Stop Running From Emotions— And Start Being More Productive

Metadata

• Author: Michael Ashcroft
• Full Title: Stop Running From Emotions— And Start Being More Productive
• Category:articles
• Summary: Embracing and fully experiencing our emotions is essential for personal growth and productivity. Often, we try to avoid or numb uncomfortable emotions, but this only leads to more suffering and a dulling of our overall experience of life. By courageously facing our emotions and allowing ourselves to feel them without judgment, we open the door to greater depth and understanding. Emotions are not thoughts, and it’s important to recognize the physical sensations in our bodies that accompany different emotions. By fully experiencing our emotions, they can transform and move through us, ultimately serving their purpose and dissipating. Creating safe spaces to feel and express our emotions can be beneficial, but it’s important to seek professional help if emotions become overwhelming or traumatic.
• URL: https://every.to/expanding-awareness/stop-running-from-emotions-and-start-being-more-productive

Highlights

• For much of my life, I struggled with picking and choosing. It’s not that I don’t have access to my emotions—in fact, I can feel them pretty clearly. It’s that I really don’t like some of them. Any expression I may have had, serene or otherwise, would have come from avoiding my feelings, not by maintaining equanimity in their presence. (View Highlight)
• In professional contexts, the desire to not feel anxiety, inadequacy, or fear of judgment led me to procrastinate or kept me from putting myself forward for opportunities that would have advanced my career. The work always got done, but with a lot more suffering than was necessary. Instead of just allowing feelings to show up and be there while I went about my business, my habitual response was to distract myself from the ones I didn’t want to feel. (View Highlight)
• The truth is that something happens the moment you stop resisting your feelings: they start to change and move through you more freely. A stuck emotion that has been with you for years can transform in just a few minutes—if you commit to feeling it fully. (View Highlight)
• Whatever happens, the feelings in your body are a vital part of the experience of emotion, and listening to your inner stream of consciousness and inferring an emotion from thoughts is not the same as directly experiencing the kaleidoscope of sensations in your body. (View Highlight)
• The ‘“feel bad”-to-“scroll Twitter” pathway is picking and choosing. It’s me saying that these parts of my experience, of my life, are not acceptable or welcome. I only want to be fully alive for the good parts, like strolling in the sun (View Highlight)
• The first is that purposely distracting from or numbing the felt sensations of emotions doesn’t make them go away. The problem hasn’t been solved, the decision hasn’t been made, and the essay hasn’t been written. In fact, it usually just makes things worse. Coming back to the thing you’re avoiding after an hour of doomscrolling isn’t itself a pleasant experience, and the original aversions you had are still there. All of this leads to the self-reinforcing “feel bad”-to-“scroll Twitter”-to-“feel bad”-to-“scroll Twitter” feedback loop from hell. (View Highlight)
• The second problem is that the effect of turning down the volume on unpleasant emotions isn’t constrained just to the unpleasant emotions, but to all sensory experience. (View Highlight)
• I call the sense of being clearly and responsively in the world “aliveness,” and one of the tactics many people use to avoid feeling unpleasant things is to turn down aliveness. But if you turn down aliveness to avoid feeling anxious, your experience of happiness, joy, and excitement will also be muted. There is only one master volume dial on experience (View Highlight)
• The only way to break the cycle of the aforementioned feedback loop is to stop running away from feeling. This is a courageous act, because it means finally feeling all the things you previously avoided. (View Highlight)
• On the other side of this courage, though, lies something beautiful. In my experience, the emotions that I think are bad, that I would rather not experience, are always doorways to greater depth. When I stop numbing myself or fighting and allow myself to feel the emotion, it’s intense, but I emerge on the other side with a new understanding and perspective, as though it were just a stepping stone that I had been loitering on for years (View Highlight)
• But embracing the tumult—feeling the anger—is crucial, because it opens a door to what lies on the other side. The deeper truth is that anger points towards sincere and earnest care. As the poet David Whyte says:

  “Anger is the deepest form of compassion, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger is the purest form of care, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for.” (View Highlight)

• To embrace your emotions means to cease picking and choosing what parts of your life you want to feel and those you don’t. In particular, it means noticing your impulse to run away when you encounter emotions you don’t want to feel—and feeling them anyway. (View Highlight)
• something beautiful happens the moment you stop resisting: the emotion starts to move. It transforms and becomes something else, something lighter and more free. Emotion serves a purpose, one that it can only fulfill once you’ve allowed it to show up. Once its purpose has been served, it probably doesn’t need to hang around. (View Highlight)
• It’s ironic that we’d rather feel an “unpleasant” emotion at 70% intensity most of the time than at full intensity for a few minutes—when it’s the latter that makes the emotion go away. We suffer a lot more than we need to. I hope that you now have enough curiosity to investigate what happens when you stop running from feelings, turn around, and feel them fully. (View Highlight)