Who are you rooting for? 🙊 🏆
'' Feelings are like waves. You cannot stop them from coming but you can decide which ones to surf. ''
Have you ever been caught up in a state of mind during which you felt like your emotions and feelings dominated yourself?
Have you ever asked yourself if the opposite was possible, that is, if your emotions could serve you rather than overwhelm and dominate you?
Behaving contrary to how we feel will ultimately change our emotions.
One example I have in mind has to do with motivation.
Most of us wait for motivation to come our way before we engage ourselves to do a specific thing (whether it’s physical activity, a big task, etc.)
However, you probably noticed that sometimes, it takes a while for it to come, and in specific cases, motivation just never ends up showing up.
Instead of waiting for it to knock at our door, we should do just the opposite:
Engage in the task now.
The more we do that, the more the cycle of motivation will change its habitual route.
And with time, the effect of repeating the action over and over again will create motivation as part of the cycle.
We then won’t have to wait for it to come, as doing the action times and times again will make it appear.
I believe that the same concept can be applied to someone who struggles with depression.
As it has been part of my life for long enough, with the years, I came to see specific patterns that made me more prone to fall back into it.
It is like a loop which contains: your thoughts that create specific emotions, which trigger sensations you feel within your body, and which then make you adopt certain behaviors.
We know that the more we practice something, the more it starts to become automatic.
For someone with depression, an example could be that the more we think negative thoughts about ourselves or a specific situation, the more we feel sad, and the more we feel sad, the less energy we have to get out of bed in the morning, which result in us crawling in bed and staying in the same state of being.
And so for instance, to change our conditioned habitual reaction, we’d first have to be aware of it, but secondly, we’d have to notice the space between the stimulus (which creates our thoughts and then make us feel a certain way) and the response (which is the way we choose to react).
Being conscious and self-aware of our own unconscious thinking and behavioral habits can truly help us to not let them take over when we want a different result.
In order to have a different outcome and change something in our lives or in ourselves, we need to respond differently.
When an unpleasant emotion comes into our minds, instead of trying to suppress it, we should try to talk to it.
''Hello Anxiety, how can I help you today? ''
Taking some distance from what we feel is an excellent technique to minimize the power of the emotion or the feeling that is present.
Feelings and emotions are temporary experiences.
And especially for the unpleasant ones, they can be disturbing.
Why should we create secondary pain, when we could simply let them be, and engage with them?
What if we could picture ourselves putting all of our feelings in giant balloons, and letting them go into the sky?
Maybe we don’t like that these emotions come up to the surface because they remind us of a past experience that has hurt us a lot.
An extremely good exercise to implement in our routine can be to write down where the way we feel comes from.
We can then visually see when was the last time we felt that way.
We can also ask ourselves if the way we feel has affected our relationship with others, and if so, in what way? And how can we change it?
Doing these simple exercices can help us develop more self-awareness and self-insight and therefore make us choose different behaviors, healthier ones, to engage with.
We can then find tools that can serve as anchors when we find ourselves stuck in a state of mind that is painful.
In the end, I believe it is the behavior that needs to be changed, and not the emotion.
That’s also an exercise we can practice with our own thoughts.
When a particular thought we dislike comes to our mind, we can talk to it and say:
''Oh, here’s my fear of abandonment coming to town! ''
''Oh there is the thought that I am not good enough. ''
So then, we can slowly start to differentiate our own inner voice versus the voice in the noise of our mind.