8 ways to take charge of your life when it feels too chaotic to manage

Life’s curveballs usually don’t abide by our well-laid plans. A loss, divorce, illness, or other serious disruption can lead to upheaval, uncertainty, and a torrent of emotions that may make it difficult to function. When you’re also juggling a career, family, and other responsibilities, keeping obligations on track can seem daunting.

Author and four-time TED speaker Bruce Feiler, who wrote Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age, calls these extreme disruptors “lifequakes.” Lifequakes are more than just a minor injury or a simple fender bender. (Most of us have roughly three dozen of those challenges across the course of a lifetime, he says.)

Roughly one in 10 of those small incidents becomes a lifequake—a massive burst of change that affects our lives. He estimates that the average length of a lifequake is five years. By that math, Feiler estimates that we spend roughly half our adult lives in transition from such big events. So, he says, “if we’re going to go through these periods, we might as well try to do that—maybe not more efficiently—but more effectively.”

Fortunately, experts say there are some steps you can take to navigate big life events and transitions:

Let go of linear thinking

Recognizing that you’re going through a lifequake and giving it a name “lets you walk a little steadier, gives you a language to reach out to a friend and ask for help,” Feiler says. “So, in some ways, step one is just to say, I’m not alone. Like half the country is going through a life transition at any time, and that means you or someone you live with is going through one right now. I’m going to get through it because other people have gotten through it.”

So, stop for a moment and recognize that you’re facing a big challenge. Life isn’t linear, he adds, so stop beating yourself up for expecting it to be so. Letting go of that linear expectation also lets you shed the pressure of being “off track” or “off schedule,” Feiler says. “The truth is, everybody is that way. And so, our lives are fine.”

Lean into your coping tools

When you’re in the throes of a massive life event or loss, it’s a good time to dust off your self-care tools. Ground yourself by remembering the challenges you’ve faced before and overcome, suggests psychiatrist Gail Saltz, author of Becoming Real: Defeating the Stories We Tell Ourselves That Hold Us Back. “Resilience is not about just having coping tools in the moment. It’s really about what you’ve gone through in the past and ended up on the other side,” she says.

Then, use the tools that have worked for you in the past to manage stress, anxiety, or other difficult emotions. These may include talking to a trusted friend, exercise, deep breathing, or progressive muscle relaxation—whatever works for you. Conversely, she says, don’t go for the shortcuts to feeling better, like alcohol, unhealthy comfort foods, or other potentially destructive habits.

Career coach and former executive Corean Canty agrees. “The biggest thing is learning to give ourselves permission for radical self-care every day,” she says.

Embrace routines

During tumultuous times, routines can be helpful, Canty says. She calls them “sacred brackets.” For example, how do you start and end your days? Think about how you can structure your time to take care of yourself. “Let me set up my morning so I fill my cup first, so I’m doing things for me, and I’m not just getting out of bed and jumping into work or my phone or everyone else,” she explains.

Similarly, at the end of your day, how do you wind down and try to get the rest you need? When you find routines that work for you, they can help you create a rhythm of care in your day.

Start with your strengths

Feiler says that transitions have phases: The “long goodbye” is when you say “goodbye” to the way things used to be. You may mourn the past or use some ritual to mark the change.

The second phase is the “messy middle” where you’re shedding certain habits and experimenting with new ones. The third is the “new beginning,” where you unveil your new self and update your life story. But, as you’re going through the transition, don’t feel like you need to enter each phase in order, he adds. Instead, start where you’re strongest.“Everybody’s good at one of these phases, and everyone is bad at one of these phases,” says Feiler. “You’ve got a transition superpower and a transition kryptonite.” So, if you’re good at making lists and finding solutions, start tackling the messy middle. If you need some time to process what’s going on and deal with your emotions, start with the long goodbye. “Start with what you’re good at,” he says.

Don’t ignore your feelings

Throughout the process, it’s important to be aware of your feelings and not dismiss or “stuff” them, Saltz says. When you’re not aware of those feelings, you may deny what you need to get to a better place, such as reaching out for help or simply giving yourself a break.

“Often, when people are highly stressed or highly anxious, highly upset, they—for lack of a better term—‘turtle,’” says Saltz. “They don’t acknowledge and don’t reach out. They try to contain it and don’t want to tell people what’s going on—maybe even feeling a sense of shame about what’s going on. But that’s really the opposite of what would help you and help you to do well at work too.” Think about the people and resources you might need when things get tough, and reach out to any of them if you’re able to do so.

Conduct a meaning audit

When you’re in the thick of a crisis, prioritizing what’s most important can feel impossible. Feiler suggests figuring out your “ABCs of meaning” to help you get clarity:

• A is agency: This is what you do, build, or create. For many of us, this relates to our work.
• B is belonging: This area includes relationships: family, friends, and larger communities.
• C is your cause: This is your calling or purpose—something greater than yourself in which you believe.

Each of these takes a portion of your time, focus, and energy. Feiler suggests this exercise: Give yourself a score of 100 and divide what you put into agency, belonging, and cause.

The ratios will likely change over the course of your life, especially when a lifequake happens. For example, you may have been putting 60% into work, but that ratio may change when you have children or need to care for an aging relative. If you’re dealing with illness or loss, the ratio may change again. Understanding that these shifts will happen can help you better weather them when they do, even if they’re out of alignment with where you want them to be.

Work on resilience infrastructure

Whether you’re dealing with a significant life event now or may have one in the future, Canty says it’s a good idea to think about how you can prepare for such times. As a former executive, she engages in scenario planning—thinking about various situations and what the solutions are if things go awry.

“When I was a chief operating officer, I used to have our teams put together team playbooks [for different situations] because we had parents and we had people taking care of their parents and we had people who might have been dealing with other things that come up in their life,” she says. “How do we build a support system within our teams proactively so that we can scale up and down when we need to?”

This may include cross-training team members, creating written explanations of processes, and building up goodwill between team members so they can fill in gaps if we need to step back for a bit. In addition, she says that it’s important to think about how we build our own stress-management tools to help us make better decisions when we’re stressed and in fight-or-flight response, when we may not be thinking clearly.

Shed something

Feiler says these periods of transition often make us involuntarily shed something, such as a relationship or a way of being, for example, but they can also be an opportunity to shed something that we don’t like or which is holding us back.

“There’s probably some aspect of your personality or your habits or your way of living that you didn’t like,” he says. Use this time to change that too. Do something creative. Work on changing unhealthy habits. As you’re emerging from this period of change and tumult, using your hands or body to make something new can lead to greater well-being—the idea that you can create a new self, too,” he says. That’s an idea that can help give us hope during dark times.