Years ago I read a book about an air force pilot who went down in a hurricane. He managed to get into his tiny one-man life raft. Then the wave knocked him out of it. Every time he got in the waves would knock him out.

The way he stayed sane and kept going was he would figure that if he dug deep he could take three more. After those three he would dig deep and handle three more. Instead of looking at as a storm with thousands of waves he took them on three at a time. He also stopped counting anything beyond three.