Do you wish that you knew a secret to getting rid of uncomfortable, painful or negative emotions?
Click Here: Grab the Free Attention Solution Worksheet and Get Results
Does any of this sound familiar to you?…
“How can I make myself stop feeling this way?”
“How can I make myself feel better?”
“Sometimes I wish I just felt nothing.”
We all experience a wide range of emotions. Some emotions are less comfortable than others. When we experience an uncomfortable or negative emotion, often our tendency is to either dwell on it or avoid it. Another common response is to inflate or overemphasize a negative emotion. Overthinking and dwelling, denying and avoiding or panicking and inflating or are all common ways of trying to manage emotions.
You may be aware that some of your familiar reactions are not entirely healthy, and can cause more stress over time when facing situations or feelings that are potentially difficult to manage.
There are downsides to these responses, and there are alternatives options that are not only healthier for you but make your day to day life much easier on you.
First, let’s debunk these tempting yet terrible responses to negative emotions.
The Danger of Dwelling
Wallowing in or brooding over an emotional response to a situation can cause you to be overcome by it. This may happen in the form of fears and worries piling on, imagining all of the “what-if”s in a situation, or reliving an experience over and over in your mind – and probably criticizing yourself.
Staying wrapped up in an uncomfortable emotion clouds your mind with negative thoughts until they become your reality. It becomes harder and harder to break into a positive state of mind.
The Trouble with Avoiding
To avoid having to fully feel an emotion, you might do anything to distract yourself, whether it is browse on the internet, pull away from people you care about, turn to medication or drugs, or blame others to deflect the emotion that you’re experiencing internally.
At certain times, distracting yourself from an uncomfortable or negative emotion can provide a temporary relief that can leave you time to gain some perspective on the situation. However, even in it’s more harmless forms, distracting yourself must only serve as a temporary relief.
The Risk of Inflating
Amplifying, heightening or escalating to panic as a response to a negative emotion can be terrifying, but it’s also a powerful habit. You might find yourself looking for many reasons to justify the feeling that you feel, or find yourself responding with extreme anger or panic to situations that might seem small or easily manageable.
To say that you inflate your emotions isn’t to say that your distress is fabricated! Ironically, grasping for shows just how important your feeling is and how much it needs acknowledgement, but makes difficult for both yourself and for others to address your true needs or concerns.
The above options don’t work in the long term (or even, at times, in the short term) because in every case the emotion is controlling your actions outside of your control or awareness.
Which of these common reactions resonates with you? What is your knee-jerk response to a painful or uncomfortable emotion?
The good news is that practicing paying attention to both your initial response and to the emotion itself can help you learn to guide yourself toward healthier, smarter and even much simpler ways of addressing negative emotions.
Click Here: Grab the Free Attention Solution Worksheet and Get Results
The Attention Solution (10-minute Emotion Management Tool)
It takes bravery and vulnerability to admit to an emotional response (even to yourself). To truly manage uncomfortable or negative emotions, practice this attention solution and discover how to make it work for you. Let’s learn by doing it now.
First, acknowledge what you are thinking, feeling and/or experiencing (whatever you can quickly identify). Consciously tolerate it for a matter of moments. Rather than adding negative judgments on top of an uncomfortable emotion, take a moment to appreciate yourself for noticing it.
Acknowledge the thought, emotion and fear or concern that you’re faced with (whichever comes naturally first will help you find the others). A form of acceptance is necessary in order to change something.
Any emotion will instantly have less power over you and your actions if you allow yourself to pause, breathe, and feel it. It may feel uncomfortable (and counterintuitive) at first, but your power resides in your ability to take a pause.
Your power is in your ability to take a pause. #attentionsolution Click To TweetAt this point, you may be surprised to see that the discomfort surrounding the negative emotion will naturally dissipate. In many cases, after a moment an uncomfortable feeling will decrease enough for you to address the situation at hand in a productive way. The can be true for sadness, fear, anger, and more.
Don’t stop there, however. Once you give yourself the gift of attention, notice the way you think you want to react. Overthink? Avoid? Inflate? Now consciously select a new response. Guide yourself toward a chosen response by separating thoughts from facts, what you can control from what you can’t, and what you believe from what fear is telling you.
Finally, take action. You may decide to share your feeling with someone else, remove yourself from a negative situation or to write out your concerns about something that you fear. Perhaps you might allow yourself to make a decision based upon what feels best for you rather than what someone else thinks. Whatever the action is, select one – small or large.
If you’re not sure what to give attention to (or how to take action once you give a negative emotion attention), I have a free guide for you to help you go through this process in your own way.
This downloadable .pdf is a step-by-step guide of this method to help you manage negative emotions with the attention solution in your own way.
Click Here: Grab the Free Attention Solution Worksheet and Get Results
This solution can be practiced in the face of an unexpected negative emotion. It is also perhaps even more useful to practice the attention solution by taking a planned pause to do so when you are going through the motions of your day.
With consistent practice of the attention solution, you can respond to a negative emotion and allow it to dissipate, while also being in full in control of your own actions.