The Importance of Processing Sadness
Life will always have its ups and downs and just as sadness is an emotion that will pass, so will happiness. I’m not sure any of us can reach a state of continuous happiness in this lifetime and I’m not sure we’d want it — even if we could.
The phrase, “it’s okay to not be okay” is a reminder of the fact. We don’t always feel happy, and an expectation that we always will is only a precursor for frustration and disappointment. What matters is how we conduct ourselves considering our sadness.
I wanted to speak of the importance of leaning into our sadness when we’re feeling low to inevitably move through it. Society may have taught us that avoiding our problems is the answer, but as many of you reading can vouch — distraction doesn’t solve problems, it causes them to linger.
Feeling Into Our Emotions
A few years ago, I began developing a habit of “noting”. A practice I first learn meditation through the Headspace app where you mentally divert your attention from your thoughts to not engage with distressing ones. I used to be an avid ruminator and suffered from OCD, so it was a good practice that allowed me to stay grounded despite sometimes uncomfortable intrusive thoughts.
I still use it today.
The downside of such a practice, however, is that you can become pretty good at not paying attention to your emotions. Even the ones that need attention. If I felt discomfort, I could quickly turn my mind’s eye away.
And whilst it’s a practice I would recommend to anyone who suffers from distressing thoughts, it’s also important not to underestimate the importance of processing our emotions. I’ve found as of late my ability to distract myself was both a good and bad thing. Good in that I could place distance between myself and my thoughts but bad because those thoughts were indicators of my emotions.
In choosing to not pay attention to my thoughts I was stopping myself from feeling my emotions. I then wondered why I felt increasingly low.
The Balance Between Emotional Awareness and Distraction
Not all distractions are bad. Personal development will tell you that your phone, Netflix, and just about anything that gives you a dopamine rush is the enemy — and in some cases, they can be.
But what personal growth doesn’t tell you is how distractions give us breaks from the mental noise that could otherwise drag us down. As this Psychology Today article goes on to say, “The wandering mind is an unhappy mind”. We’re evolutionarily primed to have negative biases and habits of rumination/overthinking can leave us in positions where we don’t process negative emotions but help cultivate them.
Distractions remove the magnifying glass away from our thoughts to decrease the emotional charge. Noting was vital in my OCD recovery because being able to return to the present stopped me from ruminating over irrational worries.
But there must be a balance and whilst we don’t want to fuel the fire of our emotions through ruminations, it is important to recognize them and even feel into them from time to time. Otherwise, our efforts to distract ourselves as a means of self-soothing will only cause us more problems down the line — when emotions are left unfelt and show up in unwanted ways.
How To Feel into Your Emotions
It’s not uncommon to not know how to feel your emotions. After all, we were never taught. Algebra was more important, I presume.
Feeling emotions is the process of applying active awareness to what is going on within us. An interesting Psychology Today article notes that emotions aren’t so much there to be “felt” but to be “reacted to”. Our emotions are reactions to our environment — evolved to either motivate us into doing something or into avoidance.
But our emotions aren’t as reliable as we often assume. Their manifestation occurs considering a relation between our subconscious minds, filled with conditioned, misguided, and reinforced beliefs, and our external world. For example, you feel insecure when your partner is going out with friends. She hasn’t been an untrustworthy person but it’s your pre-conditioned beliefs, based on experience, that see the potential for danger — creating a reaction within you that aims for you to confront the problem and solve it. Feeling our emotions not only allows us to recognize what we’re feeling but also rewrite past stories that may no longer be serving us. This can only be done when we actively choose to sit with them. When we distract ourselves, we rob ourselves of this opportunity. On the flip side, when we act immediately on them, we risk reinforcing and validating limiting beliefs.
Michael J McCluskey 