This is a follow-up to my previous article, Why Feelings are Not Facts, where I talked about the concept that emotions are merely our reactions to a perceived situation. While emotions are reactions, they still are strong. Often times we feel like we’re weak against our emotions, and I want to talk about healthy ways to address emotions without letting them completely overtake us.
When we get down to it, we’re scared of our emotions. We are! There’s this crazy concept in our society today that any emotion other than happiness is a threat, and that happiness is the absence of negative emotions. But honestly, that’s so impossible to achieve. So while I’d love to get into tips and tricks for maneuvering emotions, I first want to get more into the mindset of how we should look at emotions.
So, here’s the first tip: It’s okay to feel negative emotions because they aren’t real.
And I know I know, you’re sitting there being like hey Ari, I have an essay due tomorrow and I’m in a fight with my friends and I have x, y, and z going on and maybe I don’t have the time to just sit in my sadness. But just buy into this for one second, okay?
What would it look like to actually accept our emotions? I’m no Dr. Phil, and I go through my own battle with my emotions, but to get meta for a moment, this is why I’m writing this article: sometimes I feel really sad and I’m scared to talk about it. There’s this stigma that sad people aren’t fun, that if you are upset for some reason you don’t want to tell people because then you will be sad.
What happens if you just embrace the emotion not as a negative but as a simple change in weather? The weather was sunny and now it’s raining, and the rain isn’t a bad thing. Sure it’s inconvenient–you may have to dress differently, cancel or at least redirect plans, and it may seem like a bit of a downer to you and the people around you. But is the world ending? Eventually the rain stops, your clothes will dry, and you can reorganize the plans that you wanted to have.
So here’s the second tip: Negative emotions have a purpose.
Why does it rain? I mean obviously I’m not a scientist, but there are benefits to rain. It provides fresh water, it makes the grass greener, kids can jump in the puddles, etc. Can it be a burden and cause traffic, wet hair, and inconvenience? Yes, and that is how we should examine feelings. There are benefits and inconveniences to feelings, and you get to choose how they make you feel.
When you embrace your feelings, you allow yourself to look critically at a situation and examine what’s going on. By critically examining your feelings, you can get a better sense of who you are and what you need. You are not weak for wondering why you feel a certain way; critically exploring your feelings is a sign of emotional maturity.
This doesn’t have to be a long, meditative, spiritual process of finding yourself. This is as simple as waking up and feeling gross, and acknowledging that sometime during the day, you’re going to dedicate an hour to honoring that feeling. Maybe that is dedicating an hour to going to the gym and running, or sitting in bed and manifesting, or what have you (I smell another article coming your way!), but the point is that you’re allotting time to acknowledging the feeling and allowing yourself to examine why you feel that way with instead of pushing the feeling away and dubbing it “unnecessary” or “time-consuming.”
The bottom line is that with this tip, you are acknowledging that you are worthy of your emotions, which is a tricky thing to do. But by first stating that you are sad, and then giving yourself the gift of wondering why you are sad, you’re increasing your emotional intelligence and thereby making yourself grow and be stronger.
Third tip: Let the drizzle be drizzle.
So I just said to embrace your emotions, and I stand by that. I also said it doesn’t have to be a long process, and I want to emphasize that it shouldn’t be a long process. The complaining about the drizzle will turn it into a flood, and no one wants a flood. Honor your feelings, accept them, look critically at them, and then keep going.
This is easier said than done, and I want to emphasize that none of this is easy. We live in a fast-paced society that really doesn’t encourage this kind of introspection. But the more that we have healthy conversations about our emotions, the more that we give ourselves the room to embrace our emotions and let them guide us rather than us trying to guide them, the healthier we can be.
So take the time to feel what you’re feeling, and then after that allotted time, you go on with your day. And maybe it’s still raining and you still feel gross, but the point is that you keep going. You do not let the rain get you stuck in traffic, and keep going throughout your day knowing that eventually the rain will stop. And if it doesn’t, you take the time to look at why.
Image Credit: Feature, 1, 2, 3