How to stay on top of your discomfort
18 October 2019
Painful feelings — anxiety, guilt, worry — can drive us to do almost anything for a little relief. Sometimes unconsciously. We may play more video games than we are really happy with, snack even though we’d rather not, or distract ourselves from the discomfort in some other way.
If you have a good friend, they may send you cat clips for cheer.
And that is perfectly reasonable. If we don’t have a working plan for what to do when we feel discomfort, painful feelings become very scary. It then becomes natural to start monitoring how we feel — what we might call anticipatory anxiety.
Maybe we try to keep the discomfort at bay with a cheerful podcast, a feel-good series, or light music.
We may avoid a particular documentary, avoid talking about a particular topic, or avoid going to a part of town that we worry will remind us of the pain. Our energy goes into this worry, and it shrinks our freedom of action.
Others do the opposite.
We may have absorbed the idea that “you should listen to your feelings”. So we try to spend time with them, feel them, meditate with them in mind, stimulate them.
The problem, as I see it, is that neither distraction nor wallowing in our feelings helps us use them in a useful way. So I’m proposing another approach.
* * *
Imagine that, going forward, you start seeing your discomfort the way you see warning lights in a cockpit. Warnings have a purpose: to give you information about how your journey is going. If a warning light comes on, the last thing you want to do is cover it with your hand to avoid seeing it.
You definitely want to know if an engine is overheating, if cabin pressure is dropping, if the landing gear is acting up, and so on.
But you also don’t want to just stare at the warning light, hoping that everything will be fine if you only sit with it long enough.
As soon as you’ve noticed the signal, it has done its job. Now you turn all your attention to what the warning is trying to alert you to. And to what you need to do for the rest of your journey to go well.
My suggestion is that you start treating feelings in a similar way. If you catch yourself with painful feelings, see if you can pause and become curious about which longing your discomfort is trying to draw your attention to. Try asking yourself what you feel, and then connect your feeling to a longing, using this formula:
“I feel [feeling], because I’m longing for [need].”
The feeling, then, is the signal, and the need is the longing that is asking for your attention. Here you’ll find lists of feeling and need words in English, and here a slightly shorter list in Swedish.
Go through the lists. Sit with the feeling words, so you learn more than “good” and “bad”. This will help you become more aware of how you feel. Sit with the needs words too, one at a time. Take your time. Is there one that, as you read it, strikes a chord of recognition for what you long for?
* * *
A few things that can be useful to know if you try this.
Needs, the way I use the word, are abstract, universal longings, or driving forces. All humans share the same set. We can all relate to longing for love, safety, authenticity and so on. But people have different preferences for which strategies meet those needs.
Another thing: thinking is a powerful tool when we’re debugging a computer, doing scientific experiments, analysing the world around us, etc. But when it comes to your needs, set the thinking aside.
You can’t “compute” your needs. Which need your feeling is trying to draw attention to is not something you can analyse, theorise, or intellectualise your way to.
You’re a human, not a machine. You need to take a few deep breaths. Slow down. Use your being, your intuition. It’s more about being than doing.
You’ll notice that you’re making contact with your need when your feeling shifts. Often from a kind of gnawing, “raw” pain to an often equally intense, but qualitatively different, “sweet” and healing pain.
Just making contact with the need can make a difference. But it isn’t enough. There is a world out there, and it could do with some change for you and others to more easily meet your needs. What can:
- you do, or
- ask someone else to do, or
- do for someone else
that would mean more of your needs were met?
Here you want to try to find strategies that meet both your needs and others’. Also see if you can find a good balance between short and long term. You don’t want to do things that feel good in the moment but cause trouble in the long run, for example.
* * *
Distracting yourself from your feelings can be a fine strategy on that autumn Thursday evening when you’re tired and need to rest. Distraction can also meet needs, in other words.
So don’t take this as a new rule you have to live up to. Take it more as a tool you can add to your repertoire of how you take care of yourself, where entertainment and downtime also have their place.
If you practise, it will gradually become a habit.
When you can put more words to your discomfort, and use it to make contact with your longing, the time is over when discomfort was an uncontrollable alarm you couldn’t switch off.
Anticipatory anxiety has lost its purpose, and you have more options for how to act when you feel some form of discomfort. You can, for instance, do the process above. Or you can watch a light series.