The painful truth
When we unhook ourselves from troublesome thoughts, when we stop trying to think positively and stop distracting our busy minds in other ways, what do we find? What are we really avoiding and trying to get away from? What is all this busy rushing around in aid of? What is our purpose with it? When we take a look, by stepping out of our busy thinking mind, allowing it to slow naturally, to still or recede, then up pop the emotions.
Usually, when emotions sneak in, we tend to respond to them habitually and reactively, often in a way that is not too helpful for us. Through a practice of noticing our emotions, we can become more familiar with them and understand them better, which is the most important step to figuring out what to do with them when they show up. We will come on to that later but, first, let us jump straight in to a super quick mindfulness practice that you can use anywhere at any time.
Practice 7.1: Mindfulness right now!
What am I feeling?
- Notice and name how you are feeling emotionally right now (feelings tend to be described in one word, such as: happy, excited, bored, frustrated, angry, sad, anxious, stressed), e.g. ‘Here is a feeling of boredom.’ If you are not too sure what is there, perhaps noticing whether the feeling is pleasant, neutral or unpleasant.
- Acknowledge the fact that you are noticing your emotions.
- Notice how you know you are feeling this emotion. Where in your body does this emotion show up (lightness in the heart, tightness in the chest, butterflies in the stomach)?
- Point to the area of your body where this emotion feels the strongest. If you notice that it is all over your body or you cannot locate a specific area, then just point to an area in your body at random, perhaps to the middle of your body or the heart area.
- There it is, that emotion, and then there is you, acknowledging it – nothing more than that.
As you go about your busy days, continue to practise noticing your emotions (the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ ones) and acknowledge the fact that you are noticing them, in the way described above. You may notice how you feel when you:
Our wired world
Initially, recognising our painful emotions can be tricky, as every cell in our bodies goes on ‘red alert’. As you will recall from Part 2, our cortisol levels rise (we feel we are under threat), we feel stressed by trying so hard to figure out just what to ‘do’ about it all to make it stop and go away. We bump into our difficult emotions and try to ‘fix’ them, preferably really quickly, because they do not feel nice, both physically and mentally. The more we keep going and struggling like this, the worse the feelings get, until often we end up giving up.
We see this in our clinic every day. The case example below highlights such an instance. Rita, perhaps just like you, struggled with the counter-intuitive idea that, if we just stop trying so hard to fix everything, then life becomes much simpler and we are much more effective. The strength of this pattern nearly led her to quit therapy (like so many other things she had tried so hard with but still felt like she was ‘failing’). Instead, she realised that there was nothing to fail, because this was not a test, an appraisal or a kind of trick – there was not really anything at all to fix, figure out or mend.
Rita
Rita was an attractive, successful and intelligent young woman who worked as a management consultant in the city. She had always worked diligently and unceasingly to overcome her ‘flaws’ and manage her ‘deficits’. She did this at work, in her relationships and even questioned the very core of her personality. She came to therapy seeking another answer to her problems, looking for strategies and techniques to cure her depressed mood and persistent feelings of failure. Her expectation for dealing with her difficult emotions was to look at what therapy could do about them, to get rid of them and she was prepared to work very hard to make them go away.
She took out her notebook to write out her to-do list from the session and found the explanation that this was not going to work quite shocking.
This is an excerpt from a session, discussing her difficult emotion of loneliness. She is asked to do nothing about it, just to breathe mindfully, to notice her thoughts and physical sensations arising. It went something like this:
Breathing in: tension in the solar plexus.
Breathing out: overwhelmed with feeling of loneliness.
Breathing in: this is unbearable; I have to make it stop.
Breathing out: tightness in the chest.
Breathing in: feelings of panic.
Breathing out: I can’t do this.
Breathing in: I need to make it stop.
She stops the exercise, exclaiming she cannot do mindfulness. She is crying. She is encouraged that she has got it! But she does not understand. She is absolutely right; she cannot ‘do’ mindfulness. She has just discovered her habitual pattern, the one that is the real cause of so much distress. She is noticing all those thoughts exclaiming to her that she ‘cannot cope’ and she is believing them, and wanting desperately to act on them by ‘doing’ something. Because this response to her difficult emotions is so habitual for her and she is such a high achiever, she has attributed her success to her busyness and her failure to not trying hard enough.
This has meant Rita has become busier and tried harder, even when it has not been working. Consequently, her performance at work declined, she was depressed, anxious and working longer and longer hours with no time for her relationship, friends or pleasure. In fact, when Rita learned that she could be just as busy without grasping at success and running away from failure, her anxiety and depression left, she had a successful relationship, felt happier and became more productive, confident and efficient at work.
Emotions are a condition of life, not a problem to solve
We live in a society that is geared towards a medicalised view of our bodies and health. If we experience sadness or anxiety, or any uncomfortable physical manifestation of these emotions, we assume that these are a problem and that they need fixing straight away. Our thinking mind pipes up, we start to evaluate our experience, judge it and analyse it, we take ourselves off to the doctor and say, Look, I am anxious, my heart is beating fast, or I am sad, I can’t get the energy back to get out of my bed, what’s wrong with me? Our minds overanalyse, they go into problem-solving mode and focus on these experiences as the problem, but they are not.
Sadness, anxiety, anger, guilt, shame, boredom, grief and discomfort, and all the physical manifestations of these, are all part of what makes us human. It would be unusual never to have experienced these feelings and sensations at many different times in our life. Of course, they are unpleasant and we do not want them around when they show up, but often they can provide us with important information, if only we listen to them. Emotional pain, just like physical pain, has a purpose – it is an evolutionary response. Emotions are not the problem.
It is our attempt to suppress, control and eradicate painful feelings via our endless attempts to think through them, avoid them and solve them and the inherent struggle in this respect that is our real problem. Struggling with our feelings is the problem. Do not take our word for it. Have a go right now, reflecting on your own experience of trying to push away, fight or fix your feelings.
You will notice that this next exercise is similar to the one in Chapter 3, called ‘How is busyness working for me?’ We think that there is great value in revisiting this concept time and time again. Noticing the function of our behaviours and whether those behaviours are serving us well or not can be extremely helpful in attempting to better manage our demanding and busy lives.
Practice 7.2: Mindfulness right now!
Do what works (in the long term!)
- Make a list of all the strategies you have tried in order to resolve difficult feelings. Here is a list of common ones we regularly encounter in our clinical practice to help you get started; checking/adding to/completing to-do lists, working overtime, drinking alcohol/caffeine, taking drugs, avoiding socialising, thinking positively, problem-solving, using social media/your mobile phone/playing games to distract yourself, worrying, arguing, people pleasing, comfort eating, reading this book!
- How do these strategies immediately help you/are they effective in the short term (e.g. feel better, avoid some difficult feelings, feel like you are getting somewhere – probably)?
- Do any of these strategies permanently get rid of these feelings (probably not)? Do any of them increase your difficult feelings in the long term (we guess sometimes they might)?
- And, if you use these strategies regularly in the long term, are there any costs to your health, well-being, relationships, self-confidence, quality of life, missed opportunities, sense of busyness?
- How effective are these strategies in moving you closer to the aspects of your life that you care most about (e.g. your improved relationships, mental and physical health, productivity, sense of accomplishment)?
Of course, some of these strategies might be helpful (reading this book, we hope), so keep doing what works for you. However, we are guessing that you probably use some strategies that can make things worse in the long term and take you further away from the kind of life that you would prefer to be living or the sort of person you would prefer to be, and it is these exact strategies and not your feelings, therefore, that are the real problem.
Busy bee
Have you ever seen someone flailing their arms and legs at the mere sight of a bee? The bee triggers a surge of panic and they try everything to get the bee to go away. The more they try to bat the bee away, the more it frustrates the bee and increases the likelihood of the bee staying close by and that person getting stung. Maybe that person is you? It is the same for our emotions: the more we try to bat our unwanted emotions away, the more unwilling we are to have them around. Perhaps, by staying as busy as we can possibly be, the more likely they are to linger around, increase in their intensity and cause a painful sting on our lives.
The best thing to do when a bee is around, is to stay still, watch it for a little bit and perhaps step aside if needs be or open a window for it to fly away when it is ready to. Similarly, the antidote for all of our struggling with our difficult emotions is the opposite of struggle, it is about letting go of the struggle – letting go of all the over-thinking, problem-solving, rushing around and trying to push away our ‘pain’ and, instead, be willing for these emotions to be around until they are ready to dissipate in their own good time. We do not need to like them or want them to be around, we just need to be willing to have them, to accept them. In other words, acceptance of what is, and that is what mindfulness is all about. Using mindfulness to manage difficult emotions is not about feeling better, but about getting better at feeling whatever emotion is showing up, in any given moment.
When practising acceptance of emotions, it is best to practise when it is a little easier, when the emotion is not too overwhelming, and work your way up. For this next exercise, you might find it helpful to bring to mind something that has left you feeling a little distressed, perhaps a dilemma at work, a small quarrel with a friend or a difficult decision you have to make.
Practice 7.3: Mindfulness right now!
Turning towards our emotions 
- Begin by sitting in a comfortable and balanced position. Tune in to your breathing to anchor you in this present moment.
- Bring to mind a situation that is mildly distressing for you. Let your mind think freely about this problem for a short while.
- Next, expand your awareness throughout your body and notice what is here right now. Notice what emotions are here and their sensory qualities, perhaps tightness, heaviness, discomfort somewhere in your body.
- Gently guide your awareness to an area of the body where you feel discomfort more vividly. Be curious to what this really feels like, in this place in your body, right now.
- Gently stay with the discomfort and explore it in more detail, notice the intensity of it, where the discomfort starts and where it finishes, perhaps drawing a mental outline around the sensation, noticing how much space it takes up in your body. Getting a sense of whether it is moving or still, hot or cold, sharp or dull, towards the surface of the body or deep within.
- Allowing your experience to unfold moment by moment, letting go of any urges to try to change your discomfort. Breathing alongside these sensations.
- If you notice any thoughts that distract your attention, see if you can notice these and allow space for these too and guide your attention gently back to the tangible sensations of discomfort in the body.
- If it feels OK to do so, and as you breathe alongside your discomfort, silently say to yourself, ‘I know this hurts and I can be with it.’
- If the sensations become too intense, turn your attention back to your breath. When you are ready again, return the attention back to the discomfort. Come back to the breath and end the exercise whenever feels right for you.
What will we do when nothing we do will do?
What do we do when we feel busy and overwhelmed? Well, most of us keep doing, making plans and new to-do lists, prioritising tasks and doing more – in the hope of getting everything done and making all the stress and ‘pain’ go away.
What do we tend to do when we feel difficult emotions, discomfort and pain? Well, we usually tend to avoid it, try to get rid of it and keep busy to distract ourselves.
A lot of our busyness and associated stress and anxiety to get things done on the surface is a lot more to do with escaping the feelings that are lurking underneath, rather than what we think it is all about – so much to do, things to get done, people to please, success and happiness to get!
With most of the busy people that come to see us for therapy, it is often the case that their busyness is all about trying to get rid of painful and uncomfortable feelings of some type or another. Whether they are busy with work, the children, socialising, trying to find a partner, or all the above, when we drill down with them to find out what would happen if they just stopped, let go of any urges to keep all this busyness going, they invariably all admit to feeling scared that, if they simply stopped all this doing and all that keeps them busy, they would feel worthless and then vulnerable!
Now, worthlessness and vulnerability are just words, terms that many of our clients seem to use, along with others like, not good enough, a failure, rejected, alone, unlovable – they are just terms that we are now using to describe this painful experience that lurks beneath our busyness, you can call it what you want, any term will do, even ‘X’! Remember, feelings of worthlessness and vulnerability are very scary to us all, we have internalised a prehistoric message from our ancient ancestors that these feelings are connected to our downfall, in other words:
Worthlessness/Vulnerability = Death/The End
It is not at all surprising, therefore, that we would all struggle with these feelings, that we would try our best to avoid, escape or hide them from ourselves or others.
How often have we stopped to think what would really happen if we just let go and did not rush around doing all the time?
- How devastating would it really be?
- What really is the very worst thing that would happen?
- Would our world really come to an almighty sudden crash and traumatic ending?
Well, the reality is no, of course it would not! All we are trying to avoid is our own feelings, our vulnerability and imperfections. Some of us know this and still fear that once all this is exposed and revealed to ourselves and/or possibly to others – then our world will end, but nothing is the end of the world except the end of the world – these are just feelings after all and you will not die, your world will not end simply as a result of you experiencing all this. The feelings that you may be trying to run from are part of you, part of the human experience for all of us – we are all in the same boat here. You cannot run from them and you cannot hide, so it will be helpful for you to learn to sit with them or you will just get more stressed and busier trying not to!
Try to invite all your experience in – it is kinder to yourself when you find a way into your life experience instead of desperately trying to find a way out of it all the time. The very fact that we are terrified of experiencing a part of us is telling us what is most important to us, what we want and need more of, which is often a greater sense of safety and security that we can give directly to ourselves with more self-directed attention, care, compassion and connectedness (in other words, mindfulness).
So, next time you feel rushed off your feet, busier than the busiest bee in town, try the following practice, which comes in two parts.
Practice 7.4: Mindfulness right now!
What is underneath my busyness?
Part 1: Drilling down
Ask yourself the following questions:
- If I do not act on this urge right now (e.g. to go out, work on this project, check and answer emails, check my Twitter and Facebook messages, call a friend, boss, mother), what am I really concerned might happen?
- And what is the problem with that/what might happen then?
- And what is the problem with that/what might happen then?
- And what is the problem with that?… For example, I will feel ‘X’ (worthless, failure, rejection, unlovable, vulnerable).
Part 2: Stop stirring the pond
- Right, so there it is, your ‘X’ (e.g. feelings of worthlessness/vulnerability) with all the busyness, stress, anxiety and frustration whirling around it.
- Now for a few minutes, just sit observing this experience and any feelings of anxiety, frustration, busyness and stress.
- Let these feelings come and go as they will naturally. Notice the urges to act on these feelings or any urges to take the feelings away. Notice how the intensity of these feelings and urges change.
- Notice any thoughts that arise, maybe about how this is not helpful, you have too much to do, there is not enough time in the day for this mindfulness lark! Allow these thoughts to come and go as if they are passing clouds in the sky of your awareness.
- Now focus in on one of the most intense feelings you have, maybe a feeling of worthlessness, vulnerability or associated fear, anxiety, sadness, general stress or frustration. Locate that feeling in your body; is it in your chest, stomach, head, shoulders, heart, legs? If you feel it all over your body, then hold your whole body in your awareness.
- Hold this feeling of pain in your awareness, like a caring parent will hold a crying child, give it your time and attention right now. You do not have to like it, just hold it.
- Now breathe into the area of your body where this feeling resides, imagine your in breath flowing around this feeling. As you breathe out, let go of all struggle and tension you may have with this feeling, imagine your out breath carrying this struggle away.
- Again, breathe into and around this feeling. And, as you breathe out, let go of all struggle and tension you may have with this feeling.
- Allow this feeling to be here just as it is, allowing the breath to create space around it.
- The feeling may change or it may not. Remember, the goal is not to change the feeling but to accept it, it is part of you, it makes you human, we all experience it, let it be.
Time to SLOW down
Mucking about and struggling with difficult emotions tends to create more of them, not fewer. We get frustrated that we are still feeling anxious; we are anxious about our anger, we are bored with always being anxious, depressed about always feeling stressed. This is time-consuming and inefficient. This gets in the way of us reaching our targets and goals and living the life we would prefer. This is certainly, therefore, the moment to SLOW down. We mentioned this acronym back in Chapter 4, but here it is again to help remind us what we can do when we meet difficulties, feel overwhelmed and at our wits’ end:
| S | Stop whatever you are doing and bring your awareness to your breathing. |
| L | Let thoughts, opinions, judgments and urges be. |
| O | Open up your heart, body and mind to what you are feeling. |
| W | Where is most important for you to put your attention right now? (For example taking care of yourself, being present with friends/family, resting the mind, finishing off important work.) |
When SLOWing down in this way, your attention might settle on the feeling itself for some time. You may find that you are able to bear this feeling after all or perhaps discover that it was not as bad as you imagined it might be. It is possible that it might even give you some clues as to what might be most helpful to do.
This is life, Jim …
You may like to kid yourself that you are a Vulcan like Spock and are ever so logical. Emotions do not come into the equation of a busy life or making quick rational decisions and your ‘feelings’ simply are not compatible with good business, performance, success and staying on top of your game. This is a fun idea, perhaps, and quite nice for the next Star Trek convention, but it simply is not true. Whoever told you this was possibly misinformed –it is all a trick! You are human (really). You may not like it, sometimes it basically sucks, but there you have it. Here is another nice science bit to help you get the message that emotions are really, honestly, very, very important and, yes, you do have them.
As psychologists, we recognise that emotional pain often is rooted in early childhood experiences. The human brain is not born fully developed, so early experiences are highly significant in shaping our brain function, neurology and biochemical responses to stress. Think nice, round blob of Play-Doh.
Now we understand that cognitions (our thinking minds) are dependent on emotions – as Sue Gerhardt (psychotherapist) points out: ‘Cognitive processes elaborate emotional processes but could not exist without them.’ In essence, our higher brain function, such as making sense of our emotions through our thought processes, develops later than our basic ‘old brain’. So, as tiny babies, we can express basic physiological needs through crying, etc. But we are totally dependent on our experiences – such as physical contact, care and nurturing – from an adult to meet those needs and then to help our brains to develop. Think of making a gentle dent into the Play-Doh with your thumb.
If our needs are not met, or met poorly, we suffer. At the most primal levels this is akin to feeling like we are going to die. This is as dramatic as it sounds because we are absolutely helpless as infants, we also do not have the developed higher levels of cortical (brain) functioning to understand or make sense of the situation. Think fist splatting Play-Doh into a pancake.
This brain functioning does develop, but it takes several years, hence children go through differing levels of comprehension – including the egotistical age of two, not believing in the tooth fairy any more (your parents were liars) and painting your room black as a misunderstood teen. You probably, recognise some or all of these stages, but together they make a tower of different coloured blobs and splats of Play-Doh.
So, the quality of the relationship between an adult and the child profoundly influences brain structure and biochemistry. If this process lacks sensitivity, then our cognitive development is impaired, we do not understand our emotions and we do not experience ways to regulate them; our levels of physiological arousal, associated with emotion are easily either aggravated or suppressed. Splat the whole tower.
The good news is that, even as an adult, we can create new and improved neurological pathway and can learn to regulate our emotions. We need to work hard to establish these by practising again and again, but this will also get easier and easier to do. Roll the Play-Doh into a cool giant rainbow blob or any other shape you like.
We can then SLOW down. We recognise our physiological arousal, we let ourselves experience it and thus do not repeat or reinforce our habitual response, and we ‘let go’ through non-attachment and bring our attention and energy to somewhere more helpful, offering ourselves up a nice new neurological pathway. We can skilfully and gently adapt from the most stressful situations this way, from past childhood distresses to present-day concerns. In mindfulness, we learn that, rather than trying to control our emotions (push them away, try to fix them), we can develop a fresh new relationship with them, one of acceptance and turning towards our emotions, which generally is more helpful in living life to the full.
Turning towards our emotions and letting them be
=
Less stress
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Better mental and physical health
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Greater effectiveness and moving towards a meaningful and fulfilling life; the life you want.
Respond from the center of the hurricane, rather than reacting from the chaos of the storm.
George Mumford, author of The Mindful Athlete
Mindfulness top tips to-go
In this chapter, you have learned that it is helpful to do the following:
- Identify and acknowledge your emotions (the good and the bad).
- Stop trying to figure out or get rid of emotions, as this will only stress you out more and make you busier and inefficient.
- Discover what vulnerable feelings lurk beneath and motivate your busy behaviour and urges.
- Stop trying to avoid your deeper vulnerabilities and imperfections; you are human after all.
- Find a way into your life, rather than out of it; let all your emotional experiences in.
- Hold your painful emotions in your awareness, let go of struggling with them, breathe alongside them, open up around them and make space for them.