I’m not going to lie to you—I love numbing out. When a wave of feelings comes my way, I take one look, say “Nope,” and reach for my Nintendo Switch. Or Netflix. Or my bed. Or a glass of wine. Whatever can shelter me from the storm of depression, anxiety, loneliness, anger, guilt, hurt, or whatever emotions I don’t feel like dealing with at the moment. But as a human in therapy, I know well that this isn’t a great coping mechanism—in fact, I know it’s often a majorly counterproductive one.
“When you’re busy numbing out your feelings, your feelings are in the other room doing push-ups,” Caroline Fenkel, D.S.W., L.C.S.W., executive director of Newport Academy, tells SELF. “Then, when you’re done smoking weed or watching Netflix or whatever you were doing to numb out, and you walk into the other room, you’re like, Wait a minute. These feelings are worse than they were before. That’s because you gave them all that time and space to do push-ups.”
So what’s the alternative? Well, to start, feeling our feelings. But that’s not as simple as it sounds. Therapists tend to use “feel your feelings” as shorthand for a multistep process of acknowledging and dealing with your emotions in a healthy way, often known as emotional regulation. “There are two parts to feeling a feeling,” clinical psychologist Ryan Howes, Ph.D., tells SELF. “There’s the emotion coming up in the first place, and then there’s the choice you make: Do I want to deal with this emotion or do I want to ignore it?”
Developing ways to give time and space to our difficult emotions is especially important right now. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, there are a lot of feelings going around. If you don’t have practice tolerating discomfort and harnessing unwieldy feelings into something manageable, there’s a good chance you’re having a really hard time right now. To help, consider these therapist-approved tips for tackling your emotions head-on.
1. Know what your go-to numbing behaviors are.
We’re going to be talking about what to do instead of numbing your feelings, so it’s important to know that this numbing looks different to everyone. Basically, it’s anything you do intentionally or unconsciously to avoid facing your feelings. It’s often in the form of some sort of distraction, but not always.
Immersive entertainment (like video games and streaming) are classic choices, as are alcohol, drugs, and food. But there are some sneakier behaviors that you might not realize you’re using to numb out your emotions. “Busyness is a big one,” says Howes. “Packing your calendar full and saying, ‘I’m too busy to feel anything right now, I’ve got too many things to worry about,’ or chronically putting your nose into other people’s business, offering support and advice to avoid facing your own stuff.”
Obviously, you can enjoy a lot of these habits safely in moderation, and it can be hard to draw the line between what’s “healthy” and “unhealthy.” Because, listen, it’s a spectrum. We’ll get to how to tell the difference between a helpful and unhelpful distraction later. In the meantime, go with your gut on what you think might be your go-to way to numb out your feelings.
2. Start with identifying your feelings.
It may sound weird, but funnily enough, many of us aren’t in the habit of investigating our emotions as they strike us. We kind of just make a quick judgmental call about what’s going on or even brush it off. But given how complex our emotions are, we do ourselves a disservice by not taking a moment to name what we’re experiencing and why.
For that reason, the next step to working with your negative feelings is exploring them. “Start by identifying what’s going on in your body,” says Howes. “Actually feel the emotion. What’s going on in your gut? What’s going on in your chest? Is there buzzing in your head? Does your throat feel tight?”
Then you can investigate a little further, taking into account what triggered the emotion and how you would describe it. It might be pretty straightforward (like you read a news headline and now you feel anxious), but not always. Maybe you see on Instagram that a friend isn’t taking social distancing very seriously and you think you feel anger but on further investigation realize that you’re more disappointed than anything. Or maybe you do feel angry, but that’s not specific enough to encapsulate it—perhaps betrayed or disgusted would be better. “A big struggle right now is that with all the emotions people are feeling, it can be hard to tease out and identify what’s going on,” says Howes.
Whatever it is, explore it with curiosity, not judgment (we’ll get to that next), and if it helps, write it down. By the way, there are a lot of cool resources out there to help you expand your emotional vocabulary, which in turn can help you identify your emotions more easily. One of my favorite tools is the emotion wheel, which exists in many iterations but generally breaks down broad emotional categories (like anger, sadness, and fear) into more specific feelings.
3. Resist judging your feelings.
This is a big one. So often we jump straight to our feelings about a feeling. Stop me if this sounds familiar: Anger hits, but instead of feeling angry, you feel ashamed because it feels “irrational.” You feel sad because you can’t celebrate your birthday at a restaurant, but then you feel guilty because it’s such a “small” thing to worry about compared to what other people are going through. You feel left out because you saw your friends had a Zoom happy hour without you, but you push it away, telling yourself to stop being such a baby. You get the point.
It’s tough, but try to exercise self-compassion and sit with the feeling without explaining it away, piling another emotion on top of it, or telling yourself what it says about you as a person, says Fenkel. Remind yourself that feelings aren’t facts—feeling something doesn’t make it true—and are often contradictory. When you don’t judge a feeling, you give yourself permission to really feel it—which is often something many of us don’t allow ourselves to do.
4. Ask, “What are these feelings telling me?”
Now it’s time to put your observations to work to help you figure out how to deal. “Emotions are adaptive and useful to us,” John Grych, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Marquette University, tells SELF. “Tuning into them helps you recognize what you might need in the moment and allows you to act on those observations.”
Important to note: Acting on your observations of a feeling is different than acting on a feeling itself. If we always acted on our feelings, well, that wouldn’t be great. Our feelings are emotional—they want us to do things like lecture our coworker for messing up our project or to say “screw you” to social distancing because we’re lonely. Instead, we’re investigating our emotions to find further information to help us cope with them, not directly act on them.
All that said, asking what an emotion is trying to tell you can lead you in so many helpful, illuminating directions. It could be telling you something as small as “You need to step away from social media for a bit,” or something bigger or more nebulous, like “You need to investigate further why everything is irritating you lately. Maybe that’s something to talk about in therapy this week.” Honestly, maybe all this feeling is telling you is that you need to grab a snack because you’re hangry.
5. Find a way to express the feeling mindfully and safely.
Now we’re entering some Choose Your Own Adventure territory. The best way to respond to an emotion once you’ve identified and unpacked it—and once you’re practicing some self-compassion around it—will differ for each person. A lot of the time, a good strategy is expressing the emotion somehow instead of keeping it inside you.
Do you need to talk about it with a friend? Do you need to write it out in your journal? Do you need to have a good cry? The list goes on: Paint something. Rip up a piece of paper. Dance around to a cathartic song. Hell, try anxiously scrubbing a bathtub (don’t judge me). Whatever helps you feel like you’re working through the emotion. “So many people try their hardest not to feel something,” says Howes. “They don’t realize the relief that comes with not having to suppress it any longer.”
Because that’s another reason why this practice is so important: It allows us to choose how to mindfully and safely express our emotions instead of taking them out on others or falling into destructive patterns. “You’re frequently feeling lower, manageable doses of emotion instead of numb, numb, numb, numb, numb, explode!” says Howes.
6. Focus on physical sensations instead.
Physical sensations are often useful antidotes to strong emotional distress. In fact, the mind-body connection is a core tenant of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a form of therapy that is focused on distress tolerance and emotional regulation. “Emotions have a physical basis,” says Grych. “When we engage our bodies, we can help work through and express our emotions in a way that’s constructive and healthy.”
Exercising or getting outside are two common ways to deal with a strong negative feeling, but if those aren’t your cup of tea, there are other ways to tap into the emotion-regulating powers of your body. Personally, I’m a fan of hopping in a shower (hot or cold, depending on how I’m feeling), using an acupuncture mat ($20, amazon.com), or the old trick of holding an ice cube to ground myself. When in doubt, ask yourself how you can engage your senses and go with whatever sounds doable.
7. Remember it’s okay to hit snooze on a feeling.
We live in the real world—we’re not always going to have time to deal with emotions as they come up. In these cases, it’s still important to go through the first step of naming and accepting a feeling (instead of swallowing it down without any thought and sending it into the other room to do push-ups). But after that, sometimes you just have to tell yourself, Okay, I’m depressed and I’ll get to it later.
“A lot of the time, it has to do with intensity,” says Howes. “If it’s something small, like you’re kind of annoyed about something, sure, you can take five minutes and go for a walk or vent about it to a friend.” But if it’s an intense emotion that you know will take more than the few minutes you have to dedicate to it before your next meeting at work, it’s okay not to engage. “Tell yourself you’re going to talk about it or give yourself time to headbang to a good song or however you plan on dealing with it later—just make sure you actually do deal with it later,” says Howes.
8. Be smart and intentional about using distractions.
This article wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t talk about the most tempting way to deal with emotions: distraction. Sometimes it really is totally fine and healthy. Who has the bandwidth to engage with and express their emotions all the time? Especially in the middle of a literal pandemic when our emotions are constantly all over the place. Talk about exhausting. That’s why distractions can be great.
“If feelings are overwhelming, if it feels like you’re caught in a loop and ruminating and feeling worse, absolutely you should find something to take your mind off of it,” says Howes.
In a recent Instagram Live Q&A about ~feeling your feelings~ (what can I say, I love the topic), clinical psychologist Andrea Bonior, Ph.D., told me, “The key difference between numbing your emotions and a helpful distraction is what you feel like afterward.” So if you tend to dread coming back to the real world or find your emotions get worse and not better, that’s probably a sign it’s on the less helpful side of things.
More than that, Bonior says giving yourself permission to enjoy some restorative distraction can go a long way. Too often we layer guilt on top of our behavior and we wind up feeling worse, not because the distraction was bad for us, but because we’re judging ourselves too much to enjoy it. So just…enjoy a few hours of TV if you need it.
9. Practice, practice, practice.
All of this sounds like a lot, I know. But the thing is, the more you do it, the more automatic it becomes. Just like many of us condition ourselves to respond to strong emotions by running away from them, if we practice facing them head-on, that will start to stick too. It won’t take away all of the sucky-ness of negative emotions—like, they’re still negative emotions—but it will make them easier to deal with.
In addition to making life a little bit easier day-to-day, these skills can help you develop a deeper sense of emotional regulation—something that’s imperative to our long-term mental health. “Emotional awareness and knowing how to manage those feelings can go a long way to support our resilience,” says Grych. “It’s people who really fight against feeling their feelings that end up having a hard time.”
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