difficult emotions and 5 mindful ways to deal with them

“Emotions are telephone calls bringing us information […] Do not refuse to answer the phone […] Do not run away from the phone. […] Answer the phone! Stop reacting to the phone’s ringing!”

Denis Jun Po Kelly www.mondozen.org

Overloaded circuits

If there is one thing that we all know, it’s that our difficult emotions are, well, difficult. Just when we might believe we have our emotions under some kind of calm or control, or we feel generally at ease or balanced a seemingly random event-a piece of bad news, getting cut off in traffic or rudeness in the supermarket might trigger us and tip us over.

Our emotional overload often finds its “home” now at work. Work related stress and its impact on us emotionally has climbed to its highest rate in 16 years, according the latest set of statistics published by the Health and Safety Executive. This data, released on 1^st  November 2017, comes from the annual Labour Force Survey, produced by the Office of National Statistics. In addition, there has been an 108.5% increase on the 31million antidepressants which pharmacies dispensed in 2006 to 2016. What’s causing this? Clearly, something is going profoundly askew in our society.

Our society (that’s you and me) now faces low but chronic episodes of stress related, almost threat saturated events that occur relentlessly, day by day. And it’s wearing us out.

Our society is not geared up to reduce stress, but to increase, layer upon layer, the stress, pressure and anxiety we experience: modern urban living is turning us into emotional pressure cookers and we need to find the valve(s) that stops us running headlong into burnout.

Professor Marie Asborg, of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm calls this The Exhaustion Funnel, where we keep on running, dropping bit by bit the activities and resources we need to keep us resilient and healthy. Before too long we’re worn out and stressed to bits, drained of buoyancy and plunged into low mood, our emotional regulation system becoming radically dysregulated.

How does this happen? (part 1)

In 2004 Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University published his ground-breaking book Why Zebra’s Don’t Get Ulcers. He draws us a picture of the grasslands where zebras are peacefully eating. Suddenly a tiger bursts out from the bush and the zebras’ fight or flight response is activated. They run for their lives; some succeed, others, not. Sapolsky asks us to notice what the surviving zebras do next: they shake.

They literally shake off their stress.

What do we do when the paper tigers of target performance, journeys to work, and pressures from our children and society impact upon us?

We shake it in.

This is crucial to our understanding of stress, worry and anxiety, pressures that often we believe are in our heads, but when we take a closer look are felt as a tightening of the chest, sickness of the stomach, tension in our shoulders, issues around our immune system, rashes, headaches, anger and irritable bowel syndrome. In short, our emotional regulation system is not just in our heads but experienced through our body.

How does this happen? (part 2)

We often cause ourselves extra, unnecessary emotional difficulty by reacting and fusing to our stressful experience with heighted and catastrophic thoughts, feelings and judgements that in actuality add gasoline onto the emotional fire-we shake it all in. It’s as if we’re at the mercy of this reactivity.

For example, let’s say you are under pressure to complete a task by a certain time. You might have such thoughts as “I need to finish”, or “why did I agree to do this?”, followed by difficult feelings of anxiety, inadequacy, resentment, anger and judgements such as “This is a stupid job” or self-criticism such as “I’m useless at this”. This is putting out the fire with gasoline.

The fire, we can call our primary pain of suffering and all the reactions to that, our secondary pain of suffering or pain and suffering for short. Secondary suffering is pretty much our whole defence system: it protects us but fuses into character armour and projection, existing long after the stressful event has passed and keeping the difficult emotions going. Getting to the primary pain behind the armour is crucial, for this is the actual territory, not the mapped-out reactivity.

We can’t really do anything about our primary pain-we all feel pain-but the suffering-the swirl of difficult emotions that arrive almost immediately afterwards and create fusion or a story of suffering, we can do something about: we are more than our reactions.

Doughnut emotions

The doughnut emotions model illustrates what happens to us when we let our difficult experiences turn into difficult emotions then run out of control: we spend our time in the red zone or circle of suffering.

How to get out? How to shake it off?

Practitioners in bodywork such as Reginald Ray (The Awakening Body) and Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps The Score) tell us that our somatic sense of self has much to offer us that our cognitive or intellectual self misses. Mindfulness recognises that moving from pain to suffering is a turning away from our actual stressful or difficult, yet embodied and primary experience into what is often an elaborate intellectual story of suffering. Realising this we can meet the experience differently.

Here are 5 steps to help deal with difficult emotions:

1. Turn towards the difficulty: the key here is not to run away from or suppress the difficult emotion, but let it slowly register with awareness on your body, get a felt sense of the messages that are being relayed. Try not to stay with the emotion as “thoughts and feelings in the head” as this causes a downward spiral of constant rumination: this is putting out the fire with gasoline
2. Name it: it could be sadness, anger, resentment; give the difficult emotion a name, allowing it to be present; this will also help you defuse from it. You could, for example say “this is worry, worry is here” or “I am felling angry” or “this is anger”
3. Accept the emotion: don’t get caught up in trying to suppress or deny the emotion, allow it to further come without judgement. Let it come bit by bit. Be aware of feeling “flooded” or overwhelmed by the force of the emotion if it is strong. If it feels too strong, distract yourself and then return to stage 1. Then bring a sense of kindness to the emotional state, simply by saying “may I be kind to myself at this time of difficult emotions” or “everybody has difficult times”
4. Follow the feeling: follow the feeling in the body (not the mind, this is more gasoline on the fire) and trace the felt sense of it working its way through the body, as it then leaves the body, which it will. Exhale into the places in and on the body where the feelings travel and leave. Notice what changes occur in your emotional state. It’s as if you have been holding on to this emotion with a clenched fist for years; now you are unclenching, opening up your hands and letting go.
5. Inquire within: as you sit, more and more unclenched, ask what kind of message or wisdom this difficult emotion is bringing to you (because it is). What’s underneath (e.g.) the anger? Grief? Shame? Care? Love? Don’t expect an answer right away, or for the answer to come packaged the way you want it to be. Let it gently arrive with kindly awareness at your door.

Mindfulness teaches us that our emotions are impermanent. They arise and make a display within us for a time, then disappear. This disappearing is called “self-liberation” but as they display we often cling or fuse onto them, adding to them, awfulising or catastrophising them, throwing the gasoline of thinking attention and story onto them. Regulating your emotions by taking your attention to the felt sense of emotions in the body-getting out of the red zone-takes time, practice and patience-it’s a life practice, but will pay off.

And, after all, haven’t you suffered enough?