Holding Back Your Emotions Is Not Helpful — Let Them Out.
Another day, another funeral. Yesterday I lost somebody close to me and had to say goodbye.
I was determined to get through it without any tears to show my family that I could be strong. It almost worked — until it didn’t. I made it to the end of the service and then it was time to carry the coffin to the hearse.
As soon as I took the handles of that coffin in front of the audience, tears came pouring out. My plan to hold back my emotions was down the toilet.
Everybody saw me cry even though I tried not to.
There are times in our lives where sad things happen and we are forced to deal with them.
The answer is not to hold back emotion.
Crying at a funeral is how you grieve and pretending to be strong when you’re sad is never the answer.
Emotions exist to propel us forward and help us take actions.
The family member I buried never got married until very late in life. She never had any kids and regretted that a lot. Through feeling the emotion of those regrets and mourning her loss, it helped me to make some decisions that would lead me to take action. Emotions are such good motivation.
Holding your emotions back prevents you from making those life-changing decisions that end up shaping your life.
We need emotion. Emotions are like oxygen and we have to acknowledge them.
Holding back emotions leads to abuse.
Many of the emotions I never dealt with as a young twenty-year-old were suppressed by temptations like alcohol.
Holding back your emotions is hard. It takes real work to stop yourself from feeling negative emotions in particular. That’s why we abuse alcohol, overeat and spend money on things we don’t need.
Holding back emotions is doing more damage than you think.
Letting some tears out yesterday was exactly what I needed. I’m going to miss this family member an awful lot. Life without them already feels empty, but there’s nothing I can do to change that. My family member would want me to carry on with life and feel the emotion of every high and every low. They wouldn’t want me drowning in regrets and numbing my emotions.
In the emotion, is the answer.
We all reach times in our life where we don’t know what the next action is that we should take. Do we get married? Do we start a business? Do we change career?
Many of the answers we seek are found in between the emotions we have to feel in order to take action.
Embrace the sadness.
Let some tears out.
Feel the joy of achieving a goal.
Let the regret of not doing something set in for a bit.
Your emotions are a good guide of what you need to do next. Based on how you feel, you can get good at fine-tuning your body to use your emotions a bit like a compass. They don’t give you the exact coordinates, but they’ll at least point you in the right direction.
I recently left finance after seven years because I refused to hold back my emotions. I knew I needed a change and wasn’t inspiring enough people, and so I went on an emotional nine-month journey to find something else.
I did the same the year before when I went on fifty plus dates to find the woman of my dreams. I stopped holding back my emotions and started getting real with myself about how lonely I was feeling at the time.
In both of these situations, not holding back my emotions led to me finding the answers for myself. I used both the positive and negative emotions to give me the motivation I needed on days when it all seemed too hard.
Men struggle with this the most.
By nature, many men fall for the lie that they always have to show strength thus never letting their emotions (like tears) out.
Men need to hear this message (and so do women).
It’s okay to cry.
It’s okay to not always be up.
It’s okay to have a bad day.
Strength is actually found in letting your emotions out. People that express their emotions do what many are not prepared to do and that’s the real sign of strength.
If all our problems are the same (which I believe they are) then letting out emotions is natural for all of us to do. You can’t fool us with Instagram selfies anymore.
You have rough days.
I have rough days.
It’s okay to let your emotions out.
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