What is your immediate mindset to these emotions?
- Anxious
- Jealous
- Inadequate
- Angry
- Depressed
- Rejected
- Embarrassed
- Shamed
I’m guessing that your mind most likely reacted in a way where you would not want these emotions around. And that’s not your fault. Firstly, these emotions don’t feel good so you’re not motivated to have them around. And secondly, you’ve been fed a rhetoric that these are bad, or negative. So, naturally, your response will be to demonize these distressing emotions.
The wellness industry, which is a vast market ($5.6 trillion in the US alone – 2022), has much that offers people beneficial elements to their lives. However, it may also paradoxically be playing a part in compounding peoples’ misery. This is due to some parts of the wellness industry’s insistence, or miscommunication, that you can reach some stage of emotional zen. Where there is a continued life state of bliss, happiness, calmness, and peace if you do all of the things that they are saying. But the upshot of this is that it can serve to make you think that when you experience distress, and the associated emotions, you are doing something wrong. If you are not feeling good all of the time, then you are failing at life.
Normalising distress
Think of a life, as best you can, without distress. Initially, you may think that would be nice.
Now think of some of the experience in your life that have offered you the greatest sense of life satisfaction, achievement, success.
With a deeper dive into these experiences, you may recall that behind them was hard work, effort, sacrifice, adversity. That there were probably many moments of distress along the way. But it was worth it.
Think how excruciatingly anxious it was before getting your first kiss. How you felt rejected when a friend didn’t call or ask you to an event. How you got embarrassed when you did your first ever presentation at work. That you felt angry at the injustice of being overlooked for a promotion. How there was a time when you felt really low and depressed because life was just hard.
These are normal experiences and normal emotions. Of course, you don’t want them around all of the time. But they are absolutely essential parts of human experience. Distress and distressing emotions help you to learn from experience. You grow and build confidence. Experiencing them allows you to build tolerance to them, and over time, greater resilience to distress.
Changing your mindset to distress
The thing that the wellness industry sometimes doesn’t factor in is that distress in life is inevitable. Especially to those in the realms of high performance. When you test your personal resources and skills at the highest levels, distress and distressing emotions are unavoidable.
Being sad when you lose, angry when you make a mistake, anxious before a performance, feeling low when you are going through a period of intense work or training. These are all perfectly normal human responses. In fact, you would expect that these would be part of the rich, experiential tapestry of high performance.
Shifting your mindset to the notion that life, and high performance especially, will have some expected levels of distress, means that when they arrive you are already more equipped to deal with them.
Managing levels of distress
With the understanding that distress, and distressing emotions, are going to be part of your experience, it sets you up to better manage the levels of distress.
Avoidance may feel like the best strategy, however, there is much research showing that will lead to lower tolerance to distress, and activates threat responses in the brain, which heightens stress responses. Supressing emotions may seem like it will help, however, you can’t suppress a singular emotion. Over time, supressing distressing emotions means that you extinguish joy, happiness, and love.
These steps may help to manage distress:
- Bring awareness to distress. Managing distress begins with acknowledging that you are having an experience of distress. Normalise it. ‘It is natural for me in this moment to be having this emotion – it is not a mistake.’
- Allow the emotion to be there. Sounds debatable, but trying to get rid of it puts more attention to the things (e.g. doubting thoughts) that evoked the emotion and distress.
- Bring your personal resources, skills abilities and strengths to mind. Everything in your mind, when you are experiencing distress will want to show the potential horror stories. That is where the distress emerges from. So, to trump those horror stories, begin playing out your own stories of experiences where you’ve overcome difficulty, where you’ve been able to achieve a and have success.
- Create moments of reflection. Reflect on how you’ve learned from the experience. Because distress and distressing emotions don’t feel good, your brain will remember the experience with the difficult emotions. However, even an experience that didn’t go well can have many things that you can learn from. What this does is update the brain for any similar situations in the future. It changes the associated emotions attached to the experience.
Changing your mindset to distress, where it is a normal part of human experience, may help you to experience more manageable levels of distress. The mindset that distress is to be avoided at all costs is more likely to heighten any perceived levels of distress and that will influence your sense of wellbeing and impact performance. It’s not easy, especially as many parts of the wellness evangelism will tell you that you can get rid of distress. Anyone purporting to be able to remove distress from your life will most likely have a poor knowledge of evidence-based psychological science. However, managing distress is a more realistic and sound scientific approach that can be applied to improve your sense of wellbeing and performance.