Feelings
Today I want to talk to you about FEELINGS. Yep, touchy, feely I know! What I notice in conversation with people is them saying “I’m always depressed” or “I’m always worried”, but this is actually not possible.
We humans cannot stay consistent in our moods. We cannot be anything 100% of the time. If you stop and think right now about how your day has been today, how you woke up, how you got out of the house, how you’re feeling right now, reading this post – if you really think about it, you will notice that you have experienced a whole range of emotions throughout the day. This is really healthy. We humans have an emotional range: that we experience all the time.
So, we cannot expect to feel happy or any other positive emotion all of the time. It just cannot be!
In fact I was reading an article earlier this week about this where some researchers from the University of Jerusalem had found that in order to feel happy, you need to feel some negative emotions as well – how would we know what happiness was if we didn’t experience hatred or anger as well. So that’s good – research says we need both.
But this particular study didn’t explore depression and anxiety – i.e. is it good to have these emotions as well? I think they missed a trick here, because depression and anxiety are actually diagnoses and not feelings. They have just become part of our every day language now, so people say – I feel depressed, and they mean it, but they may not have an actual diagnosis. I’m not sure why the study didn’t look at the feelings behind the diagnoses? Which to me are, sadness, grief, worry, fear – I could go on… All of the feelings are of course normal, we all experience them to some degree within our normal range.
So, it was interesting to me that the researchers had looked at hatred and anger, but not all of these other things, and found that people need to feel them – which I believe is true of all the FEELS!
A client of mine said to me this week that she had experienced some extreme anger towards herself at one point, but it had cleared after a sleep. Good. A range of emotions is normal. And proof: it didn’t last forever!
We humans are human and we need to feel a full range of emotions, to know that we are alive on the planet, having an experience of life.
I remember going through a period in my life of anxiety, and now that has cleared, I’m able to notice times when I feel worried. I can stop and think, “what’s happening to me? oh yes, I recognise this feeling – worry, and that’s quite right, as I’m worried about…”
So – my message here is do not expect to feel wonderful all of the time, experience the negative feelings too, notice how you’re feeling, appreciate all the feels! If you think you’re getting too stuck in one particular negative feeling, question it, what’s going on there? What do you need to do more of, or less of so that you can feel more positive?
