In this article spotlight, hear from Anna Borges as she discusses emotional regulation. If you or a loved one need counseling for emotional regulation or difficulty communicating feeling, please contact us to set up an appointment. 940-294-7061
“9 Emotional Regulation Tips for Anyone Who’s Struggling Right Now — What does ‘feel your feelings’ actually mean?”
I’m not going to lie to you—I love numbing out. When a wave of feelings comes my way, I take one look, say “Nope,” and reach for my Nintendo Switch. Or Netflix. Or my bed. Or a glass of wine. Whatever can shelter me from the storm of depression, anxiety, loneliness, anger, guilt, hurt, or whatever emotions I don’t feel like dealing with at the moment. But as a human in therapy, I know well that this isn’t a great coping mechanism—in fact, I know it’s often a majorly counterproductive one.
“When you’re busy numbing out your feelings, your feelings are in the other room doing push-ups,” Caroline Fenkel, D.S.W., L.C.S.W., executive director of Newport Academy, tells SELF. “Then, when you’re done smoking weed or watching Netflix or whatever you were doing to numb out, and you walk into the other room, you’re like, Wait a minute. These feelings are worse than they were before. That’s because you gave them all that time and space to do push-ups.”
So what’s the alternative? Well, to start, feeling our feelings. But that’s not as simple as it sounds. Therapists tend to use “feel your feelings” as shorthand for a multistep process of acknowledging and dealing with your emotions in a healthy way, often known as emotional regulation. “There are two parts to feeling a feeling,” clinical psychologist Ryan Howes, Ph.D., tells SELF. “There’s the emotion coming up in the first place, and then there’s the choice you make: Do I want to deal with this emotion or do I want to ignore it?”
Developing ways to give time and space to our difficult emotions is especially important right now. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, there are a lot of feelings going around. If you don’t have practice tolerating discomfort and harnessing unwieldy feelings into something manageable, there’s a good chance you’re having a really hard time right now. To help, consider these therapist-approved tips for tackling your emotions head-on.
1. Know what your go-to numbing behaviors are.
We’re going to be talking about what to do instead of numbing your feelings, so it’s important to know that this numbing looks different to everyone. Basically, it’s anything you do intentionally or unconsciously to avoid facing your feelings. It’s often in the form of some sort of distraction, but not always.
Immersive entertainment (like video games and streaming) are classic choices, as are alcohol, drugs, and food. But there are some sneakier behaviors that you might not realize you’re using to numb out your emotions. “Busyness is a big one,” says Howes. “Packing your calendar full and saying, ‘I’m too busy to feel anything right now, I’ve got too many things to worry about,’ or chronically putting your nose into other people’s business, offering support and advice to avoid facing your own stuff.”
Obviously, you can enjoy a lot of these habits safely in moderation, and it can be hard to draw the line between what’s “healthy” and “unhealthy.” Because, listen, it’s a spectrum. We’ll get to how to tell the difference between a helpful and unhelpful distraction later. In the meantime, go with your gut on what you think might be your go-to way to numb out your feelings.
2. Start with identifying your feelings.
It may sound weird, but funnily enough, many of us aren’t in the habit of investigating our emotions as they strike us. We kind of just make a quick judgmental call about what’s going on or even brush it off. But given how complex our emotions are, we do ourselves a disservice by not taking a moment to name what we’re experiencing and why.For that reason, the next step to working with your negative feelings is exploring them. “Start by identifying what’s going on in your body,” says Howes. “Actually feel the emotion. What’s going on in your gut? What’s going on in your chest? Is there buzzing in your head? Does your throat feel tight?”
Then you can investigate a little further, taking into account what triggered the emotion and how you would describe it. It might be pretty straightforward (like you read a news headline and now you feel anxious), but not always. Maybe you see on Instagram that a friend isn’t taking social distancing very seriously and you think you feel anger but on further investigation realize that you’re more disappointed than anything. Or maybe you do feel angry, but that’s not specific enough to encapsulate it—perhaps betrayed or disgusted would be better. “A big struggle right now is that with all the emotions people are feeling, it can be hard to tease out and identify what’s going on,” says Howes.
Whatever it is, explore it with curiosity, not judgment (we’ll get to that next), and if it helps, write it down. By the way, there are a lot of cool resources out there to help you expand your emotional vocabulary, which in turn can help you identify your emotions more easily. One of my favorite tools is the emotion wheel, which exists in many iterations but generally breaks down broad emotional categories (like anger, sadness, and fear) into more specific feelings.
3. Resist judging your feelings.
This is a big one. So often we jump straight to our feelings about a feeling. Stop me if this sounds familiar: Anger hits, but instead of feeling angry, you feel ashamed because it feels “irrational.” You feel sad because you can’t celebrate your birthday at a restaurant, but then you feel guilty because it’s such a “small” thing to worry about compared to what other people are going through. You feel left out because you saw your friends had a Zoom happy hour without you, but you push it away, telling yourself to stop being such a baby. You get the point.
It’s tough, but try to exercise self-compassion and sit with the feeling without explaining it away, piling another emotion on top of it, or telling yourself what it says about you as a person, says Fenkel. Remind yourself that feelings aren’t facts—feeling something doesn’t make it true—and are often contradictory. When you don’t judge a feeling, you give yourself permission to really feel it—which is often something many of us don’t allow ourselves to do.
4. Ask, “What are these feelings telling me?”
Now it’s time to put your observations to work to help you figure out how to deal. “Emotions are adaptive and useful to us,” John Grych, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Marquette University, tells SELF. “Tuning into them helps you recognize what you might need in the moment and allows you to act on those observations.”
Important to note: Acting on your observations of a feeling is different than acting on a feeling itself. If we always acted on our feelings, well, that wouldn’t be great. Our feelings are emotional—they want us to do things like lecture our coworker for messing up our project or to say “screw you” to social distancing because we’re lonely. Instead, we’re investigating our emotions to find further information to help us cope with them, not directly act on them.
All that said, asking what an emotion is trying to tell you can lead you in so many helpful, illuminating directions. It could be telling you something as small as “You need to step away from social media for a bit,” or something bigger or more nebulous, like “You need to investigate further why everything is irritating you lately. Maybe that’s something to talk about in therapy this week.” Honestly, maybe all this feeling is telling you is that you need to grab a snack because you’re hangry.
-By Anna Borges | Originally published 5/20/2020 on self.com
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