How to Stay Calm When You Get Bad News

The email arrives at ten past four. The contract has fallen through, or the job went to someone else, or the plan you spent a month on has been cancelled from above. Your stomach drops. For the rest of the afternoon you are physically at your desk and mentally somewhere else entirely.

Nobody can promise that bad news will stop arriving. But there is a great deal of difference between the shock itself and what we do in the hours after it, and most of that difference comes down to one question we rarely stop to ask: what kind of trouble is this?

Two shapes of trouble

In the book I describe trouble as arriving in two shapes.

Some of it hits you. The news came, the loss happened, the words were said. It is already in the past, and nothing you do now will make it not have happened.

Some of it blocks you. A rule that will not bend, a person who will not agree, a door that will not open. It is standing in front of you, in the present, between you and where you are trying to go.

These two need completely different responses, and most of the exhaustion after bad news comes from mixing them up. People try to argue with a hit: they replay it, rewrite it, go over what should have happened, as though pushing hard enough could change the past. Or they try to endure a block: they lean on a wall that is never going to move, for weeks, and call it persistence.

Absorbing a hit: the big pot of water

Put a flame under a teaspoon of water and it boils in seconds. Put the same flame under a large pot and the temperature barely moves. The flame has not changed. The pot simply has more mass, so the same heat spreads out and does far less damage.

Bad news is heat. When you are scattered and stretched thin, one piece of it boils you over: the rest of the day goes, and often the evening too. When your attention is gathered and you are anchored to something steady, the same news spreads through a much larger you. You still feel it. You are simply not boiled by it.

This is what the Raja Yoga tradition the book draws on calls the power to tolerate. It is not gritting your teeth, and it is not pretending you are fine. It is having enough of yourself present that the shock has somewhere to go.

In practice, absorbing well looks like this: a few seconds of silence before you say anything, then one useful question instead of an instant reaction. Noting what you need to do next, and letting the rest of the replay go. Treating the news as information about one moment, not a verdict on your life.

Getting around a block: how water moves

Now the other shape. A river that meets a boulder does not stop and argue with it. It does not push. It goes around, and loses almost none of its momentum doing so. The tradition calls this the power to adjust.

Adjusting is not giving up on where you were going. It is giving up on one particular path to it. The deal that fell through was a route, not the destination. The destination might still be reachable by three other roads you have not looked at yet, because you were busy pushing on the one that closed.

Which one is this?

When bad news lands, these three questions sort it in a few seconds:

Most bad news is both. The cancelled project is a hit (the month of work is gone) and a block (the goal behind it still stands). Absorb the first part, then flow around the second. In that order: it is very hard to find a new route while you are still boiling.

Try this

Pick one recent hit. Say out loud the one useful sentence inside it, and let the rest go. Then pick one block, something you have been pushing against for more than a week. Write down three other routes to the same destination. You do not have to take any of them yet. Just seeing that they exist is the adjustment.

This essay draws on Chapter 5 of The Inward Singularity, "Absorbing Shocks and Flowing Around Barriers", which is free to read on this site.