Handy Tips: How to Comfort Someone Properly

In Handy Tips, we find ways to improve your life and make it easier and explain why these tips work. Today, we will tell you how to properly comfort and support someone who is sad to ease their burden and suffering by lightening their load.

How to comfort someone in the right way:

1. Make contact

When you are trying to comfort and support someone, make sure they are listening. If your interlocutor has a sense-bearing look and nods in response to questions, you’ve made contact.

2. Adapt and lead

Offer the person on the verge of a mental breakdown to breathe deeply to calm down. Begin first, and once your breathing is synchronized, slow yours down to calm. The other person will involuntarily follow the example.

3. Let the person be weak

Even a boxer in a knockdown does not jump up immediately, but lies until the count of nine, coming to once’s senses. Make it clear to the one being comforted that it's okay to just relax and cry.

4. Remind the person of their success

Having failed, everyone remembers past mistakes. Do not let the other person be self-deprecating, remind them of old merits and success.

How to comfort someone in the wrong way:

1. Focus on yourself more

You cannot know for sure what a person is going through. Therefore, do not rush to tell them that you had something similar, and you coped with your grief. This is perceived as a devaluation of experiences and competition for who copes better with grief.

2. Overdo the positive thinking

If the loss is unbearable, one should not turn to trendy ideas that everything is for the best, and any situation teaches us something.

3. Get involved in their problems

Having comforted a person, you are not obliged to deal with their affairs. The purpose of comforting is not to share resources, but to help a person regain their own.