“Just calm down.”
“Just don’t think about it.”
“Just try to be positive.”
These are all common phrases people get told when they vent to someone about something – often to the dismay of the person venting. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes those phrase are exactly what we need. Sometimes all it takes is someone reassuring us with simple advice that, even though we already knew, somehow didn’t resonate until they were told to us. Of course this is especially helpful when it comes from someone we care about and love.
But other times…not so much.
But I’m not going to talk about what you should or shouldn’t say to someone who’s upset. Unfortunately I don't have any advice when it comes to that. What I am going to talk about, however, is what we tell ourselves.
Because sometimes we don’t go to others when we’re feeling bad. Instead, we try to tell ourselves many of the things we might get told if we did – like the things I already mentioned. But the problem is, a lot of the time, all we’re doing is trying to mask over our feelings and pretend like they don’t exist. And that doesn’t just not help, it makes things worse. This quote nicely explains what I mean:
“Sometimes, it’s not possible – with the chemical balance of your brain, sometimes you just are not able to calm down. And I think that allowing yourself to feel okay about that is important. Because a lot of the time we feel overwhelmed, or we feel insecure, or we feel sad, or we feel depressed, and then on top of that, we feel guilty for feeling those things, and that compounds it. And then it’s the most amount of negative emotions we can possibly feel.”
That quote is from Taylor Swift and came from this interview.
Think about it: you start feeling a negative emotion - sadness, anxiety, jealousy, fear, etc. - but you don't want to feel that emotion. So what do you do? You try telling yourself that everything is fine. You tell yourself to think positively and that really, there's nothing wrong and you feel fine. You convince yourself that having this negative feeling is stupid and will just make you unproductive so the best thing to do is ignore it and try being happy until you actually are. Because "fake it 'til you make it" always works, right?
Not necessarily.
Just to clarify, I'm not talking in absolutes - I hate doing that because I've found that there are exceptions to everything. But overall, a lot of the time, we deal with our emotions like the way I described and we make things worse.
I'll use myself as an example.
Recently I've become increasingly overwhelmed with school work, as I'm sure every college student is at this point in the semester. But it's been particularly hard on me in the past few weeks. As most of us do, I would procrastinate because I didn't feel "ready" to do my work - I was convinced I wasn't in the right mindset and would do horribly. So, I was scared and worried.
But instead of accepting that, I told myself I was fine. I tried convincing myself to just stop being lazy, stop procrastinating and just do my work already.
It didn't help.
So when that didn't work, I just became more frustrated with myself. I felt guilty for feeling scared and worried and all of the other emotions I was feeling rather than accepting it and working through them.
Obviously emotions aren't always that simple. But something we should always try to do is recognize how we're feeling and accept it. And sometimes that's all we can do. Like this morning, I was starting to feel anxious again. Instead of denying it and trying to suppress it as if that would make it go away, I accepted that this was how I was feeling today. I accepted that despite my negative emotions, I was going to try my best to do everything I had to do today - including write this article. Surprisingly, it really helped. In fact, I'm not feeling like I was this morning.
But sometimes we do need to take it a step further than recognizing and accepting our emotions. Sometimes the emotion(s) we are feeling need to be dealt with more than that. And although I can't even begin to tell you how to do that, I can tell you this: we shouldn't let our negative emotions be an excuse for lashing out at people.
It's okay to be sad. It's okay to be angry. It's okay to be afraid. It's okay to have whatever emotion that you're having. But try learning to accept them. It'll make them easier to deal with. And don't excuse being rude or hateful towards someone else because of your feelings either.
I'm not saying it's easy, and sometimes doing all of these things doesn't fully help, but they are often the first steps to feeling better. And not only can learning how to recognize and accept your emotions help you feel better, it can also help you channel your emotions to help you accomplish things.
