Posted on 03 Mar, 2010 -
Quick Fixes for When You’re Feeling Down
10 quick fixes for negative emotional states, upsetting thoughts or concerns that just won’t leave us in peace
Why I sometimes wish that irritating voice in my head would GO AWAY or SHUT UP!
The man who gave away £3 million
Sometime I get really fed up with the tiresome habit my own mind has of obsessing about and giving me a running commentary on my own emotional state.
If it wasn’t for that ever-watchful voice ready to pounce on any hint of upset, concern or sadness in today’s mood and say “Ooh, I wonder why you’re a bit down today?”, “You’re not as happy as you were last month.” or “I notice you’re still really upset about that tiny thing that woman said yesterday"… then I think we’d get on with life just fine.
I normally assume this is at least partly the consequence of the years I spent researching human happiness as well as my subsequent training in counselling and the fact that I write about this stuff for a living.
But I also think there is a tendency in our society today to assume that happiness should be our normal state and that if we’re anything less than happy then something’s got to be wrong.
Are we right to feel that we should be happy all the time?
But is that necessarily true?
Sure, a good general level of contentment is something we can aspire to and use a better understanding of the human mind to achieve. (More of this another week.) It is also wonderful to fill our lives with rich experiences, family, friends, personal satisfaction and joy. But isn’t a little bit of sorrow, annoyance, anxiety and down days a necessary part of the process? (Whatever that process may be?!)
Is is said, for example, that we are often better at rational thinking and applying ourselves to our work when we are a little subdued in mood rather than too happy and optimistic. Some of our upsets are also caused by a healthy learning from our mistakes, a realisation that things can be better or a natural reaction to upsetting events.
And do we not sometimes need to go through a tunnel of darkness in order to see light at the end of it?
Do our high expectations for happiness set us up for disappointment?
So yes, I do believe that to an extent the obsession with optimism and positive thinking that really took off in the 1990s has set us up for a degree of disappointment and suffering caused by our high expectations for happiness and a constantly positive outlook.
By accepting that we will naturally need to go through a whole host of emotional states throughout our life we can make them easier to deal with. It is also useful, of course, to remember that other things in the daily progression of our life are at least as important as our own happiness including perhaps what good we have done for others, what we have contributed to society, how well we have looked after our loved ones… and perhaps even something as simple as whether we have KEPT OURSELVES ALIVE for another week.
Still: a little bit of a mood boost or emotional detective work doesn’t go amiss either
All that said and done, however, I also believe that we often become more pray to emotional upsets (perhaps because of our over-awareness or over-watchfulness of them) than we need to be - and that the application of certain methods, thoughts or small reminders can often help make things much better.
Here are some of my favourite suggestions for quick fixes for negative emotional states - or upsetting thoughts, events or worries that won’t leave us in peace:
Acceptance and surrender. Sometimes in life there is benefit to be had in just surrendering to a situation and accepting what has happened. Trying to fight against it or wishing something hadn’t happened or that things were different isn’t going to help. This may be especially true for those of us who always want to be in control of events - or those of us who believe that we must either be perfect or else we are a failure.
If you are going through a challenging time, it may help to surrender yourself to what has happened and flow with events instead of trying to resist them. Every day brings new change, fresh perceptions, healing and new life.
If something has happened to upset you, try listing the benefits. It is amazing how sometimes something as seemingly insignificant as a criticism from a colleague or a throwaway remark from a stranger can darken your mood for days. A beep from an angry driver can leave a heavy lump in my heart for hours! Bigger negative events, of course, can be more devastating still.
If you’re feeling bad about something that has something, it can help a lot to try and list the benefits of what has happened instead of solely focusing on the negative. As author Anne Naylor nicely puts it, “Whatever you lose in the course of your life, there is something to gain.”
Listen in to what you’re telling yourself about a certain situation to make sure you’re not being overly negative or engaging in black and white thinking. Watch out, for example, for words like ‘never’, ‘everybody’ or ‘should’ as in thoughts like ‘I will never be happy/solvent/liked/smart again’, ‘Everybody must think I’m awful’ or ‘I should be earning more money than this/doing what my friends think is right/doing a better job at this than I am’. Thoughts like this can make you feel awful - despite being ridiculous exaggerations or completely negative assessments. Try looking at the situation with a bit of outside perspective and realise to what extent you are ‘catastrophising’. Repeat to yourself more positive assessments of the situation to counteract the effects of the overly negative and dramatic ones you’re quietly plaguing yourself with.
Shrink a negative thought or event down to size so you can see it in a larger context. Another habit we humans have when something has happened to upset or knock us is to concentrate all our thoughts on a single event or thought to an extent that we are unable to see it in a larger context - or indeed anything else beyond it.
In fact, I can offer myself up as an example for this one. Over the past few weeks, you see, I have been beating myself up for sending out tips that I had not researched myself as is my usual wont. The fact that I was trying to use tips that readers had sent in and that the story she told about a friend who’d seen black in an onion was a personal one did not manage to stop me feeling stupid. Indeed, it got to the point that all I had in my mind was all the bad things and the bad effect this would have on my credibility - instead of trying to see this in the larger context of two and a half years of not so bad emails and the fact that we all make mistakes sometimes.
And this is what happens: when we concentrate on something negative it becomes so large that it takes up almost all the space in our mind until there is no room for anything else or a more positive view. By shrinking it down to size and trying to see it in a larger context we can hopefully get over such events quicker and move onto new and brilliant things.
Ways of dealing with perennial worries about money. Worrying about money seems to be very deeply rooted in the human psyche. Even when we are coping fine right now, we often fear that complete crisis is round the corner. Even those who have plenty worry about its value diminishing.
To some extent, of course, worrying is needed to encourage us to work hard enough to put food on the table and provide for ourselves and family. When healthy concern turns into obsessive worrying, however, our fretting can sometimes lead to an over-reliance on wishful thinking and passive hope instead of active attempts to better or change our situation. Wishing we had more can also prevent us from enjoying the plenty that we do actually have right now.
It may (or may not!) help to ask yourself whether all the fretting actually helps - or whether you’d be better of using all that mental energy on thinking about the positive things in your life instead.
The millionaire who gave away all his money after realising it was making him miserable
I also believe that taking your eyes off your own situation for a minute and looking at people around you can sometimes help you get some useful perspective. I particularly liked the recent press story, for example, of the Austrian millionaire who gave away every penny of his £3 million fortune after he realised it was making him miserable.
He had been questioning for some time his belief that more wealth brings more happiness. The tipping point then came during a trip to Hawaii with his wife.
“It was the biggest shock in my life, when I realised how horrible, soulless and without feeling the five star lifestyle is,” he said. “In those three weeks, we spent all the money you could possibly spend. But in all that time, we had the feeling we hadn’t met a single real person - that we were all just actors. The staff played the role of being friendly and the guests played the role of being important and nobody was real.”
I have also just been reading an article about how billions of people in poor areas of the world live lives of chronic illness due to epidemics of NTDs (Neglected Tropical Diseases). For want of medicine that would cost pennies, these illness can cause lifelong suffering that includes stunted growth and development in children, impaired cognition, inflammatory bowel disease, mortality in pregnancy, chronic pain, blindness and elephantiasis.
When you are feeling a bit down, look after yourself as you would look after a friend. It is rather odd how bad we humans are at looking after ourselves. Which of us (women in particular?) doesn’t secretly love the opportunity to look after a friend when they are having a bad day or going through a bad experience? We love the opportunity to say soothing things, show how much we care… to make cups of tea and do anything we can to make the friend feel better. When the same thing happens to ourself, however, we are more likely to say things that make us feel worse and punish ourselves with jobs instead of putting a duvet on the sofa and turning on a funny film…
Meditate. Sitting down and meditating may be the last thing you fancy when you’re feeling a bit down. It may, however, be just the thing to lift your mood. By emptying your mind of those thoughts that are plaguing your sense of contentment and peace, you can be lifted into a completely different mood that will offer you the relief you sought. If you don’t already know how to meditate, try googling ‘how to meditate’ to find some instructions that you like.
If you do know how, then why don’t you do it more often? This is a question I ask myself every time I find the time to do it…
