Overcoming Setbacks: 6 Stress Management Tips for Dealing with Disappointment

As a health coach, I often work with clients on building resilience, and a big part of that is learning to navigate setbacks. I’ve found that the best way to help others is to be open about my own journey.

A few years ago, I invested a lot of time and energy into launching an offer to my audience. I poured my heart into it, but after months of hard work, it just didn’t take off. The failure felt deeply personal, and I was consumed by a mix of disappointment, frustration, and self-doubt. My usual go-to was to push through and work even harder, but this time, I just couldn’t push through as I felt so empty and disappointed.

Instead, I decided to focus on what I teach my clients: self-compassion. I stepped away from the business for a couple of weeks and shifted my focus to activities that nourish me. This included reconnecting with nature on long hikes and prioritizing time with friends and family who reminded me of my value outside of my work.

When you’re struggling with disappointment, it’s easy to get stuck in a cycle of “what if.” Here’s the advice I would give to anyone navigating a setback:

Don’t try to suppress or ignore your feelings. Allow yourself to be disappointed, sad, or frustrated. Trying to “stay positive” all the time is exhausting and counterproductive. Give yourself a specific amount of time to grieve the setback, whether that’s an evening or a few days. Talking to like-minded people who are working on achieving similar things is really helpful and makes you realize that disappointment is a part of everyone’s journey.

Talk to yourself the way you would talk to a close friend. You wouldn’t tell a friend to “just get over it.” You would listen with empathy and remind them of their strengths. Use this same compassionate voice for yourself. Remind yourself that a single failure doesn’t define your entire journey.

When you’re in the thick of disappointment, it’s important to reconnect with things that help you feel happy, like a weekend adventure, meeting up with friends, or watching your favorite show. These small acts of self-care help you release the built-up negative emotions and have fun.

Once the initial sting of disappointment has faded, challenge yourself to reframe the setback. What can you learn from this experience? Was there a valuable lesson, a new perspective, or an opportunity that emerged from the failure? Seeing it as a part of your story, not the end of it, is the key to building resilience and moving forward.

During a keynote on trauma-informed leadership, the projector froze and the mic cut out five minutes in. I felt the heat rise in my face and my chest tighten. I used the 5-4-3-2-1 grounding method right there. Five things I could see. Four I could feel. Three I could hear. Two I could smell. One I could taste.

Within a minute my breathing steadied. I told the room I would model a reset I teach, led them through the “five things you can see” step, and pivoted to a whiteboard. We turned it into a live exercise about stabilizing under pressure. The evaluations later highlighted “calm, clear, connected,” and two leaders booked follow-ups because they saw the tools work in real time.

For those struggling with disappointment, find the technique that helps you regulate and then find even one glimmer or something you can walk away with from the disappointment.

When a deal collapsed at the last moment, I felt a heavy sense of responsibility. The turning point came when I chose to have open conversations with mentors. Speaking honestly about the setback released much of the pressure and offered clarity I could not find on my own. Their encouragement reminded me that failure does not diminish capability. Instead, it can be a powerful teacher when you allow yourself to reflect with guidance. Those conversations became a reminder that resilience is often built in the company of people who have faced similar challenges.

For anyone struggling with disappointment, I recommend leaning on trusted voices. Sharing your experience lightens the emotional load and brings fresh perspective to blind spots you may not see. Isolation often deepens stress while dialogue creates healing. Recovery begins when you acknowledge the setback, speak about it, and allow others to help you see the path forward.

One setback that nearly broke me was a botched product launch in our early days. We’d sunk months of work into it, only to see usage numbers flatline in the first week. I remember staring at the dashboard like it was a personal indictment. My instinct was to grind harder, to fix it immediately—but that only spiraled the stress.

The technique that pulled me out wasn’t meditation or exercise, though those help—it was something more counterintuitive: narrative reframing. I literally sat down and wrote the failure out as if it were a case study five years in the future. “We launched this feature, it flopped, but here’s how it redirected the company into what eventually worked.” By treating the moment as a future story instead of a present disaster, I could breathe again. The stress eased because the failure stopped feeling like a dead end and started feeling like a plot twist.

What I tell others: disappointment feels permanent when you’re in it, but your brain is bad at zooming out. Try telling the story of your setback as if it’s already in the past and you’ve moved on from it. That shift doesn’t erase the sting, but it gives you distance, and with distance comes perspective. The irony is that I actually made better, faster decisions once I stopped obsessing about “fixing it now” and started thinking about the arc of the story.

The previous year, our team launched a major advertising campaign which resulted in wasted funds and unproductive conversions while our client remained anxious. I took a twenty-four-hour break from work. I closed my laptop and spent an extended time walking through Buttes-Chaumont without my phone to find mental peace. The break did not solve all problems, but it transformed my approach to solving the issue by bringing me a state of calmness and improved focus for better decision-making.

When you hit a slump, avoid using exhausted energy to force your way out of it. Take a break to reset your nervous system before you return with new perspectives. Your brain needs time to rest before you can achieve clarity because intense effort does not produce it.