Stress is a problem in the workplace. Who, for instance, has not felt unappreciated at work, or has not thought things like “Why, in this sweltering office, do my fellow employees seem hell-bent on denying me the use of a fan, using the feeble excuse that I benefit from a supposed draft emanating from an open window eight meters away?” It is always unpleasant, and can on occasion reach crisis proportions.

Even worse, however, can be the experience of being unemployed. Whether you have left to look for a better job or been downsized, being without work can carry a heavy toll for the new job seeker. Often a person feels adrift, without direction in his or her life. Repeated rejections, unhelpful recruitment agencies and an unstable future do not help things. Add to this blows to self-esteem — admittedly less in Russia than in many countries in the hyper-competitive West, where being labeled a “loser” is a thing to be dreaded more than death itself — and financial insecurity, and being unemployed can be quite a cross to bear.

People do many different things to handle stress during interim periods between jobs. But not all of them are helpful. Indeed, often out-of-work individuals become so disheartened that they begin to internalize their situation and think of it as part of their destiny, and so fall into a state of inertia and despondency. In addition, other people have a tendency to bottle stress up inside them, so that they do not deal with it as such and it comes out in the form of anger or irritability. This is pleasant neither for them nor the people around them, and failed relationships and interpersonal friction are often the result.

How, then, to keep one’s spirits up during the arduous job-seeking process? There are different approaches to the problem, ranging from the counterproductive — such as copious consumption of alcohol — to the benign to the genuinely positive. And some approaches really do work better than others.

What is most important is to remember that your condition is a temporary one. With sufficient diligence and savvy, the odds that you will be unable to eventually land a job are high indeed, at least in a city like Moscow. The job market is not so saturated, the aftereffects of the 1998 financial debacle notwithstanding, as to make the situation hopeless. With perseverence, your goal can be achieved.