We can't not have hard feelings

What we do with them is what matters

Hard feelings are hard to experience. They suck. And yet, research indicates every day we have an average of 30 notable feelings, and that we spend on average about 40% of our day in positive emotional states, 16% in negative emotional states, and the rest in neutral or mixed positive and negative states. In other words, it’s completely human to have lots of feelings on both the upside and the downside.

Five years ago, I thought that with enough self improvement, we could eventually stop having disruptive, difficult feelings. But through hard knocks experience—from losing family members to having hard breakups, from a global pandemic to the slow drift away of old friends—I’ve learned it’s unrealistic not to experience hard feelings.

“Growing past” our challenging emotions is something of a fallacy created by the self help industry. ChatGPT tells me that a search for books on “happiness” returns 400,000 results, including physical books, ebooks, and audiobooks. And that’s from WorldCat stats, which don’t even capture all available books in the world.

While we might want to “self help” our way to a state of permanent happiness, that’s not very likely. In fact, the prevalence of this fantasy implies the volume of negative emotions we humans must have, and how much we dislike them!

A Different Perspective on Hard Feelings

We’re human beings and human beings have human feelings. We live in the world and our experience of the world leads to emoting. It’s just a fact.

As I’ve let go the dream of “emotional perfectionism” and living “always happy,” I’ve come around to a more accepting view of all my feelings.

I see them as useful information about how the world around me is affecting me, and whether I need to do anything about it.

An Unusual Definition of Feelings

Turns out, feelings are based in biology. We may not think about them that way often, but they’re designed to help us respond to our environment so we survive. As we experience things, our body needs to pass information between brain, muscles, and organs, so it sends off a series of hormonal, chemical, and electrical responses to spread the deets.

If you want to read a wonderful book about this, I highly recommend “90 Seconds to a Life You Love: How to Master Your Difficult Feelings to Cultivate Lasting Confidence, Resilience, and Authenticity,” by Joan I. Rosenberg, PhD.

When a feeling is related to something wonderful, we have physical sensations designed to get us to do more. Someone is nice to us? Our body responds with warmth, calm, and radiance. That way we want to spend more time with that person.

Conversely, when a feeling is related to a threat, pain, or loss, the physical response can be pretty uncomfortable and unpleasant. Someone yells at us? We feel immediately flushed with a burning heat and maybe an impulse to hit something (or if we’re prone to a flight response, an impulse to shrink up small).

Our body is trying to drive a physical reaction that’s both fast and powerful so we don’t stay in danger. Our biological response tries to help us act in time, to run away or to fight, to evade whatever just hurt us, or to deal with whatever caused a loss.

But this powerful punch of biological flows are why hard feelings like fear, anger, sadness, disappointment, embarrassment, helplessness and shame can feel so terrible in the body. We may be overcome with nausea, waves of exhaustion, a pounding heart, sweating palms, swift headaches, uncontrollable shivers, or more!

It’s these unpleasant physical sensations that make us not want to have such feelings.

Are you sure I can’t just squash this stuff down and not deal with it?

Unfortunately, we can’t avoid having hard feelings. And squashing them doesn’t make them go away. It only means we’re not doing anything about them, which is useless. They’ll be back for us if we try to tamp them down.

Luckily, we can learn to handle hard feelings effectively, which is the opposite of avoiding them.

In fact, dealing with them means facing them head on, courageously. Even gracefully. And perhaps with a touch of spiritual awe, since they connect us to Humanity, and to our inner Truth, and to our own place within the wide universe.

But we have to get effective first, if we want to get ethereal.

Effectively Navigating Hard Feelings

We’re human, and our surroundings affect us. Sleep and food and water affect us. Sunlight affects us. Being in connection with others affects us. Chaos and instability affect us. The moods, words, and actions of others affect us. Our own needs (and whether or not they’re met) affect us.

We’re living beings in a living world. Beautiful and dangerous, right?

In an interview with Dan Harris at 10% Happier, the Dalai Lama said he hardly ever feels negative emotions anymore. But I’m going to say something controversial. The Dalai Lama spends a lot of his time in an environment, and doing activities, that are well suited to producing positive emotions.

For the rest of us, many of the societal beliefs, cultural norms, and economic systems we deal with on the daily are challenging—hence the high rates of burnout, anxiety, depression, and suicide we see in the world today.

I don’t think it’s worth beating ourselves up for having many more, much bigger, difficult emotions than the Dalai Lama. Instead let’s get effective with our emotions.

Besides, I think effectiveness is another aspect of his Holiness’ secret. I think his ability to process and manage negative feelings is probably very advanced. After a lifetime of spiritual practice, his mindful response to his own inner world is so well trained that it’s almost instantaneous. And that’s what we can strive for too. More effective emotional processing and response.

We do have a secret weapon. Our bodies want to return to neutral asap. So we can work with that—with ourselves—to respond to feelings in a new way.

Biologically, the rush of hormones, chemicals, and electrical impulses from emotions last only up to 90 seconds. Sometimes they’re as short as 30 seconds! Then they flush away. And if we are able to let go of them, we can be free from the discomfort of those feelings right then and there.

How to Handle Hard Feelings Effectively

We can support ourselves in processing difficult feelings by doing several things:

1. ACCEPT THE FEELING: Don’t fight where you’re at. There’s no need to be upset about having the feeling. It’s complete fine to have big, awful freaking feelings! How you feel is valid! Your job is to ride through it and manage not to over identify with it. It’s here, but it’s not you. Try to see it as natural and something helpful your body does for you, even if it doesn’t feel great. Give yourself a little hug of acceptance and care.

2. FULLY EMOTE: When we fully emote, we let our emotions have their moment to flush properly. Maybe we let out a scream, stamp our feet, cry, punch a pillow… anything that will help the biological rush flush out faster. (Just be sure you’re not hurting anyone else). There’s also more chill options, like letting out a big sigh, getting up and pacing, or talking ourselves through the moment. Whatever we can do to get the energy shifting in our body—to release our tension or shake out our shivers—do it!

3. LET GO: To avoid starting off another biological rush of the same feeling, we need to avoid re-thinking thoughts that trigger it again. For instance, we might be tempted to focus on what made us angry, but the more we think about it, the more we feel angry. Or we might not know exactly why we’re angry, but we could be tempted to try to figure out the source and meaning of our feeling while we’re still feeling it. But the more we ruminate, the more we stay angry. Instead, we do best to focus on new thoughts. Thoughts that get us out of the unpleasant state. Thoughts that allow us to play a new game, in a new frame.

4. ACCEPT YOUR MENTAL STATE: Yes, this again. Maybe you’re golden now, relieved and moving on. If so, awesome! But don’t worry if you can’t quite let the hard feeling go quite yet, or if you’re stuck in the triggering thoughts. You needn’t berate yourself if you’re not ready to shift. You’ll get there. For now remember that it’s valid that this feeling has happened, and you’re allowed to have it. It may even happen again, and that’s valid too. It’s natural. It’s your body helping you.

Now repeat, repeat, repeat as much as you need.

After the Biological Rush of a Hard Feeling is Gone

Once we’ve got the emotional flush over with, and the biological impulses are gone, we can more calmly move forward to identify an appropriate, thoughtful RESPONSE— rather than knee jerk REACTION.

Since feelings tell you things about your experience and how it affects you, look at the feeling as evidence about your life. This information can tell you what to do more of, what to do less of, and what to reconsider. It can show you when you need to move on from situations, jobs, people, etc. It can tell you when to lean in harder, when to let go, or when to change your perspective.

Exploring Right Responses

Finding the right response is all about using knowledge of our feelings to identify forward action. For example:

• Anger can be a sign something needs to stop or change, or that a boundary has been crossed. After feeling it, once you have enough distance to ask what information your anger is telling you, you may find you have a good idea of what to do next.

  • Maybe you need to change something in your life so the thing making you angry is no longer a factor.

  • Maybe you need to ask for something different to hold your boundaries.

  • Maybe you need to say no instead of yes.

  • Maybe you need to shift your perspective or soften what you think someone else should be doing with their life.

• Guilt is a sign you don’t like how you behaved. It’s not the same as shame, which has more to do with believe you are inherently bad.

  • If you feel guilt, appropriate responses might be apologizing, fixing what you can, and changing how you act next time.

  • It can also mean examining underlying causes of your behavior and seeing if there’s something you need to address.

• Disappointment shows your needs or expectations went unmet.

  • This can be a sign you need to be more vocal, clearer or firmer

  • It might also be a chance to consider whether your expectations were truly necessary. (Be careful with this. For instance, you might legitimately need a boost, so don’t go hard on yourself when you feel disappointed you didn’t have time for anything fun.)

• Helplessness is an uncomfortable, out of control feeling that highlights a perceived lack of power. It comes up in moments when you don’t feel a sense of agency or an ability to affect your own outcomes.

  • It is a sign to take back your power!

  • This might mean speaking up, putting your foot down, finding an ally, seeking somewhere or someone safer, and thinking over the levers you have within your control that you might not have noticed.

Luckily, beyond this spitball approach, there are some great thought models and frameworks out there to help us through the process of identifying the right response to an emotion. We’ll talk more about those in upcoming posts.

For now, this new biological view on our difficult-to-feel feelings can give us enough distance from them to bounce back faster.

Relief!

We know all our feelings are natural.

We accept them as such.

We also know the physical sensation doesn’t have to last as long as we might fear. In fact it might not last long at all.

And we have a strategy for getting through it quicker: Accept + Emote + Let Go

So, this week I invite you to appreciate your emotions with fresh eyes. Have curiosity about your feelings and what they teach you. Gain empathy for yourself when having hard feels. And remember to appreciate that all feelings—both good and bad—mean you’re human and you’re still alive!

Now go forth and feel!

xx

-Marisol