‘Don’t dwell on it,’ people say when you’re going through tough times. The idea is that it’s bad enough as it is, without focusing your mind on it all the time. Better to distract yourself if thinking won’t change anything.

There’s a lot of sense in this. It’s hard to be positive and feel resilient when you’re wallowing in misery. A break from thinking about it, maybe some fresh air or just time with friends, is a sensible idea. You want to minimise the stress you’re going through, so it makes sense that any stress-reducing activity will help.

There is a ‘but’, though. Give yourself a break, yes, but don’t play hide and seek with your troubles. If you try to run away from them, you solve nothing right now and you pile up stress in the future. Being in denial can work well in small doses – I often think it’s quite an underrated strategy – but it’s not good for you in the long term. If you think about it that has to make sense because, as long as you’re in denial, you can’t adopt many of the ways of thinking that will help you to be more resilient. You can’t reflect, ask for support, take control of your life, be self-aware, if you’re not admitting what’s happening to you. Most important of all, as I’ve said before, you’ll never learn to accept a situation you don’t admit it exists.

How can you tell which distraction is good and which is bad? It’s less about the type of distraction than about the degree. Having said that, activities such as drugs, alcohol, overeating, risky behaviour are best avoided at normal times, and especially when you’re using them to hide from your feelings. It’s fine to watch TV or play computer games, so long as it’s occasional and not a way to block out your thoughts completely.

So it’s not what you do, it’s why you do it. If you need a bit of a break, that’s fine. Carry on. If what you’re doing is a displacement activity, it’s not healthy. Or at least be aware of it and keep it to a minimum. I make a cup of tea every morning before I start work. I do it only to delay settling down at my desk. However I’m self-aware enough to recognise this, it takes only five minutes, and anyway it helps keep my fluid levels up. There’s nothing wrong with indulging this kind of brief displacement activity. The problems come when you spend half your day doing them in order to pretend your life isn’t happening.

You need to find some time to reflect, to understand your situation, to think about what you can do to take control of your life and to find acceptance of the things you can’t change. You need to learn not to be afraid of being alone with your thoughts. I’m not giving you orders – I just want you to be able to recover as quickly as you can and this is the only way to do it, daunting as it might seem at first.