Beth Kurland’s approach to unexpected stress offers practical coping options. See how to try them and where the evidence for recovery remains limited.
On September 29, 2026, Psychology Today published clinical psychologist Beth Kurland’s article “How to Handle Life’s Unexpected Curveballs.” The article was updated on October 13, 2026.
Kurland’s central suggestion is to separate the unexpected problem from your response to it. Before trying to resolve the whole situation, she recommends noticing which parts of the stress response are most active and selecting an approach that fits.
Her framework covers bodily sensations and emotions, along with thoughts and behavior. It gives a more specific starting point than simply deciding that you need to calm down. The question becomes whether attention is being pulled mainly toward a physical sensation, a feeling, a thought or an action.
Kurland uses a smoke-alarm analogy to explain why a stress response can feel intense during a situation that is not life-threatening. She also describes stress as sometimes providing energy to mobilize. The difficulty she highlights is feeling so overwhelmed that responding thoughtfully becomes harder.
Her opening example is a glass outdoor table shattering while she was preparing for a storm and facing a full workday. The event provides the context for her advice: an unplanned problem can arrive when there is little room left in the day.
The practical distinction is between managing your reaction and pretending the setback does not matter. Her suggestions leave room for emotions while asking what response would fit your values. They do not require turning an unwanted event into something positive.
This is a practitioner-authored article, not a report of new clinical research. Kurland provides no named studies, formal references or statistics to substantiate the physiological explanations or the recommended strategies.
She links perceived safety with rest and connection, but that is an explanatory frame in this article rather than a measured result. Ordinary feelings should not be used to identify a specific nervous-system state. A brief exercise is not a guaranteed way to produce recovery.
The article also reports no direct outcomes for sleep, daytime energy or long-term resilience in adults over 35. Its options are best understood as personal experiments rather than treatment for insomnia or chronic stress. Decisions about individual care belong with a qualified clinician.
For an adult aged 35 to 65 balancing work and other responsibilities, a realistic daily adjustment is to pause long enough to name what is happening before trying to solve everything at once. Kurland’s framework offers several possible starting points. One option is to try a response that fits what you notice rather than turning all of them into a required routine.
The aim is a more deliberate next response, not a demand to become perfectly calm. You can acknowledge that the situation needs attention while choosing how to approach it.
Kurland recommends grounding attention in the senses or trying a slower exhalation. Sensory grounding means directing attention toward your surroundings rather than staying entirely occupied with the problem. Her article presents this as one option for responding to the physical side of stress.
The choice can stay modest: noticing the surroundings or trying the exhalation approach, rather than building an elaborate breathing routine from the suggestion.
The useful decision is which option you want to experiment with. There is no obligation to make breathing the centerpiece of your response if grounding attention is the more manageable choice. Kurland’s broader framework leaves room to begin with a different domain.
For the emotional part of the response, Kurland suggests naming what you feel and making room for it rather than pushing it away. That offers a different task from arguing yourself out of the feeling. You are identifying what is present instead of deciding that it should not be there.
Acknowledgment is not the same as approving of what happened. In practical terms, the choice is to let the emotion be part of the moment without making its disappearance the condition for taking the next step. This follows the article’s focus on allowing emotions while choosing a response.
Kurland offers the wording “I notice I’m having the thought that…” as a way to create distance from a thought. The wording changes the task from treating the thought as the complete account of events to noticing that you are thinking it.
This is especially relevant to the harsh self-talk discussed in the article. You do not have to replace every difficult thought with an upbeat one. The author’s suggestion is to label the thought, leaving space to decide what to do next.
That approach also sits within a broader conversation about responding to uncertainty without spiraling. The focus stays on your relationship with the thought rather than on gaining complete control over the situation.
For behavior, Kurland recommends choosing a response in light of personal values. The question is not only what the stress response is pulling you toward. It is also what action would fit how you want to respond.
This keeps the practical problem in view. Grounding or naming a feeling does not replace dealing with the setback; it is part of choosing how to meet it. A values-guided response leaves room for the problem to remain inconvenient while your next action is more deliberate.
Kurland recommends practicing these options during calmer moments so they are more familiar during a difficult one. For daily life, that suggests choosing one approach you can recognize and return to, rather than collecting a long list of techniques.
A calm moment can be a chance to try naming an emotion or using the distancing phrase for a thought. You might instead practice directing attention to your surroundings. Each is drawn from the author’s suggestions; none needs to become a demanding project.
After trying an option, a reader can reflect on the experience and decide whether it is useful enough to keep. The practical implication is permission to keep or discard an option, rather than treating persistence with it as a test of character.
That choice matters for an adult whose day already contains plenty of responsibilities. The point is not to add another task that has to be performed correctly. It is to have an understandable option available when an unexpected problem arrives.
This is a modest way to approach day-to-day stress and recovery as something to respond to, rather than another standard to meet. Familiarity is the purpose of rehearsal in Kurland’s advice; perfection is not.
Kurland’s framework points toward a useful research question: how might responses to individual setbacks fit into recovery over time? For adults in midlife, daily energy and the feeling of being restored are meaningful outcomes to investigate.
Future studies could examine which approaches people keep using during ordinary responsibilities. They could also look at whether practicing during calmer periods changes how people respond to later disruptions. That would connect advice for a difficult moment with the longer view that matters to a recovery-focused reader.
Could a clearer understanding of everyday stress responses change how we approach long-term recovery in midlife?
Unexpected setbacks call for a manageable response, and Relaxopia places such coping advice within its wider coverage of recovery. For adults 35+ living with low daytime energy, its clear explanations of sleep and stress support a more informed view of uneven recovery without adding another performance target.
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