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Key points
- The longer you try to fight your emotions or tell yourself you’re wrong for having them, the longer you’ll struggle.
- It is important to see your emotions as a constant part of your inner life and to navigate them as they arise.
- Since all emotions start as energy in the body, calming your physiology is the quickest, surest way to become more in control.
Even though we’re told that emotions have no place in the workplace, trying to avoid your feelings is like trying to hold a beach ball underwater—at a certain point, the ball forces its way to the surface no matter how hard you try to keep it from springing up.
That’s because avoiding emotions doesn’t make them go away. This is especially true for sensitive strivers—individuals who are both highly sensitive and high performing. Sensitive strivers tend to battle with unbalanced emotionality and spend an enormous amount of energy pretending that everything is OK while silently brooding and trying to process the intensity of their reactions. On the other end of the spectrum, letting your emotions run rampant can be similarly disruptive and exhausting if you live life constantly at the whim of an ever-changing stream of feelings.
How, then, do you find a balance between trying to ignore your emotions and letting them run the show? The answer is learning to accept your internal reactions and manage them better.
What You Resist Persists
Among my coaching clients, I always say, “What you resist persists,” which means the longer you try to fight your emotions or tell yourself you’re wrong for having them, the longer you’ll struggle. This is particularly true in the workplace, where most believe that you need to tamp down your emotionality to be successful. A better approach is to see your feelings as a natural extension of your innate strengths.
Just like the weather, emotional energy is always present whether we like it or not. They are important to identify, consider, and understand. When the weather is bad, you accept it and adjust accordingly. You can begin treating your emotional life like you treat the weather—by accepting and preparing for it.
According to research, sensitive people tend to be more ashamed of their feelings and believe that there’s nothing they can do about them.
One of the most important things you can do for yourself is to see your emotions as a constant part of your inner life and to navigate them as they arise. This helps you to do the following:
1. Avoid depletion. High-intensity emotions like anxiety, distress, and nervousness are mentally taxing because they activate the body’s fight-or-flight response. Emma Seppälä, author of The Happiness Track, notes that when sustained over long periods, high-intensity emotions can compromise your immune system, memory, and attention span. Even if you avoid them, high-intensity emotions don’t go away. Paradoxically, they amplify, which only drains you further. Experiencing your emotions as they are is much less of an energy drag than pushing them away.
2. Influence your reactions. When you accept your emotions, you have a chance to learn about your inner life and become more skilled at navigating it. You prove to yourself that you can handle your emotions flexibly—for example, by changing their intensity or duration and recovering more quickly.
3. Heed their message. Emotions are a source of sensory intelligence and insight that give you important information about your needs or actions you can take to respond more authentically. Even so-called bad or negative emotions have a function. For instance, fear is one way to keep yourself safe, and guilt signals the need to make amends. When you start thinking of your emotions as messengers, your relationship to them changes.
4. Strengthen your emotional energy balance. Acceptance is different from passive resignation in that it involves dropping the struggle with your emotions without giving up on yourself. Ironically, accepting your emotions can boost your psychological health, contributing to fewer mood swings and higher overall life satisfaction.
Strategy: Find Your Center
No matter how intense the feeling, you can take charge of your emotional reactions before they take charge of you. Since all emotions start as energy in the body, calming your physiology is the quickest, surest way to become more in control of yourself. Once you’re centered, you can make sense of your responses and hear the messages your emotions are trying to send you.
One way to get back to center is with a mindfulness technique called grounding. Grounding activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for rest and recovery. When your parasympathetic nervous system switches on, your heart rate slows and blood flows to your prefrontal cortex, which improves your decision-making and concentration. There are dozens of different grounding exercises you can try. Most are inconspicuous, meaning you can do them on a call, at your desk, or even while driving. Below are a few of my favorites:
1. The 5-4-3-2-1 tool. Select five things you see around you (a notepad or a spot on the ceiling). Describe to yourself in detail the things you see. Pick four things you can touch or feel. Notice the texture, temperature, and sensations you’re experiencing. Pick three things you hear. Say two things you can smell (or your two favorite scents). Name one thing you can taste. Engaging all five senses helps bring your attention back to the present moment.
2. Clench and release. Visualize yourself gathering all your uncomfortable emotions up into your palms. Make a tight fist for 5 to 10 seconds. Then let go and open your hands as if you were releasing the feelings.
3. Box breathing. Breathe in for four seconds. Hold the air in your lungs for four seconds. Exhale for four seconds. Hold your breath, lungs emptied, for four seconds. Ideally, you’ll repeat these steps for three to five minutes, but even one minute is enough to experience an effect.
Instead of finding yourself drained by high-intensity negative feelings like worry, fright, or humiliation, grounding helps you move toward low-intensity positive emotions like serenity, contentment, and tranquility. Best of all, you can process and sort through your feelings in an even-handed way.
