How to Upgrade Your Emotional Well-Being for the New Year
Have you ever wondered if you are living with unnecessary emotional suffering? For a lot of us, the day-to-day is full of unavoidable “stressors,” and our energy stores are being depleted faster than we can replenish them. But what if there was a way to reduce the struggle right now, and redirect your precious energy elsewhere, to the things that actually fill you with joy and ignite your passion?
I’m here to tell you, lightening your emotional load is possible. But wait! I have even better news. Finding more emotional ease today, doesn't require any external resources. All that is needed is an open heart, and a longing to breathe a little easier again. How does that sound? Good, right?! Are you ready? Okay, let’s dig in together.
In my experience, the conversation around addressing the stress in life, typically goes one of two ways. You’re counseled to either direct your energy towards what’s missing, but need, if you’re going to start feeling better- i.e. clean up your diet, try a new supplement, start working out regularly, join a mom’s group, get a massage etc.- or, change how you feel about what’s happening, to make for an easier time dealing with it. The thought is, if you can reframe how you see a situation, the emotional discomfort will lessen. Unfortunately though, both of these approaches only perpetuate mental agitation.
When you engage with difficult feelings, as you would a fork in the road, where there are only two routes to take, and one is “right,” and the other, “wrong,” you’re settling for self-abandonment. Rejecting how you really feel, in the effort to make your feelings “fit” within the spectrum of acceptable emotional responses, for “such and such,” a situation, reinforces emotional rigidity, and harms the activation of the “resiliency potential” of your suffering, Or put another way, makes your suffering less useful! I don’t know about you, but I’ve yet to meet someone who wants wasted suffering.
If we’re going to make use of our emotional suffering, we must embrace a new way of viewing the pain within. To start, let me offer a liberating idea:
There isn’t a “wrong” and a “right” way to feel about anything.
There is ONLY how you DO feel. This is all that exists. And to be present, is to work with what is, not what you hoped would be, or hope will be.
As Susan David Ph. D., and best selling author of the book, Emotional Agility, wisely puts it, “...You don’t have to always get it right or be a perfect person. You DO have to be willing to show up to your difficult emotion and say, ‘You’re here. I’m here. Let’s talk.’”
One of the first steps to emotional maturity, is to face the emotion that is. For example, if what you have is a sense of devastation, that’s okay. Work with that! Your feelings are like a friend, offering you the opportunity to travel to a place of more clarity. Don’t worry about if you’re feeling the “right” emotion, but rather consider it neutral. It IS what you’re experiencing. Therefore, engage with it, learn from it, and get curious about where it might be trying to carry you.
In a world where we long to feel more “in control” and are endlessly seeking greater “visibility,” amongst life’s chaos, it’s ironic that we often reject one of the most profound mechanisms for illumination and agency: our difficult emotions.
When the fire of life heats up, causing difficult emotions to surface, and they aren’t the feelings you expected, or those that are openly accepted by others, before discarding them, stuffing them, or immediately self-abandoning, pause to ask these simply questions:
If I gave up the idea that there are “right” and “wrong” emotions, what emotion would I be free to feel, right now?
If ALL emotions are simply modes of transportation, carrying me to a place of greater emotional resilience, where might this one be trying to take me?
What is one thing I could do today, to integrate this, previously dismissed, emotion into my life, that would honor both myself, and the relationships I value?
Nothing can heal, that isn’t faced. And challenging emotions won’t dissolve from our neglect of them.
There are many wars you won’t be able to win in your lifetime, but one you can stop fighting today, and I hope you will, is the war against your own emotions. This is unnecessary suffering. And, Friend, I don’t want you to spend another minute suffering needlessly.
The full spectrum of emotions that arise throughout your life, are intended to upgrade your resilience.
Gaining greater emotional agility, by way of ending the war against your feelings, is one of the simplest ways you can elevate your psychological well being, in the new year. I don’t know about you, but I need the most advanced version of resilience available, for 2021!
Be well.
Erika
