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How to Stay Positive When Youre Unemployed

Unemployment. It happens to almost everyone and it will likely happen to you one day.

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As far as stressors go, unemployment is one of the most destabilizing things that can happen to a person. Suddenly, you find yourself struggling with an overwhelming set of serious challenges. How will you pay rent/mortgage? What can you borrow? What can you sell? Are your kids/loved ones going to suffer? These very real concerns can completely take over your thoughts and leave you feeling desperate and powerless.

But you’re not. "Make no mistake, you’re still in the driver’s seat, and the biggest threat to your success is staring at you in the mirror," says Cardiac Surgeon and author of "Heart to Beat", Brian Lima, M.D.

Sure, you can’t minimize the urgency of being unemployed, but you can take concrete steps to maintain a positive disposition and avoid total despair.

Positivity might seem like a luxury at this point, but if you resign yourself to your negative thoughts and your worst fears, you’ll accept almost anything that comes your way. And that will put you in an even worse position in the long run – as you give up untold potential for immediate security. You may find you have no choice but to take a job you don’t want, and that’s completely OK, but it’s all but certain that you’ll find yourself unemployed again, so either way you should be doing the following things while you’re between jobs. "Your moment may come when you least expect I, so ALWAYS be ready," Lima adds.

1. Immediately Redo Your Budget

This is where you face the cold, hard truth and cut everything that’s not absolutely essential to your survival. Your Netflix and Amazon accounts? Canceled. Your weekly drinks with friends? Postponed until further notice. Every single meal that isn’t prepared at home? It doesn’t exist.

It’s hard to know how long you’ll be without work so you need to stretch every product and service you use to its absolute breaking point – whether it’s sewing up the holes in your socks, cutting coupons or making the switch to public transit. Then you need to calculate how long you can survive without any new cash coming in.

By this point, you should already have any unemployment or welfare benefits sorted out so you can start collecting right away, if possible. And if you’re drowning in debt, now is the time to work with a financial advisor to see how you may be able to consolidate your financial obligations into something manageable, or how to declare bankruptcy if it’s come to that. Do it now before you start missing payments and ruin your credit.

This step sucks, but in the end, you’ll save more than you thought and realize that you don’t actually need many of the things you typically spend money on.

2. Learn New Skills and Monetize Your Existing Ones

Just because you’re unemployed, doesn’t mean you get to stop working. "The grind never stops and sleep is a luxury badassery rarely affords. No matter our station in life, we’re all a work in progress because there’s always room for improvement," says Lima.

Whatever you know how to do, expand on it. Are you a software developer? Learn a new coding language. Are you in marketing? Make sure you keep up with every trend that’s happening in your chosen industry. No matter how much you know, you can always know more and we live in a world where all the knowledge we could ever want is online. Watch YouTube tutorials, get a Skillshare trial, go analog and borrow books from your library, or see if you can take an affordable course at a community college. Always, always, ALWAYS be learning.

If you have any hobbies, see if you can turn them into side hustles. The gig economy is your friend right now. Do you like driving? Then why not Uber for a little while? Do you like to draw? See if you can get some Fiverr gigs. Are you a secret writer at heart? Get a Medium account and put it to the test. Unemployment can be a boon when it comes to developing yourself as a professional so don’t squander it. Welcome the distraction, get some experience and make yourself more hireable at the same time.

3. Always Be Networking

From now on, if you’re going out to dinner or drinks with people, there has to be the potential for work in it somewhere. You can’t go out for your typical drinks with the boys just because it’s Friday, but you can go out with a friend who plans to introduce you to someone working in your field.

While you’re out there, don’t spend more than is absolutely necessary. You can talk a lot of shop in the time it takes to nurse one beer, or make a good impression with a LinkedIn connection over a $3 coffee. It may seem counterintuitive to be going out at all, but this isn’t socializing. This is networking. This is an investment in a future job offering. Use a small portion of whatever you’re saving with all the services and products you’ve cut out of your life to pay for it. The bonus is you still get to be social, so this step should actually be really fun, given your situation.

4. Take Better Care of Yourself

If you didn’t exercise or eat right before, that’s fine, because you do now. "The fact is that the healthier and more fit we are, the happier we are overall, with a better quality of life, and improved mental sharpness and productivity. These cascading benefits will also improve your self-esteem and likely, the impression you make on those all-important job interviews," says Lima.

Healthy homemade meals are budget-friendly, and exercise is a great way to reduce all that stress you’re feeling. It doesn’t matter if you’re just going for a walk around the block every day or running up a mountain. Move your body. And while you’re at it, do other small things that make you feel good about yourself. Make your bed. Clean your house. Call your mother. Cook for your partner. Meditate. It’s very easy to give up in your situation but these small, seemingly insignificant acts can help you stave off a defeatist attitude.

5. Volunteer

While we’re on the subject of things that make you feel better, volunteering can be a great way to add new contacts to your network and show off your special skills to total strangers – all with their own networks. Not to mention, you’ll also be helping people who are in genuine need of your services. That should make you feel pretty good and help put your own situation into perspective. You’d be surprised at how many professional skills can serve underprivileged communities, charities and not-for-profits. Legal advice. Financial services. Design work. Social media marketing. Driving. You name it. So get out there and show them what makes you special. No one is ever going to be unimpressed with someone who donates their time to the less fortunate. It’s a win-win.

Unemployment is scary, like really and truly scary. But it’s also an experience that can show you what you’re made of if you embrace it and use it as a catalyst to become more capable, more resilient and more empowered to face an uncertain future.

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Dennis Ryan, Khareem Sudlow