There are lots of coping mechanisms that will help when you hit hard times. They will make it easier for you to bounce back from whatever hits you – in other words they will enable you to be more resilient, which is what we want.

If you’ve just found out that your father is terminally ill, or you’ve had another miscarriage, or your partner has gambled away your savings, or you haven’t got the grades you need, or your child needs a major operation, or your new boss is a nightmare – this is probably not going to feel like a good moment to start learning lots of new skills. And yet there are plenty of skills – some we’ve covered, some we’ll get to in a bit – that will really help you cope.

So the answer is to make sure those skills are up your sleeve just waiting for a moment such as this. You’ll have found out what works for you and practised it every time you’ve missed the bus, or had to deal with your critical mother, or traipsed into work with a stinky cold.

You’ll use some of these new thinking habits constantly whether things are good or bad. Others will be strategies you bring into play when you recognise you need to give yourself a bit of a leg-up to cope with things. You’ll need these skills polished and ready to go so when things really hit the fan, you can switch them on effortlessly. Because effort isn’t going to come easily at those moments.

There are new ways of thinking in the next section (Healthy thinking) which will be really useful to you, so long as you’ve made habits of them. Oh, they’ll have helped even when things were going smoothly, but now you’ll really reap the benefits. And there are other strategies too which you’ll need to work out for yourself. They’re not difficult, but some are new skills worth learning before you need them: yoga, sport, meditation, going for a bike ride, taking a long soaking bath, going out with friends, playing with the dog/cat/budgerigar. Not all of them require training, but you do need to know which are the ones that help you. If you don’t have a broad repertoire to cover all moods, weathers, time windows, locations, build up a wider range. If all your coping strategies require you to be at home, for example, think of a useful habit you can develop for when you’re at work. Or with the kids. Or when it’s snowing.

And it’s not enough just to have these personalised tactics ready. You have to recognise when to deploy them. You have to be in the habit of thinking, ‘It’s been a tough day, I think I’ll go for a run’ or ‘I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed, I’ll meditate for 20 minutes when the kids are in bed’. Know what your strategies are, when you need them, and which ones help when.