Unemployment: 5 Tips for Surviving It

Whether you saw the layoffs coming, or you’re getting fired right out of the blue, dealing with unemployment is a terrifying, confusing time. Myke has gone through it twice, so here are 5 tips for helping you survive and come out the other side while still holding onto your sanity!

1. Take a week off!

You have experienced a kind of loss, because of this it is important that you allow yourself time to grieve! If you don’t take some time to mourn the loss of your job, it’s only going to fester.

So my advice is after you fill out your unemployment paperwork and have a plan to do your job searches during the week, get out the sweat pants, some ice cream, and sit on the couch and put on some Netflix or whatever streaming service you have, and just mourn. Take a bubble bath, order pizza, sleep in, grow a beard, it doesn’t really matter. You just need to rest and recover a little, because we’re about to start going to work after your week off!

2. Stay in your routine!

On the first day of the second week, set your alarm to the time you normally get up. Then when it goes off, get up, take a shower, and put on normal clothes. After your week off, it’s important to get back in the rhythm of wake up/work/sleep. You don’t want to get lazy and have a hard time getting up for work when you eventually find a job.

You can still have some of your day dedicated to relaxing, but you need to get on the hunt for a new job. Starting your day normally does something really cool to your body, the more you do it, the easier it is to do. Then once you’ve gotten dressed, sit down at your computer and start browsing the job boards, reply to emails, get some work done.

3. Create something new!

Now, the reality of job hunting is that most job sites only update once a day. So it’s not like you can fill your time with just job searches, so I recommend you fill it with something productive!

If you have a hobby such as playing an instrument, photography, quilting, making card towers, and things like that, dive into it. Get better at it, or see if you can monetize it. The important thing is at this time, focus your energy on creating. If you’re a writer, write.

You never know what your hobby could turn into if you had more time to develop your craft! Maybe like me, it could be a source of income and could lead to the end of unemployment.

4. Exercise!

You might think that losing a job is a purely and emotionally traumatic event, but you would be wrong! The body will interpret this emotional trauma as a physical event.

So the way you recover from this is to get outside and start moving. It can be as simple as a 30 min walk, but you need to exercise.

5. Talk about it. Like with other people.

You have all this fear, anger, and hurt slowly building up inside, and if you don’t let it out in a healthy way, it’s going to come out one way or another. If you don’t deal with it, you will just be left picking up the pieces after the explosion.

So, talk to someone, they don’t need to be a therapist, but they should be a good listener and care about you.

If you’re going through a period of unemployment or something similar or found these tips helpful, share your story with us down in the comments.

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