The last leg of the cognitive behavioral triangle is our feelings. We have discussed both habits of thought and habits of behavior that can improve your life. Habits of feeling are harder to pin down. Laurie Santos focuses on: 1. How to improve your feelings by not fighting them, 2. How to improve your feelings by managing your body's needs and 3. How to manage your fight or flight response.
Allowing negative feelings:
It is both normal and understandable to want to push away negative emotions. Some feelings are really uncomfortable (fear and anxiety spring to my mind), other feelings are painful (sadness and grief), and some make you feel like you might crawl right out of your skin (anger, rage, injustice). We routinely do things to try to push down our feelings or do as Jack Donoughy once said in the TV show 30 Rock: “put them in my mind-vice and crush them.”
Unfortunately, Jack Donoughy’s mind-vice aside, research indicates that pushing feelings away is easier than making them stay away. Instead, that feeling comes back, but stronger the next time, as if angered by our rejection. Think of it like this: if you were trying to get someone’s attention and they were immersed in their phone, you might call their name louder and louder until finally they can’t ignore you any longer. This is the way it is with our feelings.
The science for increasing our overall wellbeing is to practice noticing our negative feelings and then ALLOWING them to hang out with us for a bit to see what they might be trying to tell us. Tara Brach (Spotify free meditation and podcast) developed this technique called RAIN for learning to tolerate your feelings:
R=Recognize- what is this feeling? How would I label it? Get specific and detailed here (I.e. “I am so angry and also embarrassed and a little worried too”)
A=Allow- don’t try to get rid of it or tell yourself there is something wrong with you for feeling it. Even strong uncomfortable feelings are waves that peak and then recede on their own.
I=Investigate- while you are trying to stay “in your feelings” you can focus on what it feels like in your body. Where do you feel it? What does it feel like, are there other feelings in it as well?
N= Nurture- this last one is making an effort to respond to what you are feeling with kindness, asking yourself what might help you in this moment, and then taking an active role in meeting your own needs.
Being a good friend to your body:
Laurie next talks about noticing and meeting our bodies needs. When you are hungry, tired, or in pain, your empathy and decision-making capabilities are affected. This creates a gap in our ability to experience and express our empathy, which can lead to some less than awesome behavior.
This seems like an easy piece of information, but yet it still happens all the time and, I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t usually FEEL like i’m tired when i’m about to lose my mind at a nearby driver. It is never my first or second thought whether i’ve eaten today. Also, I'd like to add that when you are in emotional pain, that counts too. The brilliant Sonya Renee Taylor (author of The Body is Not an Apology) once said about herself when she was having a moment: “what I really needed was a hug and a nap.”
The feeling state associated with being tired, in pain, or hungry is termed a “hot” state while the one where you are making rational logical decisions is called the “cold” state. In this way, Laurie Santos paints each of us as a combination of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock (from Star Trek you nerds!) What is funny is when she goes further to explain this neat trick of predicting what your hot self might do in a situation versus what your cold self might do!
Let’s try one together: pretend you are on your way home, in traffic, in mid summer, without air conditioning. You get home and it's already 6:45 and you're starving and your family is all in the kitchen asking what's for dinner. What would “cold you” do? What would “hot you” do? This prediction trick works when you are thinking about arguments, getting out of the house on time, or any of our predictable times of stress can be aided by putting our bodies in a position to succeed. As a side note, this prediction technique works for helping me see my “hot self” as more endearing and funny, which is really important when it comes to forgiving myself for basically having a temper tantrum in front of my kids!
Managing your fight or flight response:
Finally, we get to our fight or flight system. But how do we manage our fight or flight system? For this I highly recommend Emily and Amelia Nagoski. They wrote a book called Burnout and also appeared on Brene Brown's Unlocking Us podcast. Their ideas on finding ways to return yourself to a state of relaxation after being in stress are wonderful.
Very basically, our autonomic nervous system is responsible for waking us up when a threat takes place. When you see a snake, or a scary person coming at you, your autonomic nervous system activates, dumping cortisol and adrenaline into your system, taking digestion offline, increasing your heartbeat, constricting blood flow, etc.
Your parasympathetic nervous system is your body's system for rest and recovery. Activating your parasympathetic nervous system is where learning how to do deep breathing exercises comes in. Try it right now: take a deep breath, now take another, deep into the very bottom of your belly, now release and let go of your breath as you exhale slowly…..one more….and, there. Do you see?
Breathing techniques, meditation, mindfulness; it is all worth trying and practicing and trying again. The Nagoski’s go further though (which I appreciate) to talk about ways that exercise or fun or family time or snuggling can activate your parasympathetic nervous system. I would love for everyone reading this to experiment with finding at least 4 reliable methods to activate your relaxation response and then practice them, not when you are in stress, but daily when you aren't. You can train your ability to calm and soothe yourself proactively and if you do so, your body will have a much better chance of knowing how to respond well when things get tough.