How to Combat Bad Emotions With
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is a type of
meditation that has been practiced for centuries but has recently seen a
resurgence in popularity owing to cognitive behavioral therapy and modern
psychotherapeutic approaches.
The basic idea is that
you’re using meditative practices to become more aware of your own mind and of
your own emotions. You’re becoming detached from your body and calming the
judgmental part of your brain but at the same time you’re not going to ‘switch
off’ those emotions but rather you’re going to ‘observe’ them. The idea is that
you’re going to watch your thoughts and take notice of your emotions but in a
detached manner so that they can’t harm you.
This practice has two
benefits. The first is that it allows you to distance yourself from the kinds
of ruminations that can otherwise cause stress, depression, phobias and more.
The second is that it allows you to better understand the way your own mind
works.
And it is this second
point that makes it an incredibly powerful tool for combating a large number of
emotional troubles.
Turning
Towards Emotions
The problem with emotion
you see is that it robs us of our rationality. And this becomes especially true
if we try to deny it, if we try and suppress it or if we generally don’t treat
it the way we should.
Most of us when we’re
upset will react by trying to ignore it, by pretending that we’re fine – or
possibly by being unintentionally completely oblivious to it. As you probably
have guessed, none of these approaches is particularly helpful or effective in
combating those negative feelings.
So let’s say for instance
that you’re feeling very stressed, anxious and depressed. Maybe you had an
argument with your partner, maybe you had a bad day at work. Maybe you just got
out of the wrong side of bed!
Either way, you’re now in
a position where you feel low and as such you begin to look at everything
through very negative glasses. You try and stop being depressed but all you can
keep thinking is about what a bad day you’ve had. About how it’s never going to
get any better. About how nobody really gets you. About how your partner is no
good for you.
Using CBT though and
embracing the fact that you’re distressed, you’re able to instead simply turn
towards those negative emotions and say ‘yes, I am feeling stressed/anxious/depressed’.
And as soon as you do this, you will
find that they become much more manageable and that you become much more
detached from them. More specifically, you can focus on the fact that your
thoughts are a result of your bad emotion (not a reflection on reality as it
actually is) and you can remind yourself of the impermanence of that stress.
How to
Get to Sleep When You’re Very Stressed
If you’ve ever been very
stressed, then you’ll know that this can make it very difficult to get to
sleep. Common when we’re stressed is to lie awake listening to our hearts
thudding in our chest and getting even more stressed that we’re not able
to drift off and thus re-energize for the days ahead.
This is what makes the
situation so bad: we know that the less we sleep, the worse the
stress is going to seem tomorrow. Ironically, we’ll experience more of the very
same stress that is keeping us awake!
So what can you do to
overcome that stress and just drift off?
The Right
Frame of Mind
The key thing to remember
here is that you can’t ‘force’ yourself to overcome stress and you can’t
‘force’ yourself to relax. The whole idea of forcing yourself to relax is
actually contradictory.
This is where many people
fall down: in trying to make ourselves fall asleep we will often start tossing
and turning and even getting frustrated and angry that we aren’t sleeping. This
only increases our stress more, increases our heartrate more and continues the
vicious cycle. If you have ever looked at your alarm clock at 4am in the
morning and felt like you’re the only person awake, then you’ll know this well.
So how do you break this
cycle? The solution is to stop forcing yourself to sleep and to instead just
let it happen naturally. Specifically, this means you should remove the
pressure of ‘having’ to fall to sleep. In fact, remove the objective
completely.
So when you go to bed,
you’re not going to bed in order to sleep any more. Instead, recognize
that simply relaxing and resting can actually be very good for you too and
allow yourself to do this. Focus on how nice it is to just lie back and not
need to do anything and remember that even if you only do that, you’ll still be
relaxing and rejuvenating to some degree.
The irony is that as soon
as you start enjoying being in bed and as soon as you take away the
‘need’ to fall asleep, you will almost always drift off right away. And not
only will this improve your ability to get to sleep but it will also enhance
your quality of sleep as you’ll be much more restful.
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