Years ago, a friend of mine got into terrible financial problems. It was during a recession and he ended up owing a huge mortgage which was double the actual value of the house, and with credit cards bills, utility bills, and a business that had just gone under.

Every time I saw him he had more stories about bailiffs turning up, or threatening letters from the bank, or final demands on his doormat. And he couldn’t work out how to sort it all out. He’d paid off all his small creditors, so now just owed large sums to the bank, building society and big utility companies. I suggested to him (and I certainly wasn’t the only one) that he declare himself bankrupt. That way he’d write off all his debts and could start again, albeit with two or three years of financial restrictions – but he couldn’t be any more financially restricted than he already was.

He refused. He felt there was a stigma to being bankrupt and was determined to find a solution to his situation. This went on for months, and he grew increasingly depressed and stressed and – thanks to interest – increasingly in debt.

And guess what the eventual outcome was. Yep, you guessed it, in the end he had to declare himself bankrupt. He never really had a solvable problem in the first place – he’d just been trying to avoid the inevitable. Deep down he knew there wasn’t a way out of the financial hole he was in, but he wanted to believe there was so he framed it as a problem rather than an unavoidable outcome.

Interestingly, as soon as he gave in and went ahead with the voluntary bankruptcy, he immediately felt lighter. He stopped carrying around the emotional weight of trying to stave off the inevitable, and cheered up at once. The unwinnable battle had been far more draining and demoralising than the actual bankruptcy itself. He’d spent almost a year of his life miserable for no gain, and wished he’d just gone bankrupt as soon as it was clear the battle was unwinnable.

I know I said that if you believe there’s a solution, there will be. But you have to be addressing a genuine problem and not just an inevitability. Of course you could argue that there was a solution in my friend’s case: go bankrupt. But that was always going to happen, and no amount of creative thinking was going to avoid it – not in any realistic or advisable way (he could perhaps have fled the country in disguise, but that might have been rather drastic). Where there is only one possible outcome, you need to recognise that this isn’t a situation that demands problem-solving skills. This is a situation that demands resilience, honesty, self-awareness and quite possibly guts. Don’t delude yourself into thinking it’s anything else.