“As soon as [anger] begins to hold us away, it’s onerous to get again once more right into a wholesome situation, as a result of cause goes for nothing as soon as ardour has been admitted to the thoughts . . . The enemy have to be met and pushed again on the outermost frontier-line: for when he has as soon as entered the town and handed its gates, he won’t enable his prisoners to set bounds to his victory.” – SENECA
In The Little E book of Stoicism, chapter 4 is all about unfavorable feelings. As Jonas explains, the Stoics seen anger, worry, guilt, and co. because the primary enemy within the pursuit of the great life.
If you consider your largest regrets and most up-to-date failures in life, you’ll in all probability discover a unfavorable emotion because the offender. Maybe you by no means pursued the profession you had at all times dreamt of (worry, nervousness), shouted at your spouse or youngsters (anger, jealousy), or drowned your sorrows in alcohol (disappointment, despair).
What the Stoics knew hundreds of years in the past, trendy science has confirmed during the last many years: below the affect of unfavorable feelings, we regularly turn into our personal worst enemies.
One group of researchers places it effectively, “Detrimental have an effect on might very effectively be probably the most potent disinhibitor of restrained habits. When individuals really feel nugatory, depressed, or rejected, they’re extra more likely to have interaction in quite a lot of self-defeating behaviors. Following unfavorable have an effect on, dieters overeat, former people who smoke smoke, and alcoholics fall into relapse. Extra typically, individuals turn into extra more likely to procrastinate, to be egocentric or hostile, and even go as far as to denigrate outgroup members.” (Detrimental have an effect on is actually science lingo for unfavorable feelings.)
The researchers clarify a number of the mechanisms by way of which unfavorable feelings can have these detrimental results: “Detrimental have an effect on spreads poison tendrils into each side of self-regulation, amplifying wishes, lowering monitoring, depleting restricted capability, and inspiring misregulation methods (e.g., temper restore and escape from aversive self-awareness), which may relieve unfavorable have an effect on within the brief time period however typically result in additional unfavorable have an effect on upon failure to fulfill one’s targets.”
To be clear, experiencing unfavorable feelings just isn’t in and of itself the issue. As books like The Upside of Your Darkish Aspect: Why Being Your Complete Self – Not Simply Your Good Self – Drives Success and Success clarify, these feelings are invaluable and do have their place. The issue happens when these feelings overwhelm us and get uncontrolled. Put in another way, it’s our incapacity to handle and regulate them that causes hassle.
It’s totally potential to expertise unfavorable feelings and never fall into self-defeating behaviors – to expertise anger with out lashing out, to expertise nervousness and transfer ahead regardless of it, to expertise disappointment and never quit.
As a way to do this, nonetheless, we’d like the appropriate mindset and instruments. We have to know what to do and to not do when dealing with tough feelings.
Emotion Regulation
There’s a whole area of analysis that investigates how individuals cope with their feelings – how they attempt to enhance, keep, or lower the depth, period, and trajectory of optimistic and unfavorable feelings. This course of is usually known as emotion regulation. (On this article, we give attention to the regulation of unfavorable feelings solely.)
Amongst different issues, this line of analysis has discovered that some emotion regulation methods work higher than others. It has additionally been discovered that folks differ within the type of methods they use most steadily and that this has wide-ranging penalties for his or her well-being. Because the Stoics would have predicted, individuals who use adaptive methods and are good at regulating their feelings do much better than those that wrestle with this course of.
One other factor this analysis has discovered is that folks can change the methods they use to control their feelings. After they do that, they get higher at regulating their feelings and their lives enhance.
For me, studying about this analysis has been of huge assist. It has helped me get higher at managing my feelings, which in flip has helped me in overcoming procrastination, turning into extra disciplined and productive, and it has absolutely helped me turn into a nicer, extra caring, form, and compassionate model of myself.
Within the the rest of this text, I wish to share with you a number of the most essential findings on emotion regulation. With out additional ado, listed here are the 8 Do’s and Don’ts of managing tough feelings.
1. DON’T Suppress
Suppression might be the most typical approach of coping with undesirable feelings. We attempt to maintain issues in, to push our emotions down or to push them away, to inhibit no matter’s stepping into within us, to not really feel what we’re feeling.
It’s a combating stance – we battle, subtly or not so subtly, with our expertise. We don’t wish to really feel the best way we’re feeling, so we’re combating. While you search for synonyms for suppressing, you will see phrases like subduing, defeating, conquering, vanquishing, triumphing over, crushing, quashing, squashing, extinguishing, placing down, proscribing, restraining, and so forth.
The underlying assumption is that unfavorable feelings are unhealthy. They’re our enemies. They really feel unhealthy. We wish to eliminate them.
Suppression is an strategy that doesn’t work very effectively. The truth is, it tends to backfire and make issues worse. Because the saying goes, what you resist, persists.
When researchers inform individuals not to consider one thing or to not really feel a sure approach, what they discover is ironic: The extra we attempt to suppress a thought, emotion, or craving, the extra we’re caught with it and the extra strongly we’re influenced by it.
A now basic research by Harvard scientist Daniel Wegner requested members not to consider a white bear for 5 minutes and ring a bell every time the considered a white bear crossed their minds. They might take into consideration something they wished, apart from a white bear. Following this preliminary suppression interval, members had been allowed to consider something they wished, together with white bears, and proceed to ring a bell every time the considered a white bear surfaced.
Wegner and his colleagues made two essential findings. First, suppressing ideas wasn’t potential. Regardless of how onerous members tried, the white bear continued to inhabit their ideas. The truth is, individuals who had been advised particularly not to consider white bears ringed the bell much more typically than individuals who had been allowed and even advised to consider white bears.
The second discovering was that folks expertise a rebound impact after making an attempt to suppress a thought – they suppose much more about white bears as soon as the suppression makes an attempt are over. In comparison with a management group who was inspired to easily take into consideration the bear, individuals who first tried to suppress ideas of the white bear had many extra occurrences of the white bear thought.
Perplexed by these findings, Wegner performed a number of extra research. The outcomes had been at all times the identical. The act of making an attempt not to consider one thing triggered the paradoxical impact of desirous about it extra typically. Wegner dubbed this impact ironic rebound: the very factor you strive not to consider rebounds again into your thoughts with out fail. In conclusion to one in all his research, he stated, “the paradoxical impact of thought suppression is that it produces a preoccupation with the suppressed thought.”
Suppressing feelings doesn’t work, both. Analysis has proven that after we attempt to suppress our emotional expertise, our coronary heart charge tends to extend, the sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight) turns into extra activated, respiration will get extra fast and shallow, and our general physiological arousal goes up.
Within the mind, exercise in emotional facilities just like the amygdala goes up, whereas exercise within the prefrontal cortex – the a part of the mind related to larger cognitive features like reasoning, downside fixing, comprehension, creativity, and impulse management – goes down.
We find yourself being much less goal, much less clear-headed, much less rational, and fewer in management. As a substitute, we’re extra aroused and extra strongly pushed by emotional impulses. We really feel the emotion extra strongly and are extra strongly influenced by it. As one research places it, “suppressing feelings results in a paradoxical enhance within the undesirable emotional expertise…”
Within the long-run, individuals who closely use suppression as an emotion regulation technique do far worse than individuals who depend on extra helpful methods. One research discovered that recurring suppressors “expertise extra unfavorable feelings, together with painful emotions of inauthenticity, than people who use suppression much less steadily.” Additionally they “rating lowest within the area of optimistic relations with others” and “even have decrease ranges of vanity, are much less happy with life, and have extra depressive signs.”
2. DON’T Vent
Venting – giving free expression to feelings – typically will get a superb status. “You simply have to let all of it out,” is what many people appear to consider. It’s true: venting in numerous methods – lashing out at others, screaming, punching pillows, and so forth – can really feel satisfying. Nevertheless, the “letting it out” doesn’t scale back the unfavorable feelings, however moderately tends to accentuate them.
In a 2002 research, researchers divided 600 school college students into three teams: distraction, venting, and a management group. Every particular person was requested to write down an essay on abortion, which might then be evaluated by one other participant – their so-called accomplice. There was no accomplice. As a substitute, the researchers supplied unfavorable suggestions on all of the essays. In consequence, all of the members thought their accomplice had given them unhealthy suggestions.
Members within the venting group – now noticeably upset by the unfavorable suggestions – had been requested to hit a punching unhealthy whereas desirous about their accomplice. There was even a photograph of the accomplice (a random particular person) displayed on a pc display. Members within the distraction group had been additionally requested to hit a punching bag, however they had been advised to visualise their health targets whereas a photograph of a bodily match particular person. The management group did nothing.
After hitting the punching unhealthy, all members reported how indignant they felt. Subsequent, with a view to measure ranges of aggression, members got the prospect to manage loud blasts of noise to the one who had angered them.
The outcomes? Individuals within the management group had been the calmest after the research. Individuals within the venting group, alternatively, had been the angriest and most aggressive of the bunch. Removed from calming individuals down, venting resulted in intensified aggression and anger.
Equally, one other research discovered that individuals who routinely visited and posted on rant web sites had been extra more likely to develop anger points – they picked fights simply and obtained frequent warnings about inheritor habits. And as soon as once more, venting felt satisfying with members admitting that posting on ranting websites made them really feel higher.
Brad Bushman, writer of the 2002 venting research and one of many main researchers on anger and aggressive responding, believes that “venting to scale back anger is like utilizing gasoline to place out a fireplace – it solely feeds the flame.”
3. DON’T Ruminate
One other widespread approach wherein we cope with unfavorable feelings is thru rumination – the tendency to repetitively take into consideration the causes, situational components, and penalties of 1’s unfavorable emotional expertise.
For instance, we ask ourselves why we really feel a sure approach. “Why will we maintain getting indignant? What’s unsuitable with us? What’s inflicting it? What could possibly be finished about it? Will I ever discover a approach out of this? What if I don’t?”
When you wrestle with rumination in your personal life, you realize it’s not a wholesome or helpful coping mechanism. And the analysis agrees. Individuals who ruminate are more likely to develop issues with nervousness and melancholy. A latest research confirmed that brooding an excessive amount of on unfavorable occasions is the most important predictor of tension and melancholy and a powerful determinant of the extent of stress individuals expertise.
Rumination is related to an entire host of self-sabotaging behaviors corresponding to alcohol abuse or consuming problems – we drink to take the sting off the constant worrying and use meals to distract ourselves. Rumination additionally will increase our physiological and psychological stress responses to such a level that it considerably raises blood stress and might truly put us at a higher danger for heart problems.
The excellent news is that the next methods assist us deal not solely with unfavorable feelings but additionally with ruminative considering.
4. DO Settle for
Accepting unfavorable feelings means permitting them to be as they’re, with out judging them and with out making an attempt to manage or change them. It’s not passive resignation, however moderately an lively willingness to expertise feelings and accompanying sensations and ideas simply as they’re. It’s about experiencing one’s emotions absolutely and permitting them to run their pure course. It’s a stance of openness and curiosity.
Analysis reveals that accepting feelings reduces their power and stickiness. Acceptance additionally slows down our respiration, reduces our coronary heart charge, and dampens our physiological arousal. Within the mind, acceptance decreases exercise within the amygdala and different emotional facilities. On the identical time, exercise within the prefrontal cortex ramps up.
In consequence, we really feel extra calm, cool, collected, and in management.
5. DO “Identify It to Tame It”
A easy option to cope with a unfavorable emotion or thought is to identify it to tame it. The approach was coined by Dan Siegel, a psychiatrist and professor who spent many years researching the consequences of aware practices on our brains and well-being. The approach includes noticing and labeling feelings as they’re taking place.
You may merely say to your self, “Oh, there’s anger effervescent up within me,” or “Oh, that is nervousness,” or “Hmm, I’m feeling a bit dissatisfied proper now.” You may also label your ideas and bodily sensations, “Oh, there’s stress right here,” or “I’m having the thought that I’m not adequate,” or “Oh, there are a number of ideas about my upcoming examination. Attention-grabbing.”
The act of labeling an intense emotion (“naming it”) has the impact of lowering its power and energy over us (“taming it”). Once we label an emotion, we create a pure distance to it. There’s the emotion and there’s us. There’s a wholesome separation between the 2. Labeling additionally helps us settle down and regain management over our expertise, moderately than get swept away by the sturdy emotion. We’re experiencing an emotion, however we aren’t caught up in it or managed by it.
Analysis means that the easy act of labeling decreases exercise within the mind’s emotional facilities, together with the amygdala. On the identical time, exercise within the prefrontal cortex ramps up. That’s the neurological rationalization for a way labeling helps us transfer from a state of scorching impulsivity to a extra calm, cool, and picked up state.
6. DO Reframe
Reframing, or cognitive reappraisal, may be outlined as “altering the best way one thinks a few scenario with a view to change its emotional impression.” It includes reframing the which means of a scenario, emotion, feeling, or sensation. It’s about viewing issues in a extra optimistic gentle, about discovering a extra optimistic interpretation of no matter is disturbing us.
Thomas Edison gives a superb instance. When his analysis lab was burning down and many years of labor had been being destroyed, he supposedly advised his son, “Go get your mom and all her pals, they’ll by no means see a fireplace like this once more.” “Don’t fear,” Edison calmed his son. “It’s all proper. We’ve simply removed a number of garbage.”
Edison’s interpretation was optimistic and thus his emotional expertise was additionally optimistic. If his interpretation had been that this was the worst factor that ever occurred to anybody, that he was so unfortunate, that his profession was over, and that the world was conspiring towards him – he would have skilled nice emotional turmoil (anger, rage, self-pity, and so forth).
For many people, our preliminary interpretations aren’t as optimistic as Edison’s. If that’s the case, we are able to use reappraisal to vary how we view the scenario and thus change our emotional expertise.
We are able to obtain this in a number of alternative ways. For instance, we are able to take into account what sort of recommendation we’d give another person in the identical scenario. Or we are able to take into consideration the great issues we would study from this expertise. Despite the fact that a scenario could also be painful within the second, it may make our lives higher in the long term.
We are able to additionally remind ourselves of the perhaps story. Or we are able to inform ourselves {that a} unhealthy day for the ego is an efficient day for the soul. We are able to remind ourselves that dealing with problem will make us stronger within the long-run, and extra empathetic, understanding, and compassionate.
Analysis means that reappraisal is among the simplest methods to control our feelings. As a 2019 research places it, “Reappraisal has been proven to scale back unfavorable emotional reactivity, scale back autonomic hyperactivity, modulate emotion regulatory mind networks, and improve bodily and psychological well-being.”
Very like acceptance, reappraisal has been discovered to scale back the power of unfavorable feelings, decelerate our respiration, deactivate the emotional facilities of the mind, and convey on-line the prefrontal cortex.
Within the long-run, individuals who habitually use reappraisal to cope with their feelings are inclined to do loads higher than individuals who don’t use the technique as steadily. One research confirmed that “reappraisers each expertise and categorical behaviorally extra optimistic emotion and fewer unfavorable emotion than those that reappraise much less steadily. Socially, reappraisers usually tend to share their feelings, each optimistic and unfavorable, with others, they usually have nearer relationships with pals; certainly, their pals like them greater than they like those that don’t use reappraisal steadily. By way of well-being, reappraisers have fewer depressive signs, and higher vanity, life satisfaction, and each different sort of well-being we measured.”
7. DO Deal with Your self With Compassion
Self-compassion is about being by yourself facet and treating your self the identical approach you’ll deal with a superb good friend, partner, or a child. It’s a wholesome approach of regarding your self that includes three core dimensions:
- Self-kindness – treating your self with kindness versus harsh self-criticism or judgment
- Widespread humanity – acknowledging that struggling is a typical human expertise versus isolation and disconnection
- Mindfulness – accepting struggling whereas holding it in balanced consciousness versus over-identification with struggling
With self-compassion, we forgive ourselves and deal with ourselves with understanding, heat, and kindness. We perceive that we’re solely human and that others wrestle with the exact same points. We settle for that life may be tough at instances. We inform ourselves, “It’s okay. It is a tough expertise. It occurs to all of us every now and then.”
This calms us down and brings in positivity and heat to counteract the tough feelings.
8. DO Use R.A.I.N.
Generally it helps to have a selected software that we are able to bear in mind to make use of within the warmth of the second. RAIN is one such software that comes with lots of the tips for coping with unfavorable feelings. It’s a mindfulness-based software invented by meditation trainer Tara Brach.
She explains: “The acronym RAIN – Acknowledge, Enable, Examine, Nurture – guides us in bringing mindfulness and compassion to tough feelings. With apply, we are able to discover our approach residence to open-hearted presence within the midst of no matter arises.”
The apply has 4 steps:
R—Acknowledge What’s Going On
Recognizing means consciously acknowledging, in any given second, the ideas, emotions, and behaviors which are affecting you. This could be a finished with a easy psychological whisper, noting what you might be most conscious of.
A—Enable the Expertise to be There, Simply as It Is
Permitting means letting the ideas, feelings, emotions, or sensations you may have acknowledged merely be there, with out making an attempt to repair or keep away from something.
You may acknowledge worry, and permit by mentally whispering “it’s okay” or “this belongs” or “sure.”
Permitting creates a pause that makes it potential to deepen consideration.
I—Examine with Curiosity and Care
To research, name in your pure curiosity—the will to know fact—and direct a extra targeted consideration to your current expertise.
You may ask your self: What most needs consideration? How am I experiencing this in my physique? What am I believing? What does this weak place need from me? What does it most want?
Regardless of the inquiry, your investigation will likely be most transformational in case you step away from conceptualizing and convey your major consideration to the felt-sense within the physique.
N—Nurture with Self-Compassion
Self-compassion begins to naturally come up within the moments that you simply acknowledge you might be struggling. It comes into fullness as you deliberately nurture your internal life with self-care.
To do that, attempt to sense what the wounded, frightened or hurting place inside you most wants, after which supply some gesture of lively care which may handle this want. Does it want a message of reassurance? Of forgiveness? Of companionship? Of affection?
Experiment and see which intentional gesture of kindness most helps to consolation, soften or open your coronary heart. It is perhaps the psychological whisper, I’m right here with you. I’m sorry, and I like you. I like you, and I’m listening. It’s not your fault. Belief in your goodness.
Along with a whispered message of care, many individuals discover therapeutic by gently inserting a hand on the center or cheek; or by envisioning being bathed in or embraced by heat, radiant gentle. If it feels tough to supply your self love, recall to mind a loving being—religious determine, member of the family, good friend or pet—and picture that being’s love and knowledge flowing into you.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the easiest way to cope with unfavorable feelings is to welcome them, settle for them, give them area, and allow them to be there. To simply observe them with out judging them, with out labeling them as unhealthy, and with out making an attempt to manage or change them. To observe them moderately than determine with them.
We are able to label what we’re experiencing with a view to activate the extra rational and goal elements of our brains and with a view to create a wholesome distance between us (the observer) and our feelings.
We are able to additionally search for a more healthy and extra helpful interpretation of the scenario. We are able to ask ourselves how we’d view the identical scenario if it had been taking place to another person.
Throughout this course of, we wish to deal with ourselves with heat, understanding, compassion, and kindness. It’s okay that we expertise problem; it’s a part of being human.
Russ Harris sums it up effectively in his ebook The Confidence Hole – From Worry to Freedom: “…moderately than making an attempt to eliminate disagreeable emotions, we open up and accommodate them. We make room for them and permit them to come back and go in their very own good time. It doesn’t imply we like them, need them or approve of them; we simply cease investing our effort and time in combating them. And the extra space we can provide these tough emotions, the smaller their impression and affect on our lives.”
On Emotion Regulation and Procrastination…
As I’ve defined in quite a few articles (e.g., right here and right here), procrastination is generally an emotion regulation subject. Particularly, procrastination has to do with the mismanagement of unfavorable feelings, corresponding to nervousness, guilt, disgrace, boredom, or frustration.
The actions we delay are people who induce unfavorable feelings in us. We delay duties which are aversive – that make us really feel anxious, nervous, bored, and many others..
For instance, we might delay making a dentist appointment as a result of we now have worry of ache, injections, needles, drills, and many others., or as a result of we really feel helpless within the dental chair, or as a result of we don’t just like the unintended effects of anesthesia, or as a result of we are inclined to really feel self-conscious or embarrassed about our tooth. As a result of desirous about making an appointment brings up all of those unfavorable feelings, we keep away from making an appointment by placing it off.
Or we might delay engaged on an essential venture due to worry of failure, which induces nervousness each time we even take into consideration the venture. As a way to alleviate the nervousness, we keep away from the venture.
Our approach of coping with unfavorable feelings is thru avoidance. And whereas this works to alleviate the unfavorable feelings within the short-term, it makes issues a lot worse within the long-term.
As one group of researchers places it: “…procrastination may be understood as a self-regulatory failure that arises because of previous aversive feelings, corresponding to frustration, boredom, unfavorable have an effect on, nervousness, and fear ensuing from the publicity to disagreeable and aversively perceived duties. Thus, by procrastinating, the engagement within the voluntarily delay of disagreeable however necessary duties, people handle to keep away from the expertise of the aversive feelings in short-term, albeit fail to realize their long-term targets.”
If we perceive procrastination as an emotion regulation subject, it follows logically that studying to higher cope with tough feelings will end in much less procrastination.
This assumption was examined in a research revealed in March of 2022. The researchers break up college college students into two teams: an intervention group that obtained on-line emotion regulation coaching over a interval of 9 weeks, and a wait-list management group that obtained no such coaching. On the finish of the 9 weeks, the intervention group reported higher emotion regulation capacities and considerably much less procrastination.
Within the phrases of the researchers: “The outcomes confirmed that the enhancement of basic emotion regulation expertise considerably decreased subsequent procrastination habits…”
This was the primary research to point out that bettering basic emotion regulation expertise straight interprets into much less procrastination. Which means that utilizing the Do’s and Don’ts we mentioned on this article will allow you to overcome procrastination.
(For extra recommendations on regulating feelings in terms of procrastination, take a look at Module 7 in our premium course Procrastinator to Producer. You possibly can study extra about it right here.)
