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Emotions like sadness, guilt, or anger can appear like complicated puzzles. To make sense of these feelings, we often direct our attention to the events that influenced them, how uncomfortable we feel, or what we can do to feel better. But when emotions are intense, it's easy to get so wrapped up in these details that we overlook important pieces of information—our thoughts about the events, the emotions, and our options for responding to them.
You might question whether it's really necessary to pay more attention to these thoughts. If so, consider the thought you just had about my suggestion to observe the activity of your mind whenever you're struggling with difficult emotions. If you thought, "When I'm mad at my friend or panicked about a deadline, the last thing I want to do is spend more time with my thoughts," that might seem reasonable enough. After all, you already have enough to sort out, so why take on the additional challenge of exploring your thoughts?
The answer is that when you become a better observer of your thoughts in emotionally charged situations, it becomes so much easier to explore the countless opportunities for change, growth, and improvement that will ultimately help you cope more effectively. Those opportunities don't present themselves so much if you instead grapple with unchangeable setbacks of the past, fixate on uncertain aspects of the future, battle the feelings that push back harder, or run from emotions that won't let go.
In contrast, when you notice your thoughts and acknowledge their impact on the emotions that follow, you open up opportunities to challenge your beliefs, revise your thinking to be more accurate and useful, make plans to solve problems and function more effectively, be more accepting of authentic emotions and yourself for having them, or gently let go of biased, destructive ideas you don't really believe and that don't deserve any more attention than you've already given them.
To give you an example that highlights the relationship between difficult thoughts and feelings, consider the unpleasant experience of disrupted sleep. Suppose you woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't fall asleep again. If you thought, “This happens to me all the time, and I can’t take it anymore,” you might feel depressed by how hopeless this problem seems to be.
The predictions, “I won’t be able to function tomorrow,” or “I’ll never figure out how to sleep through the night,” might provoke anxiety because there's so much uncertainty surrounding your ability to sleep well in the future. And you might react with irritability or anger to the belief that “I’m so stressed out by my demanding family that I can’t calm down enough to sleep” because the situation seems so unfair, and your needs aren't being considered. And finally, if you had the realistic and useful thought that "It's an off night, and I might not feel 100 percent tomorrow, but I'll get through the workday and probably sleep much better tomorrow night," there's a good chance the setback won't seem so overwhelming, and you'd be that much more prepared to get through the day and eventually get your sleep routine back on track.
As you can see from this example, our thoughts about ourselves, the people in our lives, our setbacks, and future challenges can have a big impact on the emotions that follow and our ability to manage them. We all get stuck, at least from time to time, on certain biased, inaccurate, and destructive ideas that produce predictable, overwhelming emotional reactions. When we acknowledge that not all of these beliefs are true and that they're just hypotheses that can make emotions more intense and difficult to manage than they need to be, it gets a little bit easier to consider alternative perspectives that help us manage the emotions or function more effectively.
Although it’s easy to get stuck on beliefs that predictably lead to intense emotions, the good news is that, with practice, it’s possible to respond to those thoughts with others that are both more realistic and useful. We may not get rid of certain automatic thoughts that we’ve rehearsed countless times, but we do have the capacity to be patient and supportive with ourselves, as we would with a close friend or family member, while we explore other, more productive ways to think.
When you're struggling with difficult emotions, here are some strategies that can help you identify your thoughts and figure out what to do with them:
- See if you can clarify the thought that led to the emotion. Sadness is often tied to beliefs about loss and hopelessness. Anxiety is a future-oriented emotion driven by uncertainty or concerns about an upcoming challenge. Anger can escalate if you believe you’ve been treated unfairly or disrespected.
- Rigid thinking limits your emotional and behavioral options, so see if you can clarify your beliefs before buying into a judgment that might be unnecessarily defeating. For example, if you believe you’re the cause of a problem that affects every area of your life and things will never improve, consider some other ways of understanding the problem that might be more accurate. Did other people contribute to the problem? As difficult as things are right now, is it possible that the problem is temporary or that the impact of the setback will decline with time? Is this problem specific to one area of your life while other things are stable or going well?
- Consider what you’d like to do with the information you’ve gathered. Would it be helpful to revise your perspective? Is there room for change, growth, or problem-solving? Are there things you could try, even if they’re new or difficult, to make the situation even a little bit better? Would it be worth it to try?
- If your thinking is accurate, or even if it isn’t, but you’re just going through a difficult emotional time, might it be important to revise your thinking about the feelings themselves? Could you be patient with yourself, give yourself a break for struggling with authentic emotions that don’t always make sense, hold off on the self-critical talk, and instead respond with warmth and acceptance?
It's inevitable that we'll be tested in life by difficult emotions, but instead of wrestling with the feelings themselves, one of our most powerful comebacks is to recognize our thinking traps and respond with new, more useful beliefs that help us work through difficult emotions and develop a stronger sense of personal control.
