What is Perspective Framing?

How to cope with difficult situations

I’m going to let you in on a little inside baseball.

There is only one thing that matters in your life, the health of your friends and family.

Don’t believe me?

What happened the last time a member of your family or friend group got sick or injured?

Everything else went on hold didn’t it?

You thought the state of your friend’s relationships mattered.
You thought how long you were gonna play video games tomorrow mattered.
You thought your intro to calculus class mattered.
You thought making sure your boss liked your project mattered.

Those things quickly become insignificant in the face of an emergency.

I’m hoping this message helps with 2 things:

1. You become more resilient to less important stressors

2. You gain tools to deal with difficult situations

Let’s start with the perspective framing exercise.

What was the worst thing to happen to you last week? Let’s say on average, maybe the worst thing that happened to you was that your girlfriend dumped you.

There will be a sliding scale based on the length of the relationship and emotional investment. But, all breakups will fall into a defined range of appropriate sadness and grief.

If you were cut from the high school team and diagnosed with cancer at the same time, you would never be equally sad about both things.

Because we (thankfully) rarely experience things on the worst end of the spectrum, it can be hard to remember how stressed, sad or anxious we should be about certain problems.

This is why your high school breakup felt like the world was ending.

One quote I like to come back to says: “If it won’t matter in 5 years, don’t spend more than 5 minutes worrying about it.”

Using that lens — and the unfortunate reality of experiencing some things on the far end of the spectrum — has led to a better personal understanding of how much I allow things to stress me out.

Now the tools

1. Perspective framing: use the example above. Each time something makes you sad, stressed or anxious, ask yourself where it falls on the spectrum of problems you COULD experience. It’s usually a lot lower than your body tells you it is.

2. 3 Deep breaths: This is the fastest way to activate your parasympathetic nervous system. This will calm the fight or flight response associated with stressful situations.

3. A strong social circle: This acts as your sounding board for life. Whether it’s a parent, sibling, girlfriend, wife or close friend, having someone to verbalize your thoughts to can often be enough to solve your own problems.

4. Reduce unneeded stressors: A quick list of things that are probably adding stress to your life without providing any benefit. Watching the news, social media, extended periods indoors, lack of sleep or unhealthy friendships.