The Five Minute Rule
Sometimes, we just have to be free to FEEL exactly what we want to feel and how we want to feel it.
Pity party, sadness, anger, emotion of any kind. God built us with emotions, so He obviously has a use for them. Part of which may very well be to understand empathy ...
The five minute rule is this: You get to feel whatever you want to feel for five minutes, just exactly the way you want to feel it, as long as you do no damage to anyone else while feeling it. Go ahead, feel sorry for yourself, beat yourself up, explain to yourself how you alone are responsible for the starving people of Ethiopia, or spend time explaining to God, why He is not being very fair with all this stuff.
But, ONLY for FIVE minutes.
At the end of five minutes, you have GOT to get up and go do something constructive, usually for someone else.
The secret to the whole process is limiting the amount of time you absolutely give in to whatever you are feeling, and then GETTING UP and going to do something different.
Practice those two steps and your outlook on life changes.
And, you may do this twice every hour or every fifteen minutes ... then, I would caution yourself to only allow yourself to go there once an hour, or ONLY after you have completed a task .... washing a load of clothes, loading the dryer, folding the clean clothes, and putting them away, and THEN you get to go on an emotional roller coaster for five minutes.
The point is: You control your emotions ... do not allow them to control you.
Our basic human self is not very good for our well-being ... we seem to work overtime to defeat and demoralize ourselves.
The only thing I have found that makes the outcome different is to do something constructive ...