy studying at school or university?
Testimonials:
- What would the people closest to you describe as your superpower?
- When people say good things about you, what are they likely to say?
- What role do you play in the lives of the people you care about?
Doing these exercises and tests provides you with the language to talk to yourself in more encouraging and accurate terms. Gradually, you can explain your strengths to others, especially potential employers.
Use your strengths in your job search
Looking for jobs [internal link] that use your strengths is a good strategy because you are more likely to enjoy and perform well in them. List your strengths in your resume or CV as desirable qualities to make yourself stand out and increase your chance of getting hired. Prepare some examples to illustrate your strengths.
For example, a study on character strengths shows that most people experiencing homelessness become animated when they talk about their strengths. A man in this states that his strength is perseverance. To illustrate this, he recalls the time he worked in landscaping. Whether it took two hours or 20 hours, he always got the job done.
Likewise, you may want to take some time to gather past experiences showing how your strengths have enabled you to perform well in a job. These examples provide good reasons for a sympathetic employer to hire you.
Knowing your strengths is a source of motivation. Playing to your strengths begins with knowing what they are. Your strengths are where you can be confident that you can do well in it with less effort, and improvements happen faster.
Regulate your weaknesses
On the other side of the coin, knowing your weaknesses helps you temper and regulate them before they get out of hand and start to control you. You should avoid situations that strain your weaknesses.
Let’s take the example mentioned above of perseverance as a strength. The dark side of having perseverance is stubbornness and lack of prudence. In working hard to attain a goal, a persevering person may overlook the costs of their actions, ignore the changing circumstances, and underestimate the risks. They may make risky and costly decisions that no longer fit the new circumstance. Before they could reach their goal, they paid a dear price. This is when their strength – perseverance – becomes dangerous to themselves.
The wisdom of knowing your limits places a self-regulated brake on you, which could be extremely helpful in staying away from addiction, or for making serious mistakes that could dampen your effort in getting out of homelessness.
Thinking about our weaknesses can make us anxious. The key is to regulate them, not to allow them to overpower us. Remember that your strengths can more than compensate for your weaknesses.
Shifting focus
To shift your focus more onto your strengths and less on your weaknesses, it helps to think of yourself as a survivor rather than a victim. In talking to yourself, retell your hardship as a survivor, emphasizing how you have been using your strengths to cope. This self-talk exercise strengthens your resilience and self-compassion, helps calm down your destructive thoughts, and lessens your need to numb your negative feelings.
See yourself as a resilient survivor who is rebuilding something new, rather than a victim stuck in a hopeless state. Day by day, this positive internal belief will reflect and shape your external reality.
Practice Positive Psychology Now
There are a million ways to cope with homelessness. These positive psychology techniques are suggestions, not a must. Use them when it feels right, let them:
- Remind you of your resilience
- Cultivate hope
- Build on your strengths.
It may be hard to focus on the positive when you are struggling to satisfy your basic needs, but it is never too late to prevent things from deteriorating.
Most of all, practicing positive psychology means nurturing realistic hope that things will work out if you keep trying. Like Bodie. After 14 years on the street, Bodie, with the help of his friend Jodi, has tried 15 steps over several weeks to get a photo ID for a job. They almost gave up several times, but they got through in the end. And so can you.
