How to Handle Difficult Emotions

The biggest mistake people make when it comes to handling difficult emotions is pushing them away.

Your emotions provide valuable information and guidance. They tell you what you want out of life, what you don’t, what you need to work on, etc. Each emotion serves a specific purpose.

For instance, anger signals an unmet need or a violation of your boundaries. Handled constructively, anger gets you to assert your needs and boundaries, leading to healthier relationships. But if you suppress that anger, it manifests as sadness. Or it’s subconsciously projected outwards onto others in the form of irritability, hostility, or violence.

Avoiding Avoidance

Certain emotions obviously don’t feel very good. So our first instinct, when experiencing a difficult emotion, is to suppress or avoid it. The modern world makes it even easier to escape your emotions instead of recognizing and dealing with them.

When we avoid our emotions because they’re overwhelming or conflicting, we only strengthen them (by reducing our ability to face them). Blocking the flow of emotions puts stress on the mind and body. Suppressed emotions can then manifest as procrastination, addiction, anxiety, depression, and even physical illness. Avoidance leads to only one outcome — increased suffering.

“What you resist not only persists but will grow in size.” — Carl Jung

This is specifically relevant to anxiety. Avoidance (avoiding people or situations, substance abuse, perfectionism, seeking distractions) is usually our default response to anxiety.

It gives temporary relief which reinforces your tendency to avoid. And every time you avoid an anxiety-provoking situation, you subconsciously strengthen the seriousness of the threat in your mind. Avoidance reaffirms your inability to deal with the threat and damages your confidence. So the next time you’re in a similar situation, you’ll feel more anxious than before. This becomes a vicious cycle.

In reality, you probably could have easily got through that situation. You can probably think of a few scenarios from your past where you did something that seemed really scary at first, but easy in retrospect.

Avoidance creates emotional blind spots. When you’re completely focused on bailing water out of a sinking boat, it’s easy to miss the life preserver at your side.

What’s the right way then? Counterintuitively, handling difficult emotions starts with accepting them.

Acceptance

When facing difficult emotions, your instinct will always be to engage in avoidant behavior like mindless scrolling or playing video games or something like that.

Don’t distract yourself. Allow yourself to feel what you’re feeling, without doing anything about it immediately. Just pay attention to how it makes you feel. Notice the physical sensations.

This works paradoxically. The more you accept your emotions and allow them to be, the more they lose their power over you. Acceptance doesn’t mean you like what you’re experiencing. It’s about making peace with the idea that it is what it is.

The idea is similar to mindfulness. You stop identifying with your thoughts/emotions, and instead simply observe them.

In the process, remember to be kind to yourself. Never beat yourself up for feeling a certain way. When you negatively judge your emotions, you experience double the suffering. On top of the difficult emotion you’re experiencing, you make yourself feel weak for having the emotion in the first place. Your emotions are always justified (what you do with them is a different matter).

Acceptance sets you up to extract valuable information from your emotions and deal with them in a constructive manner. More importantly, it helps you cultivate awareness.

Acceptance, in general, is very liberating. Once you accept yourself with all your imperfections, you don’t have to expend energy on trying to deny your flaws or hide them from yourself and others. Instead, this energy can be channeled into your personal growth.

The next step is to find an expressive outlet for those emotions.

Expression

If you don’t express negative emotions, they become internalized — assimilating into your subconscious.

When you feel angry, sad, guilty, shameful, anxious, jealous, whatever, find a way to express those feelings. Talks to a friend. Write your thoughts down. Don’t bottle it up. Journaling is specifically very effective because it helps you notice unconscious patterns and solve the problem at its roots.

The act of writing, labeling, and expressing moves emotional information from your emotional brain to your frontal lobes — the seat of reasoning. This helps you better understand yourself and feel more in control of your emotions, making you feel better. (Brain scans show that as a person processes his or her situation into words and labels, their amygdala — called the “fear center” of the brain — shows reduced activity.)

The more specific you get about how you’re feeling, the better you’ll be able to address and learn from it. That’s why it’s useful to broaden your emotional vocabulary (save the image, it might come in handy):

Remember that there are levels to everything, including awareness. Dig deeper to unearth the deeper emotions and memories buried beneath the surface level feelings. Getting at the root, where the emotion first presented and processing it, can potentially transform your life.

Thank you for reading. Most of the content on this website has emerged from conversations with readers like you. Every Sunday, I send out an email dissecting some aspect of the human mind.

If you can take out a few minutes every week, I promise to help you develop a strong understanding of how your mind works. So that you can have more control over your thoughts, behavior, and life.

You can sign-up below. Or you can sign-up after reading my story and the core idea behind this website:  We Should Be Getting More Out of Our Lives (would recommend)