Something I wish my parents had told me when I was growing up:<p>You, the thing listening to this advice, is just a small part of a greater whole, much of which you (the thing listening to this advice) are not consciously aware of. This is because you were built by your genes to be good mainly at one thing: reproducing. That's all your genes care about. They don't care about your happiness or achievements or having a fulfilled life. In fact, they don't even really "care" about reproducing, except the same way that water cares about flowing downhill.<p>Your negative emotions are real. The pain you feel is real. But it's not <i>you</i>. It's something that is being <i>done</i> to you. In that regard it is exactly the same as physical pain, which is also not part of you, but rather something done <i>to</i> you. The fact that you're depressed is no more a character flaw than the fact that it hurts when you skin your knee.
I've come to accept this with regards to sexist/racist thoughts. Once you realize that it is a normal, ingrained biological urge to have these thoughts as a result of human evolution and cultural conditioning, it frees you to stop "feeling bad" about having those thoughts and trying to block them out, so that you can objectively assess the flawed assumptions behind them and reason yourself past them without the need for self shaming.
I feel like this validates my tendency to deal with a serious Low Mood by turning out the lights, lying on the floor with headphones on, and listening to the saddest, loneliest music in my collection for a while. I'm gonna feel sad whatever I do, and I may as well make some time to give in to <i>really</i> feeling sad and getting it out of the way.<p>When I feel bad I generally do a quick mental checklist: Have I drunk any water lately? Have I eaten? Have I had my pills? Usually the answer to at least one of those is 'no' and I feel better after correcting them. Then since my need for a warm place to sleep is pretty well settled, it jumps up a few notches to checking when the last time I cuddled someone was, how I feel about my current project, etc.
I learned to accept that I feel bad sometimes and it made me happier.<p>But I went farther than that.<p>I also learned to accept that my ideas and behaviors are inconsistent and it helped me better understand the world and myself.<p>And finally, I learned to accept that I sometimes do bad things (and desire to do even more bad things) and it made me a better person.<p>(Disclaimer: my experiments have n=1, no control group and subjective measurements chosen in hindsight.)
This article sounds like a long version of Carl Jung's quote -> "what you resists, persists" to me. That's how I deal with pain. I don't try to resist it. I simply allow myself to go through the pain. Cry occasionally if I had to. Feeling bad about feeling bad doesn't make me feel better, it simply delays my healing.
Been there, done that :( For me, it's been a negative spiral that ends with behavioral paralysis.<p>Over the years, I've managed to train myself to be amused by feeling bad. Because it's so pointless and silly. And so I smile, feel happy, and consider what needs done. Sometimes what needs done is sleeping for 15 hours. But that's very different from refusing to get out of bed.
I don't know if this claim is true or false but I'm pretty sure that doing a study on this kind of thing is an extremely fraught enterprise. Edit: more so than even simpler psychology studies, many of which are coming back with problems.<p>How does one determine that someone is really "feeling bad about feeling bad" or whether they're satisfying some expectation of the experimenter or doing something else? And moreover, cause and effect can be slippery, maybe those with more extreme problems tend to be caused to do the thing the experimenter thinks is a mistake rather what they do having an effect.
Alan Watts said it better: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emHAoQGoQic" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emHAoQGoQic</a><p>worrying about worrying about worrying
Somewhat similar to some problems I used to have with sleeping. If I was particularly stressed and had trouble getting to sleep a couple of days in a row. Then I would be stressed, tired because of lack of sleep and now starting to stress about not being able to get to sleep leading me to find it even harder to sleep.
It feels like a "duh" thing to me.<p>Emotions are adaptations. They trigger in particular circumstances and they cause particular behaviors. The entire point of having an emotion is to engage in emotionally appropriate behavior until the circumstance has passed. Positive emotions are attractors towards the triggering class of circumstances, while negative emotions are repellers.<p>"Feeling bad about feeling bad" pretty much works out to be something like "naive gradient descent on the function that maps attention onto emotional valence". This doesn't solve the underlying situations that cause you to feel bad - it's like not looking at pictures of your dead wife, rather than grieving, getting support from friends and family, and then moving on with your life.
This effect is at the root of homesickness, I think. In my experience you're never <i>really</i> homesick when you're happy - homesickness only happens when you're sad for some reason and you can't separate it from the place/situation you're in. That reason is only sometimes a direct result of that situation, but your instinctive response is to think "this would be better if I were at home" regardless.<p>Getting over homesickness seems to be about being able to accept the bad thoughts as you would do at home and move on, rather than "feeling bad about feeling bad" in the form of wishing you could just go home.<p>I'm fortunate enough to have never experienced it, but I imagine serious grieving is like this too.
This paradoxical idea of sitting with and being close to the very things that make you suffer is central to Alan Watts' teachings, who westernized Zen Buddhism in a secular way. Robert Wright also talked about this very topic in a recent episode of Fresh Air.
Therefore.. Feeling good about feeling good, can make you ecstatic. <punExplainer>When you keep feeling good about your previous good thought, the system is stable, hence, 'static'.</punExplainer>
If this piece interests you, you should read the "subtle art of not giving a f*ck." Its a nice down to earth book about dealing with negative emotions and high expectations.<p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28257707-the-subtle-art-of-not-giving-a-f-ck" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28257707-the-subtle-art-...</a>
Maybe this sounds too simple and not academic:<p>The more I am busy (with meaningful work) the less time I have time to feel bad about feeling bad or just thinking about this.<p>This doesn't mean one should escape into random work but that there maight be a slight correlation.
I think the same goes for worrying too much about and trying to assert too much control over one's impulsive behavior. Like trying to eliminate it completely. It may paradoxically bring more of it.
> We found that people who habitually accept their negative emotions experience fewer negative emotions<p>and<p>> those who generally allow such bleak feelings as sadness, disappointment and resentment to run their course reported fewer mood disorder symptoms than those who critique them or push them away, even after six months<p>Yet the comments so far are mostly about "controlling your thoughts", rather than accepting negative emotions (and maybe looking at what they're trying to tell you rather than killing the messengers).
I wonder if causality is backwards. Perhaps if your negative emotions are really causing problems, you're more likely to actively to to stop them by telling yourself not to feel them.
I have learned some strategies for dealing with emotions from Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David Burns. By controlling your thoughts you ultimately control how you feel.