From Avoidance to Acceptance: How to Turn Negative Feelings Into Positive Outcomes

Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 148

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The thing about negative emotions is that they suck. They feel awful. No wonder so many of us try and rush through them and do everything within our power to try and avoid them. But this week's podcast is here to try and show you how you can move through them a little bit more quickly and try and make some use out of them, rather than just being something really awful that we have to have to endure as humans. This podcast is about how to turn negative emotions into positive outcomes.

I think that most of us want to escape our bad feelings because they're very uncomfortable for us to deal with. And because they're really uncomfortable to deal with, we have strategised lots of incredible ways to get rid of those feelings as quickly as possible. With everything from scrolling endlessly on our phones through to sugar, through to Netflix, and everything in between, we have an awful lot of very, very clever ways to stop ourselves feeling any of the ick of life.

And that means that we don't have any practice at it. We're not very well-versed at it. And as soon as something that feels even slightly uncomfortable comes up, we immediately can fall into old habits of escapism if we're not careful and if we're not paying attention.

What I have found through doing a lot of this work is that by defaulting into these avoidance tactics, we often miss the lesson that is hiding there. And even if you're like, "I don't care about the lessons, I just want to stop feeling like everything sucks". What we actually do is we prolong the experience of feeling really dreadful.

When we're trying to escape our bad feelings, we often escape the lesson. And you might not want any kind of life lessons, but I'd be guessing that you probably don't want to have to keep running up against the same things until you get the lesson. And so actually, sometimes it is worth investing in those moments of going, "I'm willing to feel this bit of discomfort, so that I don't have to keep going through the same old stories over and over again, just with different characters and different scenery".

And one of the ways that I have found really useful in breaking this idea of negative emotions being a bad thing and feeling like my body needs to escape them at all costs, is to acknowledge that emotions aren't moral, they're just information. Something feeling bad doesn't mean that it is bad. Something feeling like shame or guilt or anger or discomfort doesn't always mean that something's gone wrong. Sometimes it is a really good arrow as to where I've not been listening to myself, where I have gone against the grain of what I knew was right, where I have prioritised something that perhaps I shouldn't have, against my own best interests.

If I'm trying to just escape from those feelings as quickly as possible, I'm not able to gather that information. And the chances are that I'll probably make the same mistake again.

Being able to sit with our emotions is a skill that is one of the least pleasant I've ever had to learn and so, so worth it. I cannot explain how valuable a lesson it is. And many studies have been done. I have none of them to hand, but you can go and look them up yourself, about how quickly an emotion passes when you're willing to sit with it. And that is so much further than what we think sitting with an emotion is. Quite often, we think that sitting with an emotion or just being with an emotion means that we have to feel dreadful forever, and that it will never go away.

And actually, I have come to understand that sitting with an emotion, being with emotion rather than trying to escape it, actually leads to it dispersing really quickly. I'm going to pull it off the top of my head, You're welcome to correct me, send me an email. But it is the studies that have been done is that if you actually are willing to sit and process an emotion in your body, it stays with you for about 10 to 15 seconds.

And I have emotions in my life like shame, guilt, anger that I can spend, oh, I don't know, six months to six years trying to avoid that 10 to 15 second processing of what that's like in my body, which is such a wild notion.

I think this is not a new idea to probably most of you, but most of you probably haven't had it broken down of what actually sitting with an emotion is. And for me it is quite simply just staying with myself in the present moment and acknowledging that that's what's going on.

I remember going through really tough heartbreak once and sitting there one night and spending the whole night just, just repeating to myself, "this is what heartbreak feels like". "This is what heartbreak feels like". Rather than trying to find my way to the bottom of a bag of crisps or watch some nonsense on YouTube or try to self-help my way out of those feelings, I just sat there going like, yeah, this is what it feels like right now. This is heartbreak feel very, very, very. In the heartbreak, it is, arguably, you never feel more alive than when you have a smashed heart. I just sat there going, "This is what heartbreak feels like". And I knew in that moment that if I was willing to sit with it at that point, I just would not have to process it again. I wouldn't have to spend all of my time trying to be afraid of being heartbroken because I could sit there and go, this is what. This is what it is. It feels like this in my toes, it feels like this in my belly. Where is it in my heart, in my chest, in my head? Where feels tense, where feels light? Where does it feel like it wants to wriggle away? Where feels like it wants to sink to the floor? Where is this feeling for me in my body? How do I want to move with it? How do I want to feel my way into it? And it would be so amazing at how quickly it dissipates.

What we generally think of as all of these terrible emotions and the things that we'd love to avoid is actually the resistance of these feelings. So it's trying to avoid feeling shame, it's trying to avoid feeling anger, it's trying to avoid feeling discomfort. All of that resisting and working against what are very natural responses are absolutely exhausting. It feels so brutal because we're working against very natural responses.

The difference between being able to sit with our feelings and reacting to them as if they're the enemy is the difference between you being able to feel more like you are one whole united being that's able to handle your life or someone who has bits of themselves that they need to annihilate to be accepted.

It's by treating these uncomfortable feelings with the power of curiosity that will allow you to transform them from feeling stuck, stuck or feeling bad, or feeling like you are the wrong person, or getting life wrong somehow, into just this normal, fallible human being just like the rest of us.

So I'll leave you this week with a question for you to ponder: if you were willing to feel your feelings now, what lesson might be available for you? What might you be willing to hear that you had not been available to if you were just trying to brush this stuff away? And if you were willing to feel your feelings, what might you avoid having to repeat next time?

If you'd like any support with this, you know where I am: www.SelfcareSchool.co.uk has many courses on how to deal with emotions. There is some free resources in the show notes here. I've got an emotional resilience workbook that might be really useful to look at some of this stuff and you can always hop on a free 15 minute coaching call with me. There's a link in the show notes if you would like to book that in or just drop me an email hello@heardinlondon.com and I look forward to speaking to you next week.

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