Imagine this for a moment, I have you hooked up to monitors that measure your anxiety, they can tell
when your anxiety increases with perfect precision. You also happen to be strapped to a chair, sitting
on a trapdoor, over a shark tank, filled with very hungry sharks. You're perfectly safe in the moment,
but then I come in and I tell you look, you're safe right now, but if you get to a level six of
anxiety, I'm gonna have to drop you into the shark tank. So just don't get anxious and you'll be fine.
So you try your hardest to not get anxious and you try
to force yourself to not be anxious and I can constantly say "helpful" things like- 'Remember,
don't get anxious', the more internal and external pressure about your anxiety, the worse it gets
and as you see your anxiety creeping up the scale from a four to a five, pressure mounts
and you worry about what's gonna happen if you get there. Before you know it your anxiety is shooting
through the roof and click-drop-splash! Now folks I would not do this to you, this is just an
analogy, but many people do this to themselves. Many people with anxiety, chronic pain, panic disorders,
depression, tinnitus, vaginismus, muscle tension, and strong emotions in general often experience
something like this frequently. The harder you try not to feel anxious or the more you worry
about and pay attention to your chronic pain or your tinnitus or whatever the worse it gets.
When we fight and struggle against our thoughts and emotions we tend to make things worse in this
video, which is skill number five from my course How to Process Your Emotions, you're going to learn
how to tell if you're making your emotions or your sensations worse and in the next two videos right
here on my channel you're going to learn how to escape that cycle, how to get better at feeling
so that you can resolve really intense emotions, and feel more peace and happiness in your life.
This video is sponsored by Skill Share. Skill Share offers thousands of inspiring classes for curious
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and use that to work through your emotions. Okay, so just so you know I've been there in the past,
I've had a couple of anxiety attacks right, I know what it feels like to struggle with your emotions.
One of the times was when I lived in Argentina and I had been under a lot of stress overall, but
one day, you know, everything seemed just fine and I was just going about my day, when all of a sudden
I started feeling like really shaky and sick and then I started to worry you know what's the matter
with me and then I started to feel shakier and sicker and then I started to worry about how
this was going to mess up my day right we had a lot of important appointments, what if I wasn't
going to be able to get to them because of how I was feeling, and pretty soon I was just sucked into
these waves of anxiety and every one was worse than the last. Now I was trying my best to calm down
but you know everything I did was making it worse and eventually I had to call a friend over to help
me and when he came over we talked for a while and you know he was really gentle and comforting and
um you know I took a break, eventually I calmed down and when I did, all the nausea and the sick
feeling went away and turns out I wasn't sick, it was all stress and anxiety and fear
that was causing that physical sick feeling that whole time, but the harder I tried to make it go
away the worse it got and this is one of the real paradoxes of emotions. So there's a lot
we can do indirectly to change how we feel a lot you can do to get better at feeling in your life
and to get feeling better but if we try to stuff our emotions or we try to like you know force our
emotions to change in the moment we often make things worse in the long run and this can be hard
to see because for many people the only emotional skills they were taught were like- Get over it, look
on the bright side, relax, try not to think about it, right? So as children a lot of us were taught
you know it's not okay to cry or feel sad or be angry, and to be honest, putting an emotion to the
side for a while in order to complete a task is a really helpful skill in the in the short term.
So for example, think of a police officer who responds to help at a horrible car crash, now this
officer needs to be able to focus and perform their task in the moment and push their emotions
to the side for a moment and that's a really effective short-term strategy, but if that's their
only strategy, then over time those emotions are going to build and build. Many police officers are
really good at suppressing their emotions, but when they do this in the long run it can lead to higher
rates of alcoholism, divorce, and suicide. Emotional suppression isn't an effective long-term strategy
because emotions beg to be processed and resolved and they do this by popping up over and over again.
Most people have simply not been taught other ways to work through emotions. So for that officer he or
she would need to add the skill of processing through those emotions later so that those
suppressed feelings of stress and anxiety can get resolved, but the problem is that our instinct is
to avoid things that are uncomfortable. Avoidance of or struggle with our emotions is one of the
most common responses people have to them, it's like we just want them to go away so that we
can get on with our lives. Maybe we try to brush them aside as quickly as possible. In my therapy
practice I frequently see people trying all sorts of things to try and make their emotions go away.
So on a micro level it's just like little things like trying not to think about it or spending a
lot of time distracting yourself, but since those aren't sustainable practices, you know the emotions
keep getting louder and louder people end up needing to do more to suppress their emotions.
So then they end up doing things like drug and alcohol use, shopping addictions, overeating, using
sex to escape, so things like pornography addiction or having unhealthy relationships and you know it
just keeps going on and on, there's a lot of ways we try to suppress or escape our emotions right?
Gambling, media addictions, and just avoiding people or places that make us feel things like
anxiety right?, or another one that's a form of avoidance is procrastination right? Now
there's other less obvious forms of avoidance too, letting your dreams die, keeping your dreams small,
blaming other people, anger and defensiveness, or even just making decisions without really
taking the time to consider the options right, acting impulsively to make a problem go away.
Now what do you notice about all of these avoidance strategies? Do they make your life
better? All of these attempts to avoidance lead to more problems in the future, not less. They
lead to us feeling worse and needing to avoid more, so they perpetuate this cycle of feeling
crappy right? Take a minute right now and get into your workbook and take the survey about avoidance.
What are your avoidance tactics? What do you do when you're trying to avoid your feelings?
In the long run struggling with or avoiding emotions make them more intense and it usually
makes them worse, right? Okay, are you tired of metaphors yet? When the only skills you have are
things like resist, suppress, try not to feel that way, etc., it's like you're in a tug of war with a
monster, a struggle for your life and you're using all your strength to keep from getting pulled
into this great chasm between you and the monster. You're afraid that if you don't
fight with your depression or your anxiety, that it's going to pull you into a pit of despair.
But it's exhausting to be stuck fighting your feelings. In the next couple videos and
throughout the course I'm going to teach you some counter-intuitive skills that will help you drop
the rope, drop the struggle with your emotions. You can overcome depression and anxiety, but in this
episode we're just gonna focus on identifying ways that you might be making your anxiety or whatever
worse by struggling with it. Okay, so here's number one- You judge emotions as "good" and "bad", you tell
yourself that sadness and anxiety are bad emotions and that happiness is the only acceptable emotion.
You think that because an emotion is uncomfortable it's a negative thing that just needs to be
escaped or avoided, and sneak peek into the course sometimes painful emotions do need to be resolved,
but all primary emotions serve a function and when we judge our emotions we don't help ourselves
process through them so for example: healthy guilt helps us make repairs when we've messed up, healthy
fear can keep us from falling off of cliffs, and just because an emotion is uncomfortable doesn't
mean it's bad. Among mindfulness characteristics a judgmental attitude towards one's thoughts
and feelings is the strongest predictor of both depression and anxiety. Okay number two-
You're stuffing, you're clenching, you're trying not to cry, you're trying not to feel, you're
trying to numb yourself or zone out, or you do what you can to avoid an emotional situation or
to distract yourself or to white-knuckle your way through it while you wait for it to pass.
So these are perfectly fine reactions for the short term, but if you try to use them over
and over they don't work in the long run. So with muscle tension, anxiety, nausea, all these attempts
to stuff your feelings can actually make them worse. I worked with a client in the past who
every time he got sad or stressed in session he would clench his face like so hard and tight,
trying to not let the emotions get too strong, trying to force the tears to not come,
and this just triggered panic attacks over and over again he was triggered by having emotions,
his habitual reaction was to fight them, and this led to a cycle of panicking over and over and
the harder he fought this hopeless battle to not have feelings, the more depressed he felt.
When he started to learn to be gentle with himself and to be open to emotions the panic
attacks and the depression greatly decreased. Okay number three- You're negotiating right? When strong
emotions come up you plead with the universe- 'why?, why is this happening to me?, this is so unfair'.
maybe you get stuck worrying about the future right, you say like- 'What if this lasts forever? or
you say something like I can't handle feeling this way', Now there is a time and a place to explore
these questions there may be some underlying causes to what you're feeling, but if this is
something you do regularly you know that it almost always leads to despair instead of helpful action.
It's like you're trying to plead before the universe that it's not fair and then hoping that
the universe is gonna say- 'oh yeah you're right', and then it'll just magic your feelings away. Now, and
just a reminder, a mental health diagnosis like depression does not tell you the cause of
your depression, it doesn't tell you that it's permanent, it doesn't tell you anything other than
these are the symptoms that you're experiencing and they meet the criteria for depression.
It's more helpful to explore one skill you can learn, like letting go of this struggle, than it is
to spend a lot of time pleading with the universe to magic these feelings away. Okay, the fourth sign
that you might be making your anxiety or emotions worse- You shame yourself, you say 'I shouldn't' a lot.
I shouldn't feel this way, I should be happier, it's the feeling of trying to force it that often leads
to hopelessness. Shaming yourself is like banging your head against the wall and hoping it helps.
Saying- 'I shouldn't feel sad' often makes people feel sadder. Saying- 'I shouldn't feel anxious',
makes people feel hopeless or anxious this doesn't mean that you're gonna feel this way
forever, there's a whole lot you can do to get feeling better, it's just that shaming yourself
gets you stuck in the cycle of struggling against your emotions which makes things worse. Okay, number
five- you're catastrophizing, you're assuming that these symptoms mean something, so with
every little symptom you assume the worse. So if you feel a little pain you think- 'what if there's
something wrong with me? Does this mean I've got cancer?, or if you start to hear your tinnitus
you think- 'oh no, what if my tinnitus is really bad today?', or you start to feel a little anxiety and
you think- 'oh this is terrible I can't function at work with anxiety, what if it gets worse?'
Catastrophizing exaggerates every emotion you have. So in the next skill you're going to learn
all about Willingness, the skill of feeling what you're feeling without freaking out about it.
Okay, number six- you're checking, you're constantly checking your symptoms, like saying something
like 'oh how's my anxiety gonna be today?' Now you are the CEO of your brain, what you pay attention
to tells your brain what's most important to you and what you pay attention to is what you
get more of. When you hyper focus on the pain point or on uncomfortable emotions, when that's what you
think about or talk about or ruminate on, you tell your brain that sadness or tinnitus or anxiety
is the most important thing to you, so your brain complies by making more of it, by making it louder.
Joey Remenyi who helps people heal from tinnitus and vertigo says "I know that people have healed
when they stop describing their sensations as symptoms. When an uncomfortable sensation or
emotion pops up you notice it, you acknowledge it, you validate it, and then you gently redirect your
attention to what's most important to you in that moment." What you pay attention to you get more of.
The seventh sign that you're stuck in a struggle with your emotions is that you're distracting,
you're always keeping busy, you're never slowing down, you're spending too much time on your phone,
you're procrastinating important things, because you just don't want to face them. Now, there's a
quick test for this. If you stop moving, if you just sit still for a minute and that makes you feel
worse, then you're probably stuck in distraction. So this is like running away from an imaginary
monster, you think that you have to keep running so that it doesn't catch you,
but I promise if you sit and you let it catch you, you'll find that you can handle it, that
it's better than running all the time. Okay, so you're not bad, you just need some other tools.
There's a reason you're gripping right? The people I know with anxiety and depression they aren't
lazy, they're often desperately trying everything they know to keep from getting pulled off of that
cliff of their anxiety or their depression. The problem is not lack of effort. In the tug-of-war
you're afraid that if you stop struggling, you'll fall in. You're afraid that if you don't keep doing
it you'll fall into some deep despair, you'll fall apart you'll stop functioning, but the
struggle takes so much energy. I'm not saying quit trying, I'm saying drop the rope and try something
different. In the next video I'll teach you the practical skills to drop the rope. Practical
skills that will let you step away from the drama, the struggle, the fight with your feelings,
and move toward a life of peace and meaning and freaking joy right? There are at least two
antidotes to the struggle- Emotion processing, and Willingness, which is a key to emotion processing.
So in my emotion processing course you're going to learn dozens of skills
to manage intense emotions, work through them, and resolve them. So stay tuned let's do this.