Learn to Manage Your Reaction to Your Emotions, and Not Your Emotions
We have been taught to categorize our emotions into good ones and bad ones, and so we have grown used to welcoming and embracing only a certain group of emotions. We all want to feel good, happy, fulfilled, joyful, at ease, connected, loving, and grateful—our bodies release all sorts of hormones that make us feel so nice inside and reinforce wanting to do things that bring only the good feelings.
And then we have the emotions that I will call the “demonized emotions”, the rejected and feared, those we don’t want to face, feel, or let live inside of us. There’s sadness, fear, disappointment, powerlessness, anger, envy, grief, frustration, and even boredom have become a new addition to that group, thanks to our addiction to busyness and being always on (watching social media, TV shows, or engaging in any sort of activity that gives us fast pleasure and strengthens our short attention spam).
When any of these emotions show up, suddenly all alarms go off, and we question why I’m feeling like this. And how can I change this emotion as soon as possible to something better? And we take steps to move as fast as possible to a new emotion, we engage in an activity to dissociate from what we may be feeling and put away the inconvenience that came up within.
The problem with this reaction is that we will then always need something to “deal” with the undesired emotion, and that takes a lot of effort, and with time it can become too tiring without us even knowing how much energy we are using daily to manage the emotions we don’t want to feel.
So I wonder what would be a different approach to that? What could be a different reaction to the arising emotions (any emotions)?
That’s where managing our reactions comes in, there can be a different way which is in each of us to find out what that new path is and start following an alternative response to our usual reaction. What would happen if instead of dedicating so much energy to avoiding, I could welcome and accept whatever comes up as natural responses in my mind-body?
The first step is to acknowledge that emotions are information, they are signaling something, teaching us something about ourselves, others, and the situation at hand. When an emotion comes up, it can mean that a boundary has been crossed, it can mean that we are not attending to our needs enough, it can mean that there is some grieving that needs to happen, it may mean that we need to pause more often, it may mean that there is a pattern repeating that is no longer serving us, or it may mean that we found something or someone that makes us feel deeply alive and connected.
The meaning behind the signals is for us to discover, but that can only happen when we shift our view of emotions as a nuisance and instead see them as an array of possibilities that our mind-body are equipped with so that we can fully live the human experience.
What would life look like if you're allowed all emotions, able to move between them without getting attached to stories, without needing to avoid them, without depleting your energy?
