Unfortunately, most people don’t know much about their emotions, how they work, or how to deal with them in a healthy way.
As a result, you end up making the same emotional mistakes over and over again, leading to a cycle of low mood, anxiety, procrastination, and strained relationships, just to name a few.
And most of the emotional mistakes people make fall into one trap:
Even if you feel good now, you often feel worse later.
Emotional mistakes are intuitive reactions to painful emotions that often provide relief in the short term, but only make the problem worse in the future.
My job as a psychologist is to teach people how emotions work so that they can work with their emotions in a healthy way, rather than avoiding them or getting rid of them with quick fixes. is to help.
Here are seven emotional mistakes that even the most stable people make.
If you can learn how to identify and avoid them, you will find yourself much happier and more emotionally stable.
1. Believe in your thoughts
It’s great to be able to think, reason, and problem solve. But you can get into trouble if you’re not careful.
A problem many people, especially smart people, run into is relying too much on their own ideas.
Their thinking is so useful and accurate in certain areas of life, such as work, that they assume that their thoughts are: everytime Helpful and accurate. It leads to a tendency to trust one’s own ideas unconditionally.
But the problem is:
No matter how smart you are, your ideas can be completely wrong. Especially thoughts about myself.
But how we think directly affects how we feel emotionally.
- Telling yourself that you are a loser will make you feel worse.
- Imagining yourself ruining tomorrow’s important presentation at work can make you anxious.
- If you rehearse in your head the 225 ways your spouse has wronged you over the past 10 years of your marriage, you’ll feel angry.
Unfortunately, many smart people get stuck in a vicious cycle of painful emotions because they believe the first thought that comes to mind, and as a result, they continue to think that way and keep on thinking about the painful emotions. The amount will continue to increase.
If you want to avoid a spiral of painful emotions like sadness, guilt, and anxiety, cultivate a healthy skepticism of your own ideas.
And remember… just because you think it is doesn’t make it true.
2. Trying to control your emotions
Most people imagine that with enough effort or skill, they should be able to control their emotions.
- To calm yourself down when you’re feeling anxious.
- To cheer you up when you feel sad.
- To stay calm when you’re angry.
But when you stop and think about it, is this a realistic goal?
For example, if feeling happy was as easy as flipping a happiness switch, no one would need to visit a therapist like me or read self-help articles like this.
You can’t directly control your emotions any more than you can directly control the weather.
Unfortunately, trying to change your mood usually doesn’t work…
When you’re in a bad emotional mood, you’ll probably take one of two approaches. Either you try to escape those painful feelings, or you try to resolve them. The problem is that when we try to avoid painful emotions, we teach our brains that those emotions are dangerous.
This means that even if you “succeed” in feeling good in the moment, the next time that emotion arises, your brain will feel fear and the painful emotion will be doubled.
So the next time you feel sick or upset, instead of asking, How can I get rid of this feeling? Try this: Even though you feel it is good for you, what can you do?
3. Blame things for how you feel.
It is a common misconception, even among well-educated people, that things cause emotions. It certainly feels like that…
- When a coworker makes a sarcastic comment to you at lunch, feel Like the comment made you angry.
- When your spouse forgets to buy you something for your anniversary, feel Just as their forgotten things make you sad.
- When a car suddenly cuts in on the highway, feel Just like the other driver made you anxious.
But none of that is true.
Decades of research in psychology and neuroscience have shown that a process called cognitive mediation determines our emotions. In other words, it is not the things themselves that create emotions, but our interpretations of what they mean.
For example, let’s say you’re driving on the highway and a car passes you and cuts you off by talking to you from the right.
- Situation A: You think so. How bad, he could kill someone!
- Situation B: You think so. Maybe his wife is in the backseat of the car, going into labor, and he wants to rush to the hospital.
Same situation and event, but probably a completely different emotional response. And the reason is…
Things don’t cause emotions. How you think about things changes how you feel.
Of course, that doesn’t mean our environment isn’t important… When something negative happens, it’s only natural that our interpretation will be negative.
The key is to understand that you have little control over what happens to you, but you always have control over how you think about it.
4. Afraid of your emotions
Here’s a question for you. Suppose you accidentally touch a hot pot on the stove. A searing pain shoots through my fingers and arms. Is pain dangerous?
The answer… Not at all.
Pain is not dangerous. It’s the brain’s way of communicating danger.
The danger in this case is that leaving your finger on top of a hot pan will damage the tissue. Pain is just a way to move your fingers and prevent real danger.
The same principle applies to mental distress.
- For example, when you break up with your long-term partner and feel gut-wrenching sadness, the pain of sadness and mourning is not dangerous or bad.
- During a panic attack, you feel extremely anxious, but it is not dangerous.
The key insights here are:
Just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it’s bad.
Many people fall into the bad habit of thinking that painful emotions are dangerous and trying to numb them or run away from them. Unfortunately, this has the unintended side effect of worsening symptoms in the long run.
The secret to reducing the intensity and pain of emotions is to remind yourself that emotions, no matter how unpleasant, are not dangerous and are not something to be feared.
5. Trust your emotions
Just as it is dangerous to blindly trust everything you think, it is equally problematic to blindly trust everything you feel.
Our culture tends to glorify emotions. From an early age, we are exposed to messages about how important it is to “find your passion,” “be guided by your intuition,” and of course, “follow your heart.” As if emotions were somehow wiser and more accurate conveyors of truth than, say, ideas or principles.
Despite what every Disney movie wants you to believe, emotions are often terrible guides to our actions.
for example:
- When you are having an argument with your spouse, your anger may lead you to make harsh or hurtful comments in order to get revenge. Should I follow my heart about it?
- Your alarm goes off and you remember that you said you were going to exercise this morning, but you feel like sleeping for another 15 minutes, so you roll over and tell yourself that you’re going to exercise in the evening. Is your intuition the best guide to deciding that?
No matter how strongly they feel, or no matter how mysterious or wise they seem, in reality, your emotions often conflict with your values and highest aspirations.
If you develop the habit of blindly trusting your emotions, you’ll lead a life of chronic procrastination, low self-esteem, and possibly poor health.
In order to truly follow your dreams and live a life you’re proud of, you sometimes have to be able to ignore your emotions and focus on your values instead.
6. Judge your own emotions
Remember how we talked earlier about the pointlessness of trying to control our emotions because they aren’t really under our direct control?
Now, another important implication of this idea is:
There’s no point in judging yourself by your emotions if you can’t directly control them.
Anyway, this is what we all know and agree on in a legal sense. Feeling anger. It is only when you have done something wrong that you are sent to a place of blame.
And why? We judge people based on their actions because we can control them. But we don’t judge people based on their emotions. Because they are not under our control.
But there are a lot of very smart people out there who try to judge themselves as bad or wrong because of certain emotions (some lawyers I’ve worked with) include).
Unfortunately, this has some nasty side effects.
- If you judge yourself negatively for feeling sad, you will feel guilty in addition to feeling sad.
- If you criticize yourself for feeling anxious, you will not only feel anxious but also sad.
- If you blame yourself for feeling angry, you’ll end up feeling shame on top of your anger.
Judging yourself based on how you feel will only cause more suffering.
You may not like feeling anxious, sad, angry, or other unpleasant emotions, but criticizing yourself for it will only make things worse.
Instead, let’s consider a little memory that I call another golden rule: When you’re feeling down, treat yourself like you would a good friend.
7. Deal with your emotions
Coping is a short-term strategy, but it often leads to long-term pain.
It seems like everyone wants to learn more coping skills these days. As a therapist, I get asked questions all the time:
Well, I guess I’m here because I want to learn coping skills that will help me when I feel anxious, depressed, or angry.
But it’s about coping skills. It’s a Band-Aid and nothing more. While it may alleviate discomfort in the short term, it doesn’t actually address the underlying problem.
And that’s where the real trouble begins…
When we rely on coping skills to feel better, we tend to avoid addressing the root of the problem.
No one likes having surgery, but if you get a bullet in your chest, you have to take it out.
Similarly, if you are chronically anxious, depressed, or facing other emotional struggles, trying to cope is just a wasted effort.
At the risk of mixing my metaphors, at some point you have to bite the bullet and have surgery. At some point, we have to face the fact that coping skills only address the symptoms of suffering, not the causes.
Although there is a time and place for dealing with painful emotions, there is little to rely on to manage emotional pain.
Something that feels good, like economics and healthy eating now often makes us feel even worse later. If you want to improve your mood and mental health, be aware of these common emotional mistakes.
- believe in your thoughts
- try to control one’s emotions
- blame one’s feelings on things
- afraid of one’s feelings
- trust your feelings
- judge one’s feelings
- deal with one’s emotions
nick wignall The psychologist and author shares practical advice for mental health and well-being. He is the founder of his The Friendly Minds newsletter.
This article was originally published at: Moderate. Reprinted with permission from the author.