All of us struggle from time to time with difficult emotions like anger, sadness, embarrassment or shame. Sometimes they can feel overwhelming. Mindful acceptance can teach us to be more powerful in how we respond to difficult emotions. We can learn to tolerate and experience them without feeling like we have to run away from them.
Emotions are biochemical messengers that evolved to help us to respond to what our brains think is happening in the world. Emotions come and go on their own, whether we like them or not.
On it’s own, an emotion will last on the average for 7 minutes. Emotions consist of four components: thoughts, feelings, sensations and urges. Thoughts are the content of what you are thinking, like “What’s wrong with me?” or “I want to get out of here!” Thoughts may also come in the form of images. Feelings are the label or name we give to the emotion like sadness, anger, or joy. Sensations are what we feel in our bodies, like tension, heat, tightness, looseness or ease. Urges are the action impulse to do or not do something, like flee or fight.
Why Avoidance Doesn’t Work
It can feel natural or normal to relate to internal distressing or unwanted experiences the same way you would respond to something distressing or unwanted in the outside world. If there is something you don’t like in the outside world, it is natural and normal to respond to it by trying to change it or get away from it. For example, if I don’t like the color of the room you’re in you can go out and buy some paint. If there’s a scary person on the sidewalk, I can cross over to the other side of the street.
But when we apply these same techniques to internal experiences we create problems for ourselves. Private internal experiences just don’t respond in the same way. We can’t paint them over or run away from them.
While trying to avoid or not feel what we’re feeling can temporarily suppress difficult emotions, it offers only a temporary and superficial solution. The distressing emotions are pretty much guaranteed to bounce back. Avoidance reinforces the idea that there are “bad” emotions that we need to get away from. It takes a lot of energy. It pulls us out of the present moment. It limits our ability to respond flexibly to what is going on. And avoidance will only lead to more suffering, in the form of addictions, hopelessness, and loss life opportunities.
Three Ways to Make Negative Emotions Worse
Efforts to escape or avoid our emotions can bounce back on us, becoming another cue to our brains that something is wrong. It can make negative emotions stronger and can make them stick around longer. With private internal experiences like emotions, “the more you don’t want it the more you’ve got it.”
(1) Ruminating is getting stuck in our thoughts by compulsively focusing attention on the possible causes and consequences of our distress in an effort to solve the problem. This can mean worrying about the past and future or trying to figure out “what is wrong with me.”
(2) Suppressing is trying to not feel what we’re feeling.
(3) Acting out is doing what the emotion is telling us to do, like verbally attacking someone if we’re angry or withdrawing and hiding if we’re depressed.