Getting handed that pink slip is probably the most soul-destroying thing to happen when you show up for work. You rely on your job for your day to day living expenses and it’s also a big part of your social life. Call it what you want, but being fired/laid off/dismissed doesn’t make the situation any easier. For some people, panic is the first thing that they feel, with failure a close second.

There’s nothing easy about losing your job and job loss ranks very high on the list of stressful things to ever happen in life. It doesn’t just affect your finances, it affects the way that you view yourself and your emotional wellbeing. There is a typical cycle that people go through when they lose a job, and it’s rather the same as grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally, acceptance.

Finances are the biggest concern for most when a job is lost. You need to be able to keep a roof over your head, and affordable health insurance is so important so that you can keep covered and keep the expenses low if something should happen while you’re between jobs. Checking out GoMedigap to make sure that you know all of your health insurance plan options is smart, and choosing the highest coverage with the lowest makes sense to keep affording it if you are laid off. There’s a big chance that your job came with health insurance, and if you lose that then you lose the insurance, too. You need to have a budget in place, regardless of whether you have a job to go to. The last thing that you need is to cope with setting up a budget from scratch with the panic of no work alongside it.

Obviously, you will be looking for another job as soon as you possibly can to follow the one that you lost. Once you have come to terms with the emotional fallout of losing your job, you can look ahead and start moving forward again. You could look at losing your job as an opportunity to retrain or do something that you have always wanted to do. You could take a break from life – commitments permitting – and go travelling. A job loss doesn’t have to be a huge disruption in a negative way, it’s just how you choose to look at it. By making your job loss something positive, you can move on from it and take what you’ve learned into your next role.

If you allow it to, your job loss could impact your entire outlook on life, when there is no need for that to happen. You need to be able to cope with the blow in the best way that you can. Dip into the savings that you have carefully put by and make your search for a new venture a priority. There’s no need for this to overtake your life and your family – it’s about prioritising and motivating yourself to move forward.