Our world is more connected than ever before with more ways of interacting with people than we know how to use well. Still, more and more of us find ourselves having to endure the lingering pain of loneliness. Loneliness, in fact, might be one of the biggest public health concerns, having been linked to increased mortality. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly important that we all learn how to deal with this painful feeling.

When life gets dark and dreary, when the clouds of discontent swell and burst hard upon you with so much utter violence and ferocity you can scarcely take it anymore, let this simple poem inspire you through the toughest parts of your most challenging moments.

What do you do when life painfully crashes and burns and you find yourself scraped, bruised and buried under the weight of disaster and heartache? Do you run and hide? Or do you get up and fight back with all that’s inside of you?

Why do some people get crushed by difficulty, like so many boulders smashing the life and kindness right out of them? Why do they turn bitter and sour and hateful, while others rise to the occasion and come out better than before?

When you hold on to resentment or anger or hatred, letting it eat you up from the inside out, your mind gets stuck in a continuous loop. You replay the offense over and over again, unable to free yourself from the person you most want to get away from. Well, it’s time that ends. Learning to forgive your offender will finally free yourself of that mental loop and open yourself to a life filled with more love and more happiness.

For many, the Holidays are not happy times. They are filled with stress, anxiety, loneliness, despair, discouragement or a sharp case of the holiday blues. But they don’t have to be. There can be so much more joy in the Christmas season than you think. There are, in fact, specific steps you can take to have a happier, more meaningful Christmas this year, even if circumstances are not ideal.

Not everyone’s depression is exactly the same. The causes of it, the way it’s felt and experienced and those steps and ideas that will ultimately help to lift the cloud of depression will be in some combination different for each person struggling with that challenge. So what I’ve done is to write a sort of suicide note … in reverse. There are reasons to choose to live that may be enough to spark that same desire in someone else. My hope is that it does.

Depression is a reaction to real problems. It signals the need to change something. While the need to change may be real and the call for action urgent, the overriding challenge is that depression often inspires inertia. But how you feel about your life, in most cases, can be changed, no matter how chronic the root of your depression is or seems. Come see how to begin that change today.

Depression is a thousand knives continually cutting at the fabric of the heart. It is the empty space of nothingness stretching mile after forsaken mile. It is darkness and despair and the endless echo of loneliness. It is oppressive and violent and vile. And yet there are ways of shining a light into that seemingly eternal darkness. There are ways to stop the deafening scream of emotional pain that shrieks in the inner ear of the depressed. Hope is available. Here’s the first step.

Have you ever felt sucker-punched by life? Have you felt like you were at your rope’s end? When we find ourselves buried under the weight of trial and despair, we are confronted with two mutually exclusive choices: 1) Lie down, and accept your fate, or 2) Scramble to your feet the best you can, stand as tall as you’re able, look your trial in the eyes and persevere. Come discover 5 ways you too can persevere in the face of your challenges and even become better for having endured.

Part II of How to Stay Happy on a Rainy Day. Is life raining down cold, bitter darkness? How can you find purpose in your trials? Change what you do, your thinking and your beliefs for greater peace.

Unhappiness is much easier to acquire than happiness. Happiness may create an easier life, but Read More.

The perspective you hold of the pain you experience – the way you view what it is and what it means and why you suffer under it – much more than the pain itself, determines the role pain and suffering plays in your life.