Hard times have a way of making you feel stuck, as though the pain will never end and every step forward only leads to more difficulty. The instinct to stop, retreat, or give up becomes overwhelming when you’re in the middle of real suffering.
This article will show you why persistence through difficult periods is often the only path to relief, how to keep moving when you feel paralyzed, and what practical strategies actually help when you’re enduring a crisis that won’t resolve quickly.
What Does It Mean to Keep Going When You’re Going Through Hell?
Keeping going when you’re going through hell means continuing to take small, necessary actions even when you’re in pain, afraid, or exhausted. It means you don’t set up camp in the worst part of your struggle by making permanent decisions based on temporary circumstances, and you give yourself permission to move through hardship rather than demanding it end immediately before you take another step.
Why Stopping in the Middle Makes Everything Worse
When you’re suffering, your brain naturally looks for relief. The problem is that many forms of immediate relief—avoiding all discomfort, numbing out, isolating completely, or quitting everything at once—often extend your pain rather than end it.
Stopping in the middle of a hard season can turn a temporary crisis into a permanent situation. If you lose your job and respond by withdrawing from all professional contacts, refusing to update your resume, and sleeping fourteen hours a day for months, you’re no longer just unemployed; you’ve now added isolation, skill gaps, and depression to the original problem.
The same applies to relationship pain. If a breakup leads you to delete everyone from your life, refuse all social invitations, and decide you’ll never trust anyone again, you’ve taken a painful event and used it to build walls that will hurt you long after the breakup would have naturally healed.
Movement, even slow movement, prevents you from calcifying around your worst moment. It keeps your options open and your identity flexible enough to adapt as circumstances change.
What Keeping Going Actually Looks Like
Persistence during crisis doesn’t mean pretending you’re fine or maintaining your previous pace. It means doing the smallest next right thing, even when you can’t see where it leads.
Start With Basic Maintenance
When everything feels impossible, narrow your focus to physical survival and basic functioning. Eat something, even if it’s not a perfect meal. Sleep, even if your schedule is temporarily chaotic. Move your body, even if it’s just a walk around the block.
These aren’t luxuries or optional wellness tips. They’re the foundation that keeps your nervous system stable enough to make decisions and process emotion.
Break Time Into Smaller Units
You don’t have to know how you’ll survive the next year, month, or even week. You only need to identify what you can handle right now.
Can you get through the next hour without making anything worse? Can you complete one task today that moves you slightly forward—a phone call, an application, a difficult conversation, a load of laundry?
Progress during hard times is measured in hours and single actions, not transformation. String enough hours together, and you’ll eventually notice you’ve crossed into different territory.
Separate Feeling From Fact
Suffering distorts your perception. It tells you that because you feel hopeless, the situation is hopeless. Because you feel like a failure, you are one. Because you feel unloved, you’re unlovable.
These feelings are real, but they aren’t reliable narrators. You can acknowledge the pain without letting it write your future.
Try this: When a dark thought appears, add the phrase “I’m having the thought that…” before it. “I’m having the thought that I’ll never recover” is different from “I’ll never recover.” One is an observation; the other is a verdict.
Common Mistakes That Keep You Stuck in Hell
Certain responses to hardship feel like self-protection but actually function as traps. Recognizing them can help you avoid extending your own suffering.
Waiting for Motivation Before You Act
Motivation during crisis is rare and unreliable. If you wait until you feel like doing hard things, you may wait forever.
Action creates momentum; momentum creates motivation. Do the thing first, even mechanically, and let the feeling follow when it’s ready.
Comparing Your Timeline to Someone Else’s
Other people’s recovery speeds, career paths, relationship timelines, and healing processes tell you nothing useful about your own. Your circumstances, resources, history, and nervous system are unique.
Shaming yourself for not bouncing back as quickly as someone else just adds a second layer of suffering on top of the original problem. Your only job is to be slightly better than you were yesterday, not better than someone else is today.
Refusing All Help Because You Think You Should Handle It Alone
Self-reliance is valuable, but rugged independence during genuine crisis often just means suffering longer than necessary. Asking for help—whether from friends, family, professionals, or support systems—isn’t weakness.
You don’t earn extra credit for white-knuckling through something that could be easier with support. If you broke your leg, you wouldn’t refuse crutches to prove your toughness.
Making Permanent Decisions in Temporary Pain
The middle of hell is the worst possible time to decide you’ll never date again, that your career is over, that you should cut off your family permanently, or that life isn’t worth living. These decisions may feel clarifying in the moment, but they’re usually just pain talking.
Give yourself permission to delay big decisions until you’re on more stable ground. You can revisit them later when you have more perspective.
How to Measure Progress When Nothing Feels Better
Traditional markers of progress—happiness, energy, optimism—often disappear during hard times. You need different measurements.
Are you still doing the basics most days? Are you avoiding decisions that would make things significantly worse? Have you reached out to at least one person this week? Did you complete a small task that required effort?
These aren’t exciting milestones, but they’re evidence that you’re moving. And movement, however slow, means you haven’t stopped in the middle.
Notice What You’re Still Capable Of
Crisis has a way of making you forget your own competence. You focus so completely on what’s broken that you stop seeing what still works.
Make a short list of things you’ve managed despite everything: you fed yourself, you showed up to work, you were honest in a hard conversation, you didn’t send the angry text, you asked for help. These matter.
When the Hell Is a Dangerous Situation
Not all difficult situations should be endured through persistence alone. If your “hell” involves a partner who threatens, controls, or harms you, keeping going means planning a safe exit, not trying harder to make the relationship work.
If you’re in a workplace where you’re being harassed, discriminated against, or put in unsafe conditions, keeping going might mean documenting everything and consulting an employment lawyer, not just pushing through and hoping it improves.
If you’re having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, keeping going means reaching out to a crisis line, a mental health professional, or emergency services, not suffering in isolation until something breaks.
Persistence is powerful, but it isn’t the right response to situations where someone is actively harming you or where your safety is at immediate risk. In those cases, getting out or getting help is the courageous action.
Building Resilience for the Long Haul
Some difficult periods don’t resolve quickly. Grief, chronic illness, financial recovery, rebuilding after betrayal—these processes unfold over months or years, not days.
For extended hardship, you need sustainable practices, not just willpower. Willpower is a sprint resource; you need marathon strategies.
Create Structure When Everything Feels Chaotic
Small routines provide stability when the bigger picture is uncertain. A morning routine, a regular check-in with a friend, a consistent bedtime—these anchors keep you oriented when everything else is shifting.
Structure isn’t about rigidity. It’s about giving yourself predictable touchpoints that don’t require constant decision-making.
Let Yourself Have Good Moments Without Guilt
You don’t honor your struggle by refusing all joy until it’s over. Laughing at something funny, enjoying a meal, feeling momentarily peaceful—these aren’t betrayals of your pain. They’re proof that you’re still alive and still capable of a full range of experience.
Happiness and hardship can coexist. Letting them makes the hard times more bearable, not less meaningful.
Adjust Your Expectations Temporarily
You probably can’t perform at your peak while you’re also managing a crisis. That’s not failure; that’s biology.
Give yourself permission to do less, to be less productive, to lower the bar temporarily. You can raise it again later when you have the capacity. Right now, good enough actually is good enough.
What’s Waiting on the Other Side
You won’t be the same person who entered this difficult season. Hard times change you—sometimes in ways you didn’t want, but also in ways that make you more capable, more compassionate, and more certain about what actually matters to you.
The skills you’re building now—tolerance for discomfort, the ability to keep functioning under stress, the willingness to ask for help, the capacity to take one more step when you’d rather collapse—these don’t disappear when the crisis ends. They become part of your foundation.
You’re not just surviving. You’re gathering evidence that you can handle hard things, which changes how you approach every challenge that comes after this one.
Your Next Step Forward
Keeping going when you’re going through hell isn’t about forced positivity or pretending everything is fine. It’s about refusing to let the worst moment of your life become your permanent address.
Today, pick one small action that moves you even slightly forward. Make one phone call. Complete one task. Reach out to one person. Eat one decent meal. Get through one more hour.
Then tomorrow, do it again. That’s how you get through hell—not by running, not by avoiding it, but by taking one step, and then another, until you look up and realize you’ve reached different ground.
For more support during difficult times, explore our articles on healing from trauma and remember that better days are ahead as you continue building the skills for personal growth and healthier relationships.