Going through adversity forces you to slow down and consider what’s important in your life. It can be necessary to reach your fullest potential. However, the way we deal with adversity can greatly affect whether we derive benefits from it.

Reframing adversity in positive ways is one reason optimists are more likely to benefit from it than pessimists (HH pg 146).

An important aspect in the process of reframing adversity is self-reflection: via a friend, therapist, or personal journal. This is not the same as “letting off steam” or “venting.”

Rather, it’s about making sense of what you went through and how you can grow from the experience. In one journaling experiment:

It was the people who made progress across [four days of journaling] who showed increasing insight; they were the ones whose health improved over the next year. In later studies, Pennebaker asked people to dance or sing to express their emotions, but these emotionally expressive activities gave no health benefit. You have to use words, and the words have to help you create a meaningful story. If you can write such a story you can reap the benefits of reappraisal (one of the two healthy coping styles) even years after an event. You can close a chapter of your life that was still open, still affecting your thoughts and preventing you from moving on with the larger narrative.

Happiness Hypothesis Chapter Seven: The Uses of Adversity

In other words, the language we use to frame our situation in the past, i.e. the story we tell ourselves, can change our outlook on the future in important ways. Although there are limits to language, it is a vital tool for how we see our Self.