Hi everyone Emma McAdam here! In this
little nugget of help I want to share one way that anxiety and depression are
linked, and I'm gonna try to explain how our response to difficult emotions can
lead to a pattern that makes us feel less joy more sadness and more apathetic.
So, this video also fits under the category of stuff you do that makes you
feel more depressed. So I'm going to start this
video by sharing a story about one of my clients. Now I've changed some of the details to protect my
clients identity, but the gist of it is true. Okay and real quick don't forget
I've got a bunch of courses on udemy.com there's a coupon link in the description
below so check those out if you want more mental health resources. Alright,
back to the video. So I recently had a client come in who was concerned that he
was feeling a little bit depressed and most worrisome to him was this
overwhelming feeling of apathy, like he was no longer excited about his career
this this field that he had been so excited and engaged in before, and he was
a Social Work professor. He he loved the work he loved helping people in this
creative process of solving problems and reaching out to serve those who had few
resources, and he also enjoyed training new Social Work students. But, because he
was feeling so apathetic about his work he felt bad even just about teaching
them because he was worried that he was setting them up to be miserable in their
work too. So, he was experiencing a lot of distress around his career, and as we
talked about what was going on and we ruled out a bunch of things, I began to
ask him about avoidance patterns in his life. So, was he avoiding his life his
responsibilities, and he said that basically he really was just putting in
minimal effort into his work and then as soon as he got home he'd just kind of veg
out and watched TV for the rest of the day. Now for me, avoidance is a big red
flag. As it usually indicates a response to anxiety and stress that that makes things worse over time.
So avoidance is different than relaxation. Relaxation, which is things
like going for a walk or getting a massage or spending time with friends,
this actually turns on the parasympathetic nervous system. The part
of the nervous system that calms us down and helps us heal and it turns on our
immune system. So, this you know good relaxation helps our body feel rested
and relaxed. Avoidance, on the other hand just numbs us out while we're doing it,
so we don't have to think about what's bothering us. But as soon as we're done
you know watching a show or something the problem and the stress which has
been on hold, it just comes back even stronger. So avoidance is like the one
response that's almost guaranteed to make anxiety and depression worse.
Anyways I asked him about avoidance and he said he was doing a lot of it. For him
it was food and TV, but for other people avoidance might look like drugs or
social withdrawal gaming or spending too much time on social media. So, I shared I
shared this analogy with him. I said, "so this piece of paper represents your
emotional capacity your ability to feel the whole spectrum of emotions and the
right hand of this paper represents your positive emotions and the left hand of
this paper represents the negative emotions. Now I'm using those terms
positive and negative, kind of in quotes because I don't actually believe in
positive and negative emotions. I think even painful emotions serve a purpose,
but that's not what this video is about. So, anyways trying to shut down our
negative emotions and not feel them is kind of like breaking off the second
half of this paper right. So we take those feelings of stress or
discouragement and we we throw it away so I don't want to feel sad or hurt or
disappointed a so just tear off that half of my emotional spectrum and try
and throw it away. Okay now now great now I'm just left with the positive emotions.
Except for here's the thing with our emotional spectrum this paper now
this half of the paper represents my capacity to feel positive emotions joy
and love and connection, and this half of the paper represents my capacity to feel
disappointment and sadness and stress and and other emotion. So we say oh I
don't I don't want to feel disappointment I don't want to feel
sadness, so I'm gonna avoid that I'm gonna just try and escape I'm not gonna
feel that I'm gonna suppress those feelings and we're gonna get rid of that
negative half of our emotions. Throw that away we don't want that in our life. Well
now this is your emotional range right? We're gonna take and this half
represents your ability to feel joy and happiness and sadness and hope and
connection and this half is sadness and fear and disappointment and we say oh I
don't want to feel disappointed or sad or upset or unhappy so I'm going to
avoid those feelings I'm gonna suppress those feelings I'm gonna get rid of them
and throw them away. Okay, and now this is your emotional range. Now you get the
idea right? As we try to get rid of those negative or uncomfortable emotions, we
might avoid love because it hurts or we forget our dreams because we might fail
we might avoid performing because it might give us anxiety. But the problem is
is what we're really doing is we're cutting our joy in half, we're cutting
our hopes in half, we're cutting our range of emotions down. Now we're not
only left with a very short emotional range a very small window of positive
emotions, but this pile of negative emotions like failure loneliness and
quenched dreams because we gave up on those, we actually still have it. So now
we've got about this much capacity to feel joy and happiness and this much
capacity to feel loneliness and disappointment. Essentially by avoiding
things that make us feel uncomfortable, we create misery by trying to run from
the pain. So this is the analogy I shared with my client and he seemed to
understand it and and we moved on to talking about a few things he could
practice to build back his emotional capacity. So, things like
feeling joy and excitement again. So these steps included things like less
avoidance, doing some exercise to get the blood pumping a little bit so when you
get excited and exercise it gets your nervous system you know expand your
nervous systems capacity to be to feel joy and to feel good. I encouraged him to
write a list of things that he used to enjoy about his work, so remembering the
good, and I asked him to tell me about a time that he really loved doing his work.
To remember to bring to mind some experience that helped him feel that it
was all worth it, and you know what was interesting he
really struggled to tell me about a time he enjoyed his work. It's not that he
hadn't had them but he couldn't recall them, he couldn't recall an experience
like that. This is actually really common with depression and trauma. So with
trauma survivors they've experienced so much pain and they've tried so hard to
shut down those emotions and not think about it, that it's often much harder for
them to talk about their hopes and their joys then it is for them to talk about
their worst memories. And with depression it's just hard to bring to mind the
reality that you used to feel happiness. So anyways, he couldn't bring to mind
really any of these positive experiences that he had in his career. But he also
couldn't quite figure out why. So right at the end of the session, I told him
something I had written down in my session plan prior to the session but it
may be helpful to for him to have a passion project. To find something that
he does for fun that reignites his passion for his career, and at this point
he got pretty animated and he said, "you know, I had this volunteer project that
was my passion project last year we were helping young women who were coming out
of jail we were helping them find housing and work and I was developing
this program and I was really excited about it..." and as he talked I could see
his eyes light up but he told me then there was this guy who was working with
him on the project and he took over. He wouldn't let him do something that he
wanted to do. He said "I really cared about this
project so because that was so frustrating I just decided to stop
caring." and that's that's what he said. "I stopped caring about my work I told him
fine you figured out" and he told me he's still working on the project but he was
just doing what he'd been told he wasn't trying to be creative or invested in
anyway. And he basically said he's just staying with this project because he
hasn't figured out a way how to get out of it yet.
Now, when he told me that story I got excited because he had basically just
described exactly what I was talking about with this paper analogy. He had
just shared a perfect example of what I call emotional compression. Which is how
we shut down our ability to feel joy when we try to avoid feeling hurt. So he
had cared immensely about this project and then he was upset when something
didn't go his way or got really difficult. So, he shut down his care for
the project and when he couldn't be hurt, he also couldn't feel joy. When we shut
our heart off the pain we shut our hearts off to joy. You can't selectively
numb, you can't say I only want to feel the good emotions. When you cut off grief
you can't feel love, when you cut off the possibility for disappointment you can't
feel hope either. So it's not what happens to us that makes us depressed,
but how we respond to sadness that makes us depressed or joyful. When something
painful happens we have a choice. So if we feel social anxiety hanging out with
friends and we say like I don't want to feel that, so we avoid hanging out with
friends so that we don't feel so anxious then we also cut ourselves off from
feeling the joy of hanging out with friends. If something your spouse does
hurts you and instead of opening up and staying engaged and working through it,
instead of instead of you know connecting you turn away and you numb
yourself off a little bit and you avoid him or you blame him or you just spend
less time with him. Then pretty soon the marriage becomes a little bit colder.
You're not as open to being hurt but you're also not as open to joy or love.
So, the antidote to emotional compression and one treatment for apathy
and depression and anxiety is to expand our emotional capacity. So this is
getting better at feeling, instead of just focusing on feeling better. This is
a skill that can be learned you can teach yourself to increase your ability
to feel joy, by also getting better at feeling disappointment. So strangely
opening yourself up to pain makes sadness and grief and anxiety more
comfortable. It's like one of those like Chinese finger traps have you seen those
the harder you try to escape the tighter it pulls and when you lean into your
emotions and you sit with them and you notice them without fighting or judging
them first, then they don't overpower you. Now, that being said, there is a bunch we
can do to get rid of the pain and the anxiety that we can create right. We can
decrease depression by letting go of lies about ourselves and catastrophizing
and black and white thinking and other cognitive distortions that make us
depressed or anxious. But when we've cleaned that up we still need to have a
response to the painful emotions, that in the long run this response needs to help
us stay open to feeling joy and love and and the full spectrum of the emotions of
life and this essential skill is called willingness. Now I'm gonna make a couple
more videos on this topic it's you know the skill of willingness, it's the
ability to sit with emotions instead of running from them but the basic idea is
to allow yourself to feel vulnerable. To allow yourself to care, to let go of your
rules that say it's not okay to feel sad or mad or disappointed, and instead say I
can feel sad but still make good choices. So keep an eye on this channel I'm
making three or four more videos in the next couple of weeks about willingness.
But, I'm gonna close with some quotes from Brené Brown so she does a great job
of describing this in her books Daring Greatly and Rising Strong. So I'm gonna
end on one of her quotes so first she quotes Theodore Roosevelt. "The credit
belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust
and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again
and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who
knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy
cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who
at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place
shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor
defeat." and then Brené Brown says "I want to be in the arena. I want to be brave
with my life. And when we make the choice to dare greatly, we sign up to get our
asses kicked. We can choose courage or we can choose
comfort, but we can't have both. Not at the same time. Vulnerability is not
winning or losing; it's having the courage to show up and be seen when we
have no control over the outcome." As you work to overcome depression and anxiety
in your life and to live a life of joy and love and hope and peace, may you be
able to expand your emotional capacity by choosing to lean in instead of
numbing out. Thank you for watching, please subscribe, and take care.
