Read Keeping Your Head After Losing Your Job for Free Online

write. However, don’t forget you need to write down and rate your activities from when you rise until bedtime

    Once you have filled in a few days of activities, and at regular intervals, look back at what you have written and think about these questions:
    •Which activities were you engaged in when you felt worse? What were you doing?
    •What were you doing when you felt better?
    •If your feelings change depending on what you are doing, what does that mean to you?
    4: Your feelings depend on what you are thinking
    Like a lot of people who are unemployed, you believe that you have too much time on your hands. You may be sitting at home, dwelling on lots of negative thoughts that you just automatically believe. Try to see if your feelings are related to what you are thinking. For example, “I will never get a job,” “I must be a failure,” “I have let everyone down,” and “I will never be happy again.” When these thoughts come to you, you might treat them as if they are proven facts—indisputable. The more you dwell on them, the truer they seem to you.
    What if your thoughts are not true? Or, what if they are only 20% true? Your feelings might then have been based on thoughts that were lies you are telling yourself. Imagine if you were employed and you were sitting at home and someone was yelling at you every minute, for hours: “You are a failure” or “You will never be happy.” How do you think you would feel? You don’t have to believe everything you think. You can look into what you think and change it.
    You can treat these thoughts as annoying, pestering bugs that keep biting at you. The way to defeat them is to recognize them for what they are—just thoughts.
    EXERCISE: CHALLENGE YOUR THOUGHTS
Write your thoughts down, then keep a tally, and plan your attack. For example, you can challenge each of these thoughts with the following:
    •What am I saying to myself? If I didn’t believe this thought, how would my feelings change?
    •What is the evidence for and against this thought?
    •What advice would I give my best friend if they were out of work and they had these thoughts?
    For example, Claire was saying to herself, “I must be a loser. I don’t have a job.” This made her feel sad, hopeless and ashamed. She realized that if she didn’t believe this thought she would feel a lot better—more hopeful, more accepting, more able to enjoy her life right now. She realized that the only “evidence” that she was a “loser” was that she didn’t have a job at this moment in time, but there was a lot of evidence that she was not a loser—she had graduated from university, she was a good person, she had worked well at her job and on other jobs that she had held in the past, and she had a number of good friends. She said, “If I had a friend who thought this I would be supportive and tell her that unemployment happens to millions of people—good people—and it doesn’t say anything about you as a person.”
    EXERCISE: CHALLENGE YOUR NEGATIVE
Write down some of your negative thoughts and then alongside this, list the evidence in favor of the thought and against the thought. Here’s an example of how to do this
Negative thoughts
Evidence in favor of thought
Evidence against thought
I am a failure
I don’t have a job
I graduated from university. I had a job for several years. I did well in my job. I have a wife and two children and I am a good father. I have friends.
    When you look at the evidence in favor and the evidence against your thoughts, what do you conclude? Take the thought, “I will never get a job again,” for example. What is the evidence in favor of this thought? You might say, “I don’t have a job, I have been looking for a while and the job market is pretty bad.” The evidence against the thought might be, “Almost everyone eventually gets a job, there are always changes in the job market; I am willing work, I have skills that other people might need.” How does