Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 87
Quite often when I'm talking to people about feeling their emotions, I have conversations with people that are along the lines of, "Oh, I don't need to feel any more of my emotions. I've got quite enough of those already, thank you. I'm very good at feeling all of the emotions and they suck" is basically what I hear from quite a lot of people. And because I'm contrary and quite often offer a different view from some of the things that we might initially hear, one of the things that I wanted to just open up a little question mark in your mind, possibly today, is that maybe you don't have too many feelings. Maybe what you actually have is too much resistance.
When we feel something that we don't enjoy quite often, what we're prone to doing is to try and get the hell away from it as soon as possible. And we all have various varieties of favourite go-tos as to how we try and escape things that are feeling a bit rubbish. Some of the most frequent ones I hear are doom-scrolling on Instagram or finding yourself at the bottom of a bag of crisps or bottle of wine and not really remembering how you got there or watching some trashy TV or not even watching trashy tv, but like flicking through lots of things, trying to decide what to watch and then just deciding that you can't be bothered to do anything. Or quite another one, which I find incredibly amusing because those who relate will very much relate, is that if you're feeling a little bit rubbish, you're going to make sure that some of your cupboards are very, very clean. You get into fastidious tidying mode. And quite a lot of people, I hear, actually try and distract themselves with work away from feeling rubbish.
And all of these things, quite often, we can do to try and get the hell away from the thing that is not feeling very nice for us. That doesn't necessarily mean that that is us feeling the feeling. Quite often it's actually us trying to escape feeling that feeling.
So if, for example, I felt a little bit disappointed about something, I don't really enjoy sitting around in the feeling of disappointment. So I might try and escape from that feeling. And that might lead me to let's go with the Instagram example, so I find myself scrolling through social media, wasting a couple of hours looking at other people's lives with some level of judgment and mostly judgment towards myself and comparison. And then suddenly, I find myself at the end of that going, "Oh my God, I just wasted 2 hours of my life". Suddenly I'm slapping on a whole load of judgment for that. And then there's a whole load of guilt for the fact that I shouldn't be speaking to myself like this and I probably shouldn't be judging other people. And why didn't I go and get those things that I said I was going to do done when actually I clearly do have time because I've just wasted it all scrolling through a little electrical box in my hand. And so I'm slapping on shame on top of that.
And then I start to get a little bit resentful that I had all of this stuff to do and now I don't have enough time. So now there's this frantic energy coming into all of it and I'm chastising myself for not having met my own commitments or kept my own deadlines. And it's just layering and layering and layering all of these terrible feelings on top of an action which was taken to escape one initial rubbish feeling.
And so when I think of what disappointment feels like, what I actually think about is the shame and the guilt and the resentment and the comparison that comes from what I did to try and escape the feeling, not the feeling itself. (Doing quite a lot of big hand gestures over here. I hope you can hear them). We end up linking the initial emotion with all of these rotten things that we're feeling when we try and escape that thing.
So my invitation to you, if you want to try and strip back some of that other unpleasantness and the bitter taste that some of these emotions leave around, is to just try and pause when you're having an emotion that you are not enjoying very much and just spend a moment trying to describe it. And when I say describe it, I mean, like, describe it to an alien who's never felt emotions before or someone who doesn't understand what the concept of disappointment is and describe it in terms of physical sensations in your body that let you know that you feel disappointed.
So, for example, when I feel disappointed, I feel a sort of. It's almost like a nervousness. It's a sort of quick energy tightening in my belly. I feel the urge to run a little bit, actually. I feel, like, quite agitated. It's like I need to be hyper-vigilant. I need to watch all the things around me. My heart rate increases, my throat gets a bit tighter, my voice raises a tiny bit in pitch. And when you scan through and try and think about what that feeling of disappointment feels like, for you or whatever emotion it is that you're looking at, just going through and trying to process, describing what that is, brings a different part of your brain back online that has been shut down by the fear. That fear of, "oh, my goodness, I feel this thing. It's really bad. I am wrong for feeling this thing, and therefore, we're in danger". When you take a side step from that and go describe it, there's a whole load of the rest of your brain that's like, "oh, right, okay, yeah, now, we can do this. We can use words. We can check in with our body back in the room". And just spending a moment with that, you'll be really surprised at how much the intensity of an emotion decreases just by sitting with it for a moment and trying to explain it to yourself or locate it in your body. Find out where it is. Find out, is it in a particular limb or cell? Or can you pinpoint it just sitting with it for a particular moment?
Sideline distraction. But if, as someone who has quite a lot of pain and quite a lot of physical ailments, this is actually also a little trick that I use quite a lot for my body. When I'm struggling quite a lot with receiving a lot of pain my body gives me of just sitting there and just really trying to identify where it is. Can I nail it down to a particular vein or cell? Going into sitting with that pain and seeing if I can find out where it is can create a weird sense of ease with it, rather than the tense resistance of trying to brace against something, because all that does is exacerbate the pain.
And in a way, that's a really great analogy for how we work with our emotions. When we try and resist them, we get knocked over and bowled over by them, and then we fall into a whole load of other things that we give ourselves a really hard time about.
So just trying to describe these physical sensations can sometimes allow you a little bit of a release of the grip that those emotions can hold us in. It's a really interesting experiment. I've always found it to be really, really useful, but I'd love to know your experience with it, too. So please do drop me a line and let me know how it works out for you. And I look forward to speaking to you next week.
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