Imagine this for a moment, I have you hooked up to
monitors that measure your anxiety, they can tell when your anxiety increases with perfect precision.
You also happen to be strapped to a chair, sitting on a trapdoor, over a shark tank, filled with very
hungry sharks. You're perfectly safe in the moment, but then I come in and I tell you look, you're
safe right now, but if you get to a level six of anxiety, I'm gonna have to drop you into the shark
tank. So just don't get anxious and you'll be fine. So you try your hardest to
not get anxious and you try to force yourself to not be anxious and I can
constantly say "helpful" things like- 'Remember, don't get anxious', the more internal and external
pressure about your anxiety, the worse it gets and as you see your anxiety creeping up the
scale from a four to a five, pressure mounts and you worry about what's gonna happen if you get
there. Before you know it your anxiety is shooting through the roof and click-drop-splash! Now
folks I would not do this to you, this is just an analogy, but many people do this to themselves. Many
people with anxiety, chronic pain, panic disorders, depression, tinnitus, vaginismus, muscle tension,
and strong emotions in general often experience something like this frequently. The harder you
try not to feel anxious or the more you worry about and pay attention to your chronic pain
or your tinnitus or whatever the worse it gets. When we fight and struggle against our thoughts
and emotions we tend to make things worse in this video, which is skill number five from my course
How to Process Your Emotions, you're going to learn how to tell if you're making your emotions or your
sensations worse and in the next two videos right here on my channel you're going to learn how to
escape that cycle, how to get better at feeling so that you can resolve really intense emotions,
and feel more peace and happiness in your life. This video is sponsored by Skill Share. Skill Share
offers thousands of inspiring classes for curious people and lifelong learners. They have classes
on topics from art and creativity to productivity and personal improvement and here's a fascinating
class that I recently took, it's called- Designing the Life You Want with Muchelle B. (Muchelle) 'I think that
sitting back and making decisions about what you want in life what you value, who you want to show
up as, is such important self-work that we don't do regularly enough.' (Emma) She teaches four exercises
that you can use to get clarity on your values and create the life vision that you want and
she also includes a workbook that helps you walk through these exercises on your own. Cool thing is
you can also see what other people in the class are working on, you can see their projects as well.
There's a ton of other classes on productivity, creativity, and self-care. Becoming a Skill Share
member is less than ten dollars a month with an annual subscription and the first 1000 of my
subscribers to click the link in the description are going to get a free trial of a premium
membership so you can explore your creativity and use that to work through your emotions. Okay,
so just so you know I've been there in the past, I've had a couple of anxiety attacks right, I know
what it feels like to struggle with your emotions. One of the times was when I lived in Argentina
and I had been under a lot of stress overall, but one day, you know, everything seemed just fine and
I was just going about my day, when all of a sudden I started feeling like really shaky and sick and
then I started to worry you know what's the matter with me and then I started to feel shakier and
sicker and then I started to worry about how this was going to mess up my day right we had a
lot of important appointments, what if I wasn't going to be able to get to them because of how I
was feeling, and pretty soon I was just sucked into these waves of anxiety and every one was worse than
the last. Now I was trying my best to calm down but you know everything I did was making it worse
and eventually I had to call a friend over to help me and when he came over we talked for a while and
you know he was really gentle and comforting and um you know I took a break, eventually I calmed
down and when I did, all the nausea and the sick feeling went away and turns out I wasn't
sick, it was all stress and anxiety and fear that was causing that physical sick feeling that
whole time, but the harder I tried to make it go away the worse it got and this is one of the
real paradoxes of emotions. So there's a lot we can do indirectly to change how we feel a lot
you can do to get better at feeling in your life and to get feeling better but if we try to stuff
our emotions or we try to like you know force our emotions to change in the moment we often make
things worse in the long run and this can be hard to see because for many people the only emotional
skills they were taught were like- Get over it, look on the bright side, relax, try not to think about
it, right? So as children a lot of us were taught you know it's not okay to cry or feel sad or be
angry, and to be honest, putting an emotion to the side for a while in order to complete a task is
a really helpful skill in the in the short term. So for example, think of a police officer who
responds to help at a horrible car crash, now this officer needs to be able to focus and perform
their task in the moment and push their emotions to the side for a moment and that's a really
effective short-term strategy, but if that's their only strategy, then over time those emotions are
going to build and build. Many police officers are really good at suppressing their emotions, but when
they do this in the long run it can lead to higher rates of alcoholism, divorce, and suicide. Emotional
suppression isn't an effective long-term strategy because emotions beg to be processed and resolved
and they do this by popping up over and over again. Most people have simply not been taught other ways
to work through emotions. So for that officer he or she would need to add the skill of processing
through those emotions later so that those suppressed feelings of stress and anxiety can get
resolved, but the problem is that our instinct is to avoid things that are uncomfortable. Avoidance
of or struggle with our emotions is one of the most common responses people have to them, it's
like we just want them to go away so that we can get on with our lives. Maybe we try to brush
them aside as quickly as possible. In my therapy practice I frequently see people trying all sorts
of things to try and make their emotions go away. So on a micro level it's just like little things
like trying not to think about it or spending a lot of time distracting yourself, but since those
aren't sustainable practices, you know the emotions keep getting louder and louder people end up
needing to do more to suppress their emotions. So then they end up doing things like drug and
alcohol use, shopping addictions, overeating, using sex to escape, so things like pornography addiction
or having unhealthy relationships and you know it just keeps going on and on, there's a lot of ways
we try to suppress or escape our emotions right? Gambling, media addictions, and just avoiding
people or places that make us feel things like anxiety right?, or another one that's a form
of avoidance is procrastination right? Now there's other less obvious forms of avoidance too,
letting your dreams die, keeping your dreams small, blaming other people, anger and defensiveness,
or even just making decisions without really taking the time to consider the options right,
acting impulsively to make a problem go away. Now what do you notice about all of these
avoidance strategies? Do they make your life better? All of these attempts to avoidance lead
to more problems in the future, not less. They lead to us feeling worse and needing to avoid
more, so they perpetuate this cycle of feeling crappy right? Take a minute right now and get into
your workbook and take the survey about avoidance. What are your avoidance tactics? What do you
do when you're trying to avoid your feelings? In the long run struggling with or avoiding
emotions make them more intense and it usually makes them worse, right? Okay, are you tired of
metaphors yet? When the only skills you have are things like resist, suppress, try not to feel that
way, etc., it's like you're in a tug of war with a monster, a struggle for your life and you're using
all your strength to keep from getting pulled into this great chasm between you and the
monster. You're afraid that if you don't fight with your depression or your anxiety, that
it's going to pull you into a pit of despair. But it's exhausting to be stuck fighting
your feelings. In the next couple videos and throughout the course I'm going to teach you some
counter-intuitive skills that will help you drop the rope, drop the struggle with your emotions. You
can overcome depression and anxiety, but in this episode we're just gonna focus on identifying ways
that you might be making your anxiety or whatever worse by struggling with it. Okay, so here's number
one- You judge emotions as "good" and "bad", you tell yourself that sadness and anxiety are bad emotions
and that happiness is the only acceptable emotion. You think that because an emotion is uncomfortable
it's a negative thing that just needs to be escaped or avoided, and sneak peek into the course
sometimes painful emotions do need to be resolved, but all primary emotions serve a function and
when we judge our emotions we don't help ourselves process through them so for example: healthy guilt
helps us make repairs when we've messed up, healthy fear can keep us from falling off of cliffs, and
just because an emotion is uncomfortable doesn't mean it's bad. Among mindfulness characteristics
a judgmental attitude towards one's thoughts and feelings is the strongest predictor of
both depression and anxiety. Okay number two- You're stuffing, you're clenching, you're trying
not to cry, you're trying not to feel, you're trying to numb yourself or zone out, or you do
what you can to avoid an emotional situation or to distract yourself or to white-knuckle your way
through it while you wait for it to pass. So these are perfectly fine reactions for the
short term, but if you try to use them over and over they don't work in the long run. So with
muscle tension, anxiety, nausea, all these attempts to stuff your feelings can actually make them
worse. I worked with a client in the past who every time he got sad or stressed in session
he would clench his face like so hard and tight, trying to not let the emotions get too
strong, trying to force the tears to not come, and this just triggered panic attacks over and
over again he was triggered by having emotions, his habitual reaction was to fight them, and this
led to a cycle of panicking over and over and the harder he fought this hopeless battle to
not have feelings, the more depressed he felt. When he started to learn to be gentle with
himself and to be open to emotions the panic attacks and the depression greatly decreased. Okay
number three- You're negotiating right? When strong emotions come up you plead with the universe- 'why?,
why is this happening to me?, this is so unfair'. maybe you get stuck worrying about the future
right, you say like- 'What if this lasts forever? or you say something like I can't handle feeling this
way', Now there is a time and a place to explore these questions there may be some underlying
causes to what you're feeling, but if this is something you do regularly you know that it almost
always leads to despair instead of helpful action. It's like you're trying to plead before the
universe that it's not fair and then hoping that the universe is gonna say- 'oh yeah you're right', and
then it'll just magic your feelings away. Now, and just a reminder, a mental health diagnosis
like depression does not tell you the cause of your depression, it doesn't tell you that it's
permanent, it doesn't tell you anything other than these are the symptoms that you're experiencing
and they meet the criteria for depression. It's more helpful to explore one skill you can
learn, like letting go of this struggle, than it is to spend a lot of time pleading with the universe
to magic these feelings away. Okay, the fourth sign that you might be making your anxiety or emotions
worse- You shame yourself, you say 'I shouldn't' a lot. I shouldn't feel this way, I should be happier, it's
the feeling of trying to force it that often leads to hopelessness. Shaming yourself is like banging
your head against the wall and hoping it helps. Saying- 'I shouldn't feel sad' often makes people
feel sadder. Saying- 'I shouldn't feel anxious', makes people feel hopeless or anxious this
doesn't mean that you're gonna feel this way forever, there's a whole lot you can do to get
feeling better, it's just that shaming yourself gets you stuck in the cycle of struggling against
your emotions which makes things worse. Okay, number five- you're catastrophizing, you're assuming
that these symptoms mean something, so with every little symptom you assume the worse. So if
you feel a little pain you think- 'what if there's something wrong with me? Does this mean I've got
cancer?, or if you start to hear your tinnitus you think- 'oh no, what if my tinnitus is really bad
today?', or you start to feel a little anxiety and you think- 'oh this is terrible I can't function
at work with anxiety, what if it gets worse?' Catastrophizing exaggerates every emotion you
have. So in the next skill you're going to learn all about Willingness, the skill of feeling what
you're feeling without freaking out about it. Okay, number six- you're checking, you're constantly
checking your symptoms, like saying something like 'oh how's my anxiety gonna be today?' Now you
are the CEO of your brain, what you pay attention to tells your brain what's most important to
you and what you pay attention to is what you get more of. When you hyper focus on the pain point
or on uncomfortable emotions, when that's what you think about or talk about or ruminate on, you tell
your brain that sadness or tinnitus or anxiety is the most important thing to you, so your brain
complies by making more of it, by making it louder. Joey Remenyi who helps people heal from tinnitus
and vertigo says "I know that people have healed when they stop describing their sensations as
symptoms. When an uncomfortable sensation or emotion pops up you notice it, you acknowledge it,
you validate it, and then you gently redirect your attention to what's most important to you in that
moment." What you pay attention to you get more of. The seventh sign that you're stuck in a struggle
with your emotions is that you're distracting, you're always keeping busy, you're never slowing
down, you're spending too much time on your phone, you're procrastinating important things, because
you just don't want to face them. Now, there's a quick test for this. If you stop moving, if you just
sit still for a minute and that makes you feel worse, then you're probably stuck in distraction.
So this is like running away from an imaginary monster, you think that you have to keep
running so that it doesn't catch you, but I promise if you sit and you let it catch
you, you'll find that you can handle it, that it's better than running all the time. Okay, so
you're not bad, you just need some other tools. There's a reason you're gripping right? The people
I know with anxiety and depression they aren't lazy, they're often desperately trying everything
they know to keep from getting pulled off of that cliff of their anxiety or their depression. The
problem is not lack of effort. In the tug-of-war you're afraid that if you stop struggling, you'll
fall in. You're afraid that if you don't keep doing it you'll fall into some deep despair, you'll
fall apart you'll stop functioning, but the struggle takes so much energy. I'm not saying quit
trying, I'm saying drop the rope and try something different. In the next video I'll teach you the
practical skills to drop the rope. Practical skills that will let you step away from the
drama, the struggle, the fight with your feelings, and move toward a life of peace and meaning
and freaking joy right? There are at least two antidotes to the struggle- Emotion processing, and
Willingness, which is a key to emotion processing. So in my emotion processing course
you're going to learn dozens of skills to manage intense emotions, work through them,
and resolve them. So stay tuned let's do this.
