When you start feeling bad, you want to know what you can do about it. We head so much of the time from our media and even sometimes think based on other peoples lives how we should be happy all the time. How happiness is our ultimate goal in life. How if we are not happy there must be something wrong with our lives.
The media has build a whole consumerism culture that is more than happy to sell you the next product that is guaranteed to have you feeling happy. It is as if we are entitled to feeling happy all the time and that is our biggest mistake.
We are not supposed to be happy all the time.
Life is filled with ups and downs, with emotions that make us feel good and emotions that make us feel bad.
Imagine your life with only positive emotions. Imagine if your kids always did what you want them to do. It would be weird right? It would seem like we are living in a land of robots. That is not the human experience.
We need contrast of good and bad to know the good.
Once you accept this fact then you will be happier because you won’t expect to be perfect all the time. So let’s explore the negative emotion. Specifically what it is and how you can process it to move on in life.
(If you would rather watch the 5 min video on processing emotions click here.)
Negative Emotion
An emotion is a vibration in your body that is caused by your thoughts.
A negative emotion is an uncomfortable vibration in your body that is caused by certain thoughts that you think.
It is always from your thinking which your feelings are created, not the other way around. Although you might feel the negative emotion first, there is always a thought behind it.
Here are some examples of how your thinking causes negative emotions:
- the shame you feel about not measuring up to some perfect way of being a mother is always due to your thinking.
- the loneliness you feel about not having friends is due to your thinking about what you make it mean.
- the stress and overwhelm you feel as a mother is due to your thoughts about your children and home life.
Think of 20 different people going to see the same movie. All of them would have a different opinion about the movie and their own thoughts about what the movie actually means. Think of 20 people going to the same talk, all will have different opinions and thoughts about the talk.
That is not to say that you need to be happy all the time. If someone close to you dies, if your loved one gets a medical diagnosis or if you are feeling disappointed about how life turned out for your kids or even how it turned out for you as a mother, you will experience those negative emotions.
The difference is in how you process that negative emotion. You can process the negative emotion and allow it or you can resist it and fight it. But know that if you resist it and fight it, most of the time that emotion will grow. So how do you process that negative emotion?
What is tempting to do
A negative emotion is an uncomfortable feeling. But most people want to resist, avoid or react to it. When you resist that emotion, it makes it worse.
When you start yelling at your children because of your anger, you are resisting and reacting to the anger. You can be angry and allow it to be there in the background without acting on it. Did you know this? This is a skill, but one that can be practiced and one you can get very good at.
Sometimes we avoid the negative emotion by what is called “buffering” which is literally trying to escape that negative emotion by buffering with something else like social media, that bad of cookies or eve overworking.
Whatever you do to avoid feeling a negative emotion is a form of escape. Do not start beating yourself up for not wanting to feel the negative emotion. Our brains are wired to avoid pain and to seek pleasure. But your brain does not know the difference between avoiding pain in terms of physical pain and emotional pain. So the reaction within your brain is the same.
I notice that when I actually allow the space for the negative emotion and really process it without going into my head to spin in more thoughts, the negative emotion tends to go away fairly fast. If I resist it then it makes it way worse and I do end up not able to control it when it has reached the point where my prefrontal cortex is highjacked by the limbic system.
I want to invite you to next time process the anger (or whatever emotion you are experiencing) and process it and notice it. Accept it as part of the other part of life that all of us go through. You are not alone in experiencing the negative emotion, it does not mean that something has gone wrong.
What it means
When you are giving a negative emotion a meaning that does not serve ou, you add suffering on top of suffering.
This is the area where I would like to tell you about Clean Pain vs Dirty Pain. There is the emotional pain and then there is the pain that has us stuck.
Clean pain might be when you have a loved one that dies or the medical diagnosis of a child. The dirty pain is that has you maybe spinning in a victim mentality. Dirty pain might have you adding on another story on top of the original story. It is when you add on thoughts to the devastation that resists reality like “this should not be happening.”
You make the negative emotion mean that something has gone wrong instead of processing it.
But like I said before, do not beat yourself up. We were never taught this as part of the school curriculum. But brain science is catching up and we now know how our brains really work.
When you decide to give your negative emotion meaning that has a story that’s opposite of the truth, you only add suffering to your pain.
You can acknowledge the circumstance as a fact that is happening. You can think thoughts like:
- yes this happened.
- yes I feel disappointed.
- yes this is horrible.
That is such a different feeling than trying to control the situation that might be out of your control and saying that it is all wrong for even happening. The truth is, that it happened or is happening. Do not fight against the reality.
How your brain works
Your brain is great at doing what it does. There is the biggest part of the brain which is the prefrontal cortex. That part of the brain takes the longest to develop. Which is why sometimes kids do not think rationally until a certain age. This part of the brain knows all the logical things about life. It is the part of the brain that is reading this right now and understanding it logically.
Then there is your reptilian part of the brain the primitive brain where you are wired for survival. This is the brains fight and flight response. Where your habits are stored. It is always trying to conserve energy and avoid pain.
If you plan for something in the future you are using the front part of your brain but when you go an implement it which requires change your brain will want to fight you all the way until that new neuropathway is stronger. This is where is is so important that you do not make your negative emotions mean anything. You will self sabotage and make the fear and doubt mean to quit. But it is just your brain doing what your brain is wired to do.
Let’s look at an example of yelling at your kids. If you are going to decide that you are going to stop yelling at your kids and decide that for the next week you are going to stop yelling whenever you notice the urge. In the moment when you are triggered and you have the urge to yell, you will probably want to rely on will power, which is resisting the urge to yell by not reacting, which never works. Because will power is like a phone battery, it runs out. Which is why most mothers yell more during bedtime. Maybe they have been relying on will power all day and the battery ran out.
This is where you have to make a decision ahead of time. When you make a decision ahead of time that you will implement a plan when you feel the urge to yell, you won’t make the negative emotion mean anything about you.
Expecting more negative emotions
When you start to make changes in your brain and start breaking some habits that you do not like, your brain is going to want to resist those changes. Your brain is like the best con artist there is and will throw everything at you in order for you to go back to the way things were. Remember, the primitive brain is where your habits are stored and where your fight or flight hormones are so anything you want to change, your brain thinks that is part of its survival.
When you do new and different things outside your comfort zone, your brain has nothing to pull from. No experiences to keep it safe. You have to be willing to feel really uncomfortable if you want to live a new future and achieve different results.
Processing a negative emotion
First is to notice the vibration in your body. This creates the separation.
Second, name the negative emotion in one word (angry, frustrated, irritated, resentful, etc)
Third, describe the feeling in detail like you would to a friend that has never experienced a negative emotion.
“This is anger. I feel it in my head. It’s uncomfortable.”
See how that is different than describing it which looks like “I am angry at my kids because they haven’t cleaned their room before dinner yet.”
Fourth, identify the thoughts that you are thinking that is causing the emotion. Now that you have the emotion down, you can even write down all your thoughts and see which thoughts are the most painful. Can you see how some of the thoughts you are thinking might cause the negative emotion?
Fifth, decide what you want to feel or how you want to show up. Once you name the negative emotion and have authority over it then you can decide if you want to feel it.
I decide sometimes that I want to be upset at my kids, but I stopped blaming my kids. They did not create my frustration. Them acting just like kids act at bedtime is not their fault. I have to be intentional and slow it all down and bring awareness to what is really going on.
We are all guilty of doing this. We blame our emotions on something or someone external to us.
Changing the circumstances to feel better a lot of the times only works temporarily.
When you are feeling bored because motherhood seems mundane, a lot of times we want to make plans or eat or binge out on social media.
I think sometimes “Motherhood is so mundane and boring.”
No, I was bored because I have thoughts creating the emotions of boredom. Some thought like ” I should be doing something more useful, I should have plans with other mothers to connect. Maybe I need a better hobby.”
Once I brought awareness to it it was much better. “This is boredom. I can do boredom. I can feel bored right now, its totally fine.”
See the difference between negative emotion that just part of life versus the suffering that’s completely optional?
Try to get really good at noticing the negative emotion and not have it mean anything about you. Instead of making it mean something, proves it and allow it. Try not to even change your circumstances to feel better.
When you start to do this, you will start to realize that the worst thing that can happen to you is a negative emotion and you can handle a negative emotion.
Your emotions are what drive your actions. So when you are not afraid to feel a negative emotion, you are more equip to experience life as it is now and also be willing to pursue living outside your comfort zone.
You will also have less suffering in life and feel better, faster.
If you need more support in your motherhood check out the free courses to start you off on the right track.
