Can I Feel Better without Changing My Thoughts?
6 Steps to Immediate Relief from Difficult Emotions
This is the second of three articles on emotions. The first, “How Do Thoughts Create Feelings?” addressed the nuts and bolts of where emotions come from. In this article, I present a method of reducing uncomfortable feelings when they are at their height. The next article will answer the question: Can we be liberated from all negative emotion and be happy forever?
CHANGING OUR THOUGHTS IS NOT ALWAYS AVAILABLE TO US
If we’re experiencing unpleasant emotion, and we know that thoughts create feelings, why not change our thinking? Can’t we just think positive things and produce enjoyable emotions instead? If we repeat positive affirmations, will that solve our problems? Forcing a change in our thinking might bring some relief, but most of us know from experience that the results are not long-lasting. It is extremely challenging to change our beliefs by willpower alone, especially when we’re having intense emotions.
Let’s say you have a group of entrepreneur friends who meet together to support and encourage each other. In a meeting with them your brain starts to offer these ideas: They’re further ahead than me. They are successful and I’m a failure. They know what they’re doing and I’m a fake. As the conversation continues, your body begins to tingle a little bit, your stomach is nauseated, you feel slightly light-headed, and you sense a sob rising in your chest. Your thoughts become intrusive, flying by so fast and furious that you can hardly concentrate on the conversation.
You could try to stop those ideas through willpower, forcing yourself to consciously think positively, but once your mind constructs a story, it wants to hold onto it. If you try to force yourself to think I’m as good as them; I know what I’m doing; I’m going to be wildly successful, your brain will reject those ideas and present a string of scenarios and past evidence to convince you its first description (I’m a failure) was the real truth.
The moment of crisis is not the time to address your thoughts! Yes, we will learn mind management skills to gently dislodge the problematic ideas and replace them with ones that bring motivation and peace, but sometimes, we have to let our emotions reign. Once feelings are generated by our thinking, they exist and can’t be ignored. This is not the time to journal or run a Model. This is the time to simply feel bad, to permit the negative emotion to run its course through our body. Later, when the feelings aren’t as strong, we can take a look at the beliefs.
THE SIX-STEP METHOD
In the crisis, when your feelings are at their peak and you don’t have emotional energy to work on your thoughts, get immediate relief by processing your feelings with these six steps.
1. Name the emotion with a single word. “I feel like he should talk to me more” is not a feeling, it’s a thought. Identify what particular emotion is most painful in the current moment. Frustrated? Despondent? Melancholy, unmotivated, restless, rage? To find an accurate term, it might help to search a list of emotions.
2. Locate the feeling within your body. Explore head to toe and find where the feeling resides. Do you feel it in your stomach? Your throat? Behind your eyes? Discover all the sensations.
3. Relax into it. Take a deep breath and on the exhale, relax your body. Remind yourself, This is just frustration (or whatever feeling you identified). It’s okay, I can handle frustration today. The chemicals in my body are creating frustration; this is how it is to be human. Focus on relaxing the muscles in your body and imagine the hormones being dispersed and broken down.
4. Describe it. Keeping your attention in your body, observe again where the emotion exists. How would you describe it? Is it heavy or light? What color is it? Is it a vise grip or an amorphous cloud? Picture it–is it sparkles, a dead weight, butterflies, chest pressure, cold fingers, flushed cheeks? Be as specific as possible in your description. If an alien came to earth and asked you what frustration feels like? How would you describe it to him?
5. Sentences in your brain–that’s the cause of this physical experience. You don’t have to know what the sentences are or work to displace them, simply remind yourself that these bodily sensations that we collectively call feelings are caused by sentences in your mind.
6. Allow it. Relax again and imagine the emotion sweeping through your body and away from you. Take more deep breaths and tell yourself that negative feelings are unpleasant but not dangerous. If your distressing emotion is sadness, repeat in your mind something like this: I can feel sadness for a bit. I can do discomfort for a while. Life isn’t always easy or comfortable. I can sit with it and allow it for the time being. I’m just a girl, feeling sad; nothing has gone wrong.
NLRDSA–it’s not a catchy acronym but memorize it anyway. Going through these steps will alleviate much of the discomfort of a painful emotion. You will feel better right away. But if your brain continues to mull over the problematic beliefs, the feelings will resurface. In that case, simply go through the steps another time. Do them as many times as necessary.
It’s nice to be seated in a quiet room while processing emotion but not necessary. You can go through these steps while driving or making dinner. Feel the emotion, find it in your body, picture it and describe it, relax into it. If your mind wants to get involved by offering thoughts, gently tell it to quiet down, we’re focusing on the body right now.
AN EXAMPLE
When I first found this work, this concept helped me immensely. It was something to implement right away and begin to feel better. I remember a specific time shortly after I had joined Jody’s program where I used these tools. I had been scrolling through Instagram and saw photos of friends I had moved away from. I missed these friends and felt sad that we couldn’t hang out anymore.
One of my painful stories at the time was that I don’t have enough friends or social relationships. Because I told my brain this was the truth, it zoned in on anything that provided evidence for this narrative. The pictures prompted me to contemplate my lost friendships and how I’ll probably never have close friends such as these again.
Next up on my Instagram feed were pictures of a group of women in my new neighborhood whom I hoped to be friends with eventually. They had gone on a weekend away and the pictures showed that they had the best of times, laughing and talking and bonding. Great. I would never make up that time or be as close to them as they are to each other. More evidence that things weren’t going the right way in my life.
I felt horrible and started to cry. I bemoaned the struggles of moving and making new friends. I reviewed my past moves and how long it took to get comfortable socially. My brain spiraled out on all the bad parts of my life, catastrophizing them and making me feel worse and worse.
In the midst of this acute pain, I remembered the six-step method of processing emotions. Part of me didn’t want to try it (the part that wanted to stay miserable), but most of me was tired of feeling bad. I sat on a chair in the alcove of my bedroom. I took a few deep breaths and closed my eyes. Tears were still falling, but I tried to steady my breathing.
First, name the emotion. The effort to find the correct term already distracted me from the emotional pain. Of all the feelings swirling about — jealousy, frustration, disappointment, fear — I chose jealousy. I turned my attention down into my body and tried to locate the feeling. It was definitely in my chest, a hot core of pressure.
I also felt it in my throat and a little bit down my arms. I took another deep breath and tried to relax into the feeling. This is jealousy, I said to myself, I can handle jealousy. I imagined the chemicals coursing through my veins and then dispersing into my body parts until they were disassembled. I consciously relaxed each region of my body.
Next, I pictured the emotion. It was in my chest, and it was heavy and hot, red and glowing. It felt like a burning rock inside my ribcage. As I visualized it, its intensity decreased. But I could still feel the pressure, and my throat felt constricted. I imagined the feeling looked like a vise grip around my throat. I also felt little sparks going from my shoulders down my arms.
I sat with those images for a while, trying to get a very specific description. Then I said to myself, These sensations are caused by sentences in my brain. Isn’t that crazy?! The sentences passing through my mind stimulate the release of certain chemicals, and those chemicals cause changes in my body that end up as physical vibrations. This is what jealousy feels like.
I spent another minute or two allowing the emotion, experiencing it and not wishing it away. It is quite relieving to simply feel the emotion, to inspect it like an objective examiner. The whole process took about 3–5 minutes. That’s it. It might seem like a lot to remember and go through at first, but you’ll soon see it is a simple and efficient method.
It is quite relieving to simply feel the emotion, to inspect it like an objective examiner.
Afterward, I felt relaxed and calm. I could remember why I felt jealous and still had little inklings of the emotion, but the pain had definitely subsided. I had a resolute acceptance of the feelings now.
I’ve used this process countless times since then and been grateful for it every time. Difficult emotions can be overwhelming and quite distressing. Mine often come when I’m in public, and then I cry and feel embarrassed about crying and therefore create more unpleasant feelings. Even a temporary reprieve from that cycle was comforting.
THE WORST THING THAT CAN HAPPEN IS A NEGATIVE EMOTION
Having a method of dealing with upsetting emotions makes us less fearful of what might happen. Learning to process our feelings means we can face the world with more confidence and be successful in any endeavor! We can handle anxiety, rejection, embarrassment, or anger. These feelings will still be unpleasant, but we will have more power and control over them. They will not be so overwhelming.
It is shocking to realize that of everything we fear in life, the worst thing that can happen is a negative feeling. You may have some resistance to that idea at first. But think of something you don’t want to happen and ask yourself why? For example, I don’t want my kid to fail his class. Why? Because he won’t get into college. Why do I want him to get into college? So that he can get a good job.
You can keep asking and answering these questions until you recognize that it all comes down to I Don’t Want To Feel Bad. If I believe that my child’s life is not going as it is supposed to, I will feel negative emotion. This is true for whatever we worry might happen — it’s really about the feeling we will have when it happens. We just want to feel good.
When we know that the worst thing that can happen is experiencing challenging emotions, and we know how to process those emotions, there is nothing to be afraid of. We often go to great lengths to avoid unpleasant feelings. What would change if we weren’t afraid to feel bad? If we accepted that feeling bad is part of the deal and we don’t need to, in fact we can’t ever, avoid it?
We often go to great lengths to avoid unpleasant feelings. What would change if we weren’t afraid to feel bad?
People warn, “Don’t get your hopes up” because they are afraid of the disappointment that will come if they don’t get the thing they wanted. What if instead we allowed ourselves to dream big, knowing that if we fail, we can process the disappointment? It won’t be as bad as our brain tells us it will be.
Some people worry that if they allow their feelings, they will get out of control. But that unmanageable feeling comes from thoughts spinning out in our heads. The point of processing emotions is to get into our body. Don’t try to change your thinking, and don’t resist the feeling. Allow it and examine it. Using these six steps is not about convincing ourselves to calm down. When we get into our body, notice where the emotion resides, and relax into it, we naturally get calmer; we gain some control over our feelings.
Learning how to process my emotions was part of my journey to accepting that all feelings are okay. I had such resistance to painful emotions because I believed they were an indication that something was wrong with me or my life. I presumed that if I could do the right things, find the right formula, I would feel good all the time. One of the best gifts from Jody’s program has been the knowledge that challenging emotions are part of being human. The more we resist and dislike them, the more painful they are. Allowing them feels scary at first, but when we do, it’s a flood of relief. I’m okay. My life is okay. Everything is going to be okay.
Stay tuned for the next article in this three-part series on feelings that explains why we can’t (and wouldn’t want to) be free of all negative emotion.
Try this on: “This is just jealousy; I can handle jealousy.”
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“Disappointment comes in the gap between expectation and reality.”
