What do you do when you feel a difficult emotion? Take a moment to reflect on this.
- Do you stick with it, explore it, investigate what is driving it?
- Or, do you avoid, turn away from it, suppress it and numb it out in the hope it will disappear?
When difficult emotions arise, the habitual tendency is to try and avoid these. After all, they feel uncomfortable and you may not feel you can function as you want when they are around. However, repeatedly avoiding difficult emotions over time leads to a lower tolerance to them, meaning you never have a sense of control of them. And you miss an opportunity to begin understanding your sense of Self.
By turning towards emotions, you not only increase your tolerance to being with them, but you can start to unravel why they arise for you in certain situations. You learn what triggers the emotion for you, you understand more about what is important for you, you comprehend why you behave in certain ways. Understanding that the emotion comes from within can illuminate certain aspects of your Self that you may not have been consciously aware of.
Shifting perspectives to emotions (external and internal)
To begin this emotion exploration may require a shift of perspective. Consider these situations:
- You are asked to present to a large audience of important people, you feel anxious. You believe the event has made you feel anxious.
- Someone says something you don’t agree with and you feel angry. You think that the person has made you have the anger.
There is a common perception that emotions are inflicted upon us by circumstances or people. But if you feed the perception that external things resulted in the emotion, you remain a victim to circumstances and people. With that belief, in order for your emotions to change, you need the circumstances or the people to change. And that could take a long time!
This external perspective puts your emotions outside your locus of control. It means that you never have choice, you are victim, and that you have an excuse to do nothing. And holding onto this perspective means that you remain a victim to your emotions. And you never truly understand what the emotions are trying to get you to do.
In contrast, a perception where you view emotions as manifesting from within you, that they are not something that outside forces create, offers you choice, and over time, control. The anxiety about doing a presentation, is maybe because you have high-value to being seen as successful. The anger from someone saying something contrary to your beliefs is perhaps because you have strong values related to that aspect.
This may seem contrary to your opinion right now, but this seemingly simple shift in perspective can be very powerful in offering you the ability to manage emotions.
Improving tolerance to difficult emotions
The problem with the external perception of emotions is that it doesn’t motivate you to explore the emotion. After all, it is only there because of the external factor. If that goes away, the emotion goes away. Instead, this external perception motivates you to avoid difficult emotions. Paradoxically, avoidance means this difficult emotion gets triggered more easily, because your tolerance to this emotion gets lower and lower through avoiding it. Additionally, with this perception you never learn what it is that triggers the emotion for you, why it even surfaced in the first place.
Conversely, the perspective of emotions being created by us provides this opportunity for exploration. But here’s the sting. It’s tough. Difficult emotions feel unpleasant. Everything in your mind and body are screaming out for you to anything other than turn towards this unpleasantness. Yet, if you have the compassionate courage to be with that emotion, it offers you increased tolerance to it.
Building your capacity for difficult emotions – rather than them not being there
In my work with people operating in high performance environments, difficult emotions are commonplace. And when I begin guiding people to manage emotions, I often hear that they want to be free of those difficult emotions and not have them around. At the outset, I do my best to burst that bubble of misconception. Managing emotions is not about them not being around. Rather, it is about building your capacity to be with them that allows you to continue functioning at your best.
This can be tough to get your head around. After all, who wants to have difficult emotions around? But here’s the thing. In high performance environments, stress, pressure, difficulties and demands are inevitable. Therefore, difficult emotions are inevitable.
In a metaphoric sense, if your capacity for difficult emotions at present is the size of a thimble, then it is going to spill over easily and it may feel overwhelming. However, what if your capacity slowly grew, to a coffee cup size, and then a pint glass, to a bucket, and then a large container, your tolerance to the emotion has grown. The difficult emotion has not grown in size, but your capacity to deal with it has. Your perception of control around functioning with that difficult emotion has increased. The difficult emotion is still there, but you can tolerate it. You have increased your self-resilience to difficult emotions.
How to increase your self-resilience to difficult emotions
When I begin guiding people to being with difficult emotions, I invite them to start with the small annoyances or the minor grievances rather than jumping headfirst into overwhelming emotions. In your day there will be many opportunities where a difficult emotion will arise. You drop something, you forget your keys, someone says something offends you, you are asked to do something when you want to do something else. These all have the potential to spark a difficult emotion.
And when the difficult emotion arises, it is helpful to understand the elements that drive an emotion. And by exploring these individual elements, you are stripping away the power of the emotion.
So, to increase self-resilience to difficult emotions:
- Bring awareness to the fact that the emotion is around
- Be curious to what this emotion is making you think – what images are around?
- Try to pick up how this emotion makes you feel – it will have some visceral sense in the body
- What sensations in the body come with the emotion?
- What does this emotion make you want to do – what urges or impulses exist?
In the moment, this can feel quite unpleasant. Yet, what you are doing is investing in yourself. Investing in building your capacity to deal with the emotion, to manage it, and build your resilience to it. But it offers you something else that my research with people in high performance environments is discovering – you begin to understand your Self.
Understanding your Self
When you turn towards an emotion, it can be enlightening. My research has shown that when people approach emotions, they begin discovering why that emotion has been triggered. The participants in my study have shared finding out their core values and being able to notice when they are not living in alignment with these and when others challenge a value. It has highlighted areas where they felt the need to have control and why. They have been able to detect long-standing beliefs that are now out-dated and inaccurate, but were driving emotional reactions in them. This has led to profound change, and from this understanding, an increased resilience and ability to manage their emotions.
Of course, don’t stick to difficult emotions. Explore them all. What is it that makes you happy, content, joyous? Turning towards emotions offers this opportunity to learn more about your Self. And from this understanding, a sense of control and freedom.
Stuart Munro is a performance psychologist with the Canadian Paralympic Alpine Ski Team and corporate clients. Stuart is available for speaking events and has a wide array of entertaining and informative presentations that offer you some take-away mental skills.