Why You Should Sit With Your Negative Emotions
Mental wellbeing relies on being aware of one’s feelings, experiencing them and responding to them in an appropriate way. This is easy when we experience positive feelings. When we feel joy, excitement, or hope, we often engage with our emotions without thinking twice. However, we rarely engage as enthusiastically with our negative feelings which can be experienced as painful, overwhelming, or even destructive. Whether it is relationship-ruining fits of jealousy, a bad case of road rage or an unrelenting sadness, we can be left reeling by our own emotional detonations.
Unsurprisingly, many of us will do anything to avoid our negative feelings, preferring to overeat, drink an additional whiskey or simply run from whatever is making us feel bad. However, negative feelings are an integral part of what it means to be human and you cannot experience most truly meaningful life experiences without experiencing negative emotions. Our negative feelings have a purpose, whether it is to keep us safe, alert us that something is not right in our life or that we may have lost someone or something that meant a lot to us. The issue with negative feelings is not that we experience them, but when we get overwhelmed by them. To be ruled and tormented by one’s feelings is no way to live a life - at least not a happy or healthy one.
Mental health difficulties can adversely affect our physical health in a myriad of ways, with serious mental health disorders reducing people’s life expectancies between ten to twenty years. Poor mental health is associated adversely with self-care behaviours, with people more likely to engage in smoking, substance use, unhealthy eating and physical inactivity. This in turn increases the risk of chronic medical conditions like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and other diseases as well as being associated with faster rates of biological ageing. A long life is only as good as the quality of the years we add to our lifespan.
Meditation, particularly mindfulness meditation, has shown to be an effective and increasingly popular tool to help us navigate our negative emotional experiences. Scroll through your app store and you will find thousands of meditation apps to help you build up a mediation practice. Whether you prefer to be guided by an ascetic monk or accompanied by the gongs of a sound bath, there is something for everyone in the market. But despite the tools available to us and our awareness of the benefits of meditation, it remains hard for most of us to maintain a regular practice and to overcome the perfectly human condition of not wanting to stay with our feelings. Perhaps it is not so much the lack of resources or even the time to meditate, but the sheer difficulty of sitting with our feelings that makes it hard for us to take meaningful steps towards managing our emotions.
We tend to use feelings and emotions interchangeably, however, scientifically they are two distinct phenomena. Emotions are a collection of chemical and neuronal responses which occur in response to internal or external stimuli. They occur primarily in an unconscious and instinctive manner with the aim to alert the brain whether to approach an advantageous situation or stay away from a dangerous one.
Feelings are the conscious manifestation of emotions. They are the story we assign to our emotions, coloured by our life experiences. This translation is thought to occur in a part of your brain called the insula. The insula acts as a map reader, monitoring the physiological changes occurring in your body in response to emotional stimuli and translates these into conscious representations, which we subjectively perceive as feelings. The insula will collaborate with the amygdala, the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex and other areas to help us respond to our emotions. The amygdala assesses strong emotional events and works with the prefrontal cortex to balance emotional input with our existing priorities and makes decisions accordingly. Simultaneously it will feed into the hippocampus, your memory centre, to encode emotions with our memories. This ensures certain memories are better remembered and easily retrieved next time you face a similar situation.
Darwin proposed that emotions evolved as a means to produce goal-directed actions to support our survival and thereby the survival of our genes. Each emotional experience contains a message devised to support our decision-making process. If something makes us feel good, we will move towards it (again and again). If it makes us feel bad, we learn to stay away. From an evolutionary standpoint this makes sense – our genes are most likely to survive if we are continuously guided towards things such as food, sex, companionship and safe environments. And just like we can avoid situations that make us feel bad, we can also try to avoid our negative emotional experiences.
Research has shown that our minds tend to wander more when we experience negative feelings such as fear, anxiety or shame. We can cope with these unpleasant experiences by escaping them. And in the short term, this can be an effective tool – taking our mind off negative feelings can decrease activity in the areas in our brain associated with pain. However, feelings are not easily suppressed: it often encourages a boomerang effect where they return, often more intensely. Feelings are designed to be heard and convincing – they feel real. If they were not, then we would not be inclined to follow them. Studies have shown that attempts to suppress negative feelings rarely reduce the actual negative emotional experience. Instead, it merely reduces the outward expression of it and can even decrease positive emotional experiences. In addition, it appears that each time an emotional experience is suppressed, your physiological response is magnified: your heart rate and sweat response increase. It stands to reason that if we cannot escape our feelings, we better learn to effectively manage them.
Emotional regulation is a set of complex conscious and unconscious cognitive processes by which we manage and respond to our emotional experiences. Deficits in emotional regulation are central to the development and maintenance of common psychological disorders. Individuals struggling with depression have difficulties identifying emotions and modifying emotional experiences in helpful ways. Similarly, individuals with generalised anxiety disorders report poorer understanding of their emotional experiences and react more strongly to negative feelings. Deficits in emotional regulation can lead to maladaptive emotional regulation strategies including self-harm, misuse of drugs and alcohol, excessive avoidance or suppression of feelings or obsessive rumination. These types of behaviours are also commonly seen in non-clinical populations. It is not uncommon for people to drink more during periods of high stress, to just ‘not think’ about their problems or conversely to obsessively think on a problem without problem-solving.
A large part of going to therapy is to learn how to regulate our emotions in a healthy and effective way. Healthy emotional regulation strategies include acceptance of our emotional experiences, tolerance of emotional intensity and cognitive re-appraisal (where we change meaning of an emotional event to change our emotional experience). You may reduce your anxiety before an important job interview by telling yourself it is an opportunity to understand if the company is the right fit rather than a damning assessment of your character. Mindfulness and other meditative practices can support the implementation of the above strategies by improving the extent to which we pay attention to emotional stimuli, how we process feelings and help us influence their intensity.
Meditation is thought to work through four main mechanisms: attention regulation, body awareness, emotional regulation and change of perspective on the self. Each of these components is thought to act on areas in the brain which overlap with emotional processing and regulation including the insula, amygdala and prefrontal cortex, among others. Individuals on a mindfulness-based stress reduction course demonstrated increased insula activation and consistent meditators have shown structural changes in the insula. This suggests at the very least that meditation consistently activates the area which bridges our emotions and cognitions, perhaps leading to greater awareness.
There also appears to be reduced activity in the amygdala, which may reflect how meditative practices can temper the intensity of an emotional experience. Interestingly, there is inconsistent evidence for meditation’s effects in the prefrontal cortex as different studies report both increased and decreased activation. As the prefrontal cortex is involved in conscious emotion regulation, differences in activation may be explained by mastery. Novice meditators may at first need to exert greater cognitive control to overcome engrained ways of reacting to emotions. Seasoned meditators will have learned to be present with their feelings without having to exert much control. The capacity to sit with intense emotional experiences should not be underestimated. By improving our ability to sit with anxiety and other negative emotions, we can teach ourselves that something previously experienced as unsafe or uncomfortable is safe, comfortable or just neutral. The feeling will dissipate without having to control or escape it.
Under the guise that all emotional experiences are temporary but will only pass if we accept them, meditation asks that we sit with our experience and observe it with patience, non-judgement, and perhaps even curiosity. Where avoidance and suppression aim to decrease the intensity of an emotional experience, meditation attempts to increase our ability to bear with the discomfort. Counterintuitively, the more willing we are to sit gently with our emotional experiences, to allow them to unfold, the more likely we are to see them pass. By expanding our capacity to bear intense emotional experiences, we begin to have a choice. A choice to decide how or if we want to respond to our feelings.