41–50 of 141 posts
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.
> We found that people who habitually accept their negative emotions experience fewer negative emotions and > 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 Yet the comments so far are mostly about "controlling your thoughts", rather than accepting ne…
I think recognizing why we feel a certain way is important but a little different than what the article is discussing at face value. A lot of what the article discussed seemed to describe people feeling added emotional stress because of a reluctance to believe that the negative emotions afflicting them were okay (for lack of a better term). It's like the difference between struggling to swim out of a powerful current…
Point is directly fighting against something can keep you trapped by it. Rolling with it and working yourself into a better position without resistance can, eventually, take you away from the problem.
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.
It's both — it's a feedback loop. Here's a typical couple of days when you're dealing with uncontrolled anxiety: You feel like shit, that makes you unproductive and slow and dull. End of the day, you didn't get anything done because you stare at your text editor and your brain just refuses to engage in anything but panicking over... something. You get home, Now you still fill like shit the same as before, but also fe…
That is, whatever past Foo did is done. Maybe he was a dickhead and didn't study for the exam that future Foo is gonna have to sit. So present Foo can be a better friend and get that shit out of the way now, so future Foo can relax, pass, and gets to drink beer.
Like that concept of being your own best friend, only the friend you're forgiving is your past self and the friend you're doing favours to is future you.
Helps to get away from hang-ups about what is already in the past, and for some reason many people struggle with the idea of themselves as a person they should be kind towards.
Maybe this sounds too simple and not academic: 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. This doesn't mean one should escape into random work but that there maight be a slight correlation.
It can help as a distraction but not to fix the long term thought patterns - Anecdotally, I was super busy with meaningful work at university, but I was the most depressed I have ever been. The work offset it for some time, but it took a lot of non-work effort to improve the thought patterns.
Alan Watts said it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emHAoQGoQic worrying about worrying about worrying
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.
"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.
Something I wish my parents had told me when I was growing up: 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 f…
I own everything, everything that happens to me, everything that goes wrong around me, I take my share of responsibility in it. Analyze what I can do to improve it, and do it.
When I think like what you mentioned I tend to lose control of my emotions, I feel angrier, I feel sadder. When I own what happens to me, I feel peace. I know almost everything can be improved. Maybe not short term, but eventually.
Coming back to the other side, I think the core of it is that thinking that stuff is happening to me makes me feel like a victim. I don't take responsibility for anything, thus it must be the fault of some external factor. I try to rationalize and assign blame. All in all, it's a much more negative experience for me.
I learned to accept that I feel bad sometimes and it made me happier. But I went farther than that. I also learned to accept that my ideas and behaviors are inconsistent and it helped me better understand the world and myself. 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. (Disclaimer: my experiments have n=1, no control group an…
The human condition is suffering. Suffering comes from desire.
Rather than desire your unhappiness to disappear, you've accepted it. Thus, you do not suffer from it.
Or so they say.
Something I wish my parents had told me when I was growing up: 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 f…
About that...
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…