Balance
How would your life change if you believed that human experience is supposed to be 50% positive and 50% negative?
Can you recall a time when you were feeling crappy and a friend or a loved one said something like
“Don’t be sad” or “you just need to distract yourself” or “Cheer up, it might never happen!”
So it’s no surprise that when we feel bad, we think that something has gone horribly wrong and that we shouldn't feel this way.
We are forever being sold the idea that we are supposed to be happy 100% of the time.
Believing we should not feel negative emotion has us feeling bad, about feeling bad! When we resist negative emotions, we are adding an extra layer of negativity.
If you believe that life is made up of 50% positive and 50% negative, you are more likely to accept that sometimes you will feel bad and that, that is okay. Acceptance can bring a lot of peace into your daily life.
If you want to feel better, sooner, you need to FEEL the negative feeling first. If we distract and ignore the feeling, we prolong it. This is because we are not processing or accepting the feeling. Allowing an emotion is not generally something we get taught.
How to allow & process an emotion:
The easiest way to process an emotion is to pay attention to it.
Describe the emotion in detail, you can write it down as you go, or sit with your eyes closed and speak it out if you prefer.
1) Get curious. Ask yourself questions about what you are feeling:
What am I feeling? Where is it in my body? How do I know I am feeling it rather than another emotion? What is specific about this one?”
2) Describe the emotion to yourself:
Doest it have a colour? what shape is it? does it have a texture? Is it moving? Does it buzz or is it still? Is it hot or cold?
3) Don’t try and get rid of it:
Move towards it. Allow it and know that you can handle the emotion, breathe into it. Remind yourself this is just a vibration in your body and it will pass.
What happens if we don’t process our emotions?
You cannot out run your emotions.
If we don’t process our emotions, often we will distract ourselves with false pleasures (Netflix, Instagram, Ben & Jerry’s) this is a clever way for our brain to distract us from feeling the shitty feeling. In the moment the distraction can feel great, but that little dopamine hit is always short lived. And guess what the shitty feeling hasn’t gone anywhere, it will be back!
Lets say to distract yourself you go and eat, you actually add an extra layer of negativity because there will be a negative consequence from overeating i.e you gain weight.
Or perhaps for you, your go to is social media, you could loose 3 hours of your day scrolling when you were supposed to be doing something else. Or perhaps you like to drink to distract yourself, the next day you might have a hangover. Whatever your go-to false pleasure is, there will be an unwanted negative consequence caused by choosing the false pleasure.
In the example of over eating, you feel bad because you don’t think you should feel bad, then you over eat and after you feel worse because you gained weight and the original negative emotion hasn’t gone anywhere because you haven’t processed it. So you have added negative to the negative.
The negative emotion won’t go away until we accept it and process it, only then it will pass.
When you really think about it would you even want to feel happy all of the time?
Of course not, it would be weird! Would you want to be happy if you lost a loved one? Or if your car got stolen? Or if you broke your leg? The goal is to deliberate about what we are feeling, the goal is not for us to feel happy all of the time.
If we feel sad and know that we are always creating our feelings with our thoughts, we can feel empowered rather than feeling like we are at the effect of the world and our emotions. When we feel bad we are actually choosing it and that is okay.
Contrast of emotion is a great thing, we need that contrast to be able to experience happiness. If we only ever experienced positive emotion, we wouldn’t know it was positive.