WHY FEELINGS ARE FUNNY
10 AUGUST 2021 (14 MIN READ)
Considering the short amount of time we spend in each emotion, we sure do give a lot of power to them. Anxiety makes us act like toddlers with a sugar rush. Grief sends us down a torturous spiral of hating ourselves. Anger turns us into vicious pit bulls ready to chomp down on someone’s jugular. And, best of all, happiness allows us to feel that this life is worth living. But who’s the person behind all these feelings? Or do we become different people with each intense emotion? Personally, I used to let every emotion bring out a specific version of me. And I only liked the “happy” one, so I did whatever I could to reside in that feeling, turning to drugs whenever it dipped away. At the core of addictive behaviors is a need to stick to a favorable emotion. So, if you ever want to avoid the slippery slope that is addiction, make friends with all your feelings, even the “bad” ones. I firmly believe the best skill a human can have in life is treating their emotions with a degree of distance. And this article will show you why that is the case, as well as how to accomplish it. But before I get into the nitty gritty philosophical discourse, consider this story from a couple of years ago, when I was unable to deal with my own emotions:
Like the fuckboy I was, I made out with my ex-girlfriend’s best friend at a party one night. My anything but realistic mind turned that inebriated make out sesh into a sign of love. She took such a big risk, so she must really like me. I feel a gut connection! I have to pursue this and not care about the consequences. After the sinful moment, she and I met up to talk about it. I intended to push for a secret love affair, while she just wanted to sweep this under the rug and continue on with her life. She was right. My insecure ass couldn’t have been more wrong. There was still flirtation and tension but the risk was nowhere close to the reward. My brain could not comprehend that truth and I was convinced I could change her mind. My chances were not improving and I told a mutual friend about it as a way to release the pressure in my stomach. He promised he would keep the secret. Like any secret, it found its way to the masses. While I was studying in the library, I got a phone call from the lady in question. How the FUCK could you do this to me? I feel so betrayed! I will never trust you again. It was a fair response to my immature behavior. Which was then followed by more angry phone calls from people repeatedly calling me a bad person. I felt a pit in my stomach grow larger by the second. I gagged every ten seconds as I made my way home. I was finding it hard to breathe and the self-loathing thoughts got stronger by the second. You’re such a fucking piece of shit. You should be ashamed of yourself. What kind of man are you? So, I did what any good drug addict would do: I reached for a handful of Xanax and some vodka. Twenty minutes later I was face down on the floor giggling. The amount of pills I took in combination with the alcohol could have put me in the hospital—over some stupid fucking drama. I couldn’t handle the emotions of anxiety and guilt to such a high degree that I was willing to gamble my life away to momentarily wish them well. No matter how much we hate our negative emotions, they will never go away. I never properly understood that.
Don’t get into the habit of fearing your own feelings. They will only come back with a vengeance.
ACCEPTANCE
Many people view their feelings as a mechanism to define themselves. Some may call themselves “anxious people,” “sad boys,” or “a happy person,” but what does that really mean? Since these feelings are not permanent, but actually quite fleeting, how can someone define themselves that way? The trick is: you can’t. You are not defined by your feelings, but rather how you react to them. Read that again. Since you experience a rainbow of emotions each day, it’s impossible to only see yourself in one of them. Simply put, you are all of your emotions—the good and the bad. And it’s your job to find out who is the man or woman behind those feelings. Because if you change with each feeling, your identity will weaken. You must cultivate a strong core inside yourself to go back to in moments of brightness and darkness. Never forget who you are.
Although negative feelings, such as anxiety and grief, can be hard to deal with—they are just as much a part of you as the positive ones—and you must treat them equally. I’m not recommending becoming a sadist, but rather, treating each emotion with open arms and compassion. When we reject our negative feelings and start judging ourselves for having them, we turn those little creatures into full-blown monsters. What happens when you think about being tired and constantly complain about it in your mind? You get more tired and the feeling gains even more power over you. To combat this negative mental loop, consider this three-step process I use to handle my negative emotions: accept, observe, respect. Let’s use anxiety as an example.
Once anxiety enters our body, we often feel the gut-wrenching emotion and try our best to shove it aside—once we fail, we allow it to trigger a horror movie in our mind. This uncomfortable situation leads us to beg to be free from our anxiety as fast as possible. Although common, this method of “dealing” with anxiety fails miserably—it instead makes it significantly worse. The first thing we must do once anxiety comes into our domain is to accept it. Try your best to relax your body and lean into the feeling. The last thing you want to do is tense up and desperately wish for it to vanish. Although simple, this step proves to be the most important. If you get into the habit of accepting a negative feeling and not immediately getting agitated—as you age, you will notice yourself not getting fazed by emotional pain. Next, observe your anxiety with curiosity. What does it really feel like? What areas of your body is it hitting? Make sure to focus on the feeling itself and entirely disconnect from your triggered mind. I always tell myself, “into the body, out of the mind.” Become enchanted by the weird rush of venom trickling into your stomach. Our bodies are truly fascinating once we objectively observe them without judgment. While observing, I recommend breathing through your belly, exhaling twice as long as you inhale. This activates the vagus nerve, which awakens your parasympathetic nervous system and calms down your body. Finally, once you find yourself being able to tolerate the negative feeling and no longer beating yourself up, connect to your anxiety. What may have triggered it? Usually, a childhood memory or previous wound unconsciously activates a traumatic response, which leads to anxiety in the body. If you can find the answer, and don’t search for too long, empathize with that wounded version of yourself. Feel their pain and hold them. At the end of the day, we are all Russian dolls—with previous versions of ourselves popping up at any given moment. If you can’t find an answer, that is perfectly ok. Learning to sit with a negative emotion is just as powerful as realizing something new about yourself.
If one saying could encapsulate my sentiment on how to treat your emotions, it would be “amor fati,” which translates to “love of fate.” Life’s too short to spend it bullying yourself for your own emotions. Love each emotion as it comes and don’t try to push it away. The feeling of having tolerated grief or anxiety and not letting it take you away from your center is magical. And no, I do not mean being stoic and not expressing your emotions. I mean crying if you need to and feeling good about that. Maybe punching the shit out of a pillow because you’re mad. Since you had the awareness to express your emotions, you will end up not projecting them onto others—spreading kindness instead of hate. A beautiful redemptive quality exists in using an emotion to your best ability and not letting it use you. If you get into the habit of owning your emotions, they will stop owning you.
Overall, we must stop judging ourselves for feeling bad. If your best friend came up to you in distress, how would you talk to them? The answer to that is how you should talk to yourself—with compassion and love.
REFRAMING
As the all-time great boxer and philosopher Mike Tyson puts it, “Fear is my friend. I love fear. Fear allows me to reach my highest potential.” When I first heard those words on TikTok, I did not know what to make of them, but thankfully, over time, I started to realize their power. Most people see fear as a repellant—an uncomfortable feeling that holds us back. It serves to signal us what not to do. However, this couldn’t be more wrong. Yes, if you’re scared of a hippo charging at you, fucking run. But most of the time, our fear is blown out of proportion. We get scared of approaching someone attractive, starting a new creative endeavor, getting on a roller coaster, and even telling someone they’re being a fucking asshole. That fear is not justified; therefore, it must be reframed into a gas pedal for reflection and action. Whenever I fear something, I immediately tie it back to my youth. I used to be petrified of talking to beautiful women because my mother wouldn’t give me the time of day growing up. Adding fuel to the fire, I was also bullied by the “cool girls” as a pre-teen. In combination, those wounds inside me made me petrified of romantically pursuing attractive women, but the fear had no basis in reality. In reality, I was a handsome young man with a big heart and tattoos. But I treated myself as if I was that fat kid in middle school, chomping down on a Twix in the corner of the room. Thankfully, I reframed my fear as a means to get stronger. If I was scared of asking a girl out on a date, I would do it. If I feared confessing my feelings, I would do it. After a while, through repetition, my fear subsided, which emphasizes that the only way to beat fear is to lovingly act against it.
In summary, when fear enters your territory, try to remember a time where a similar situation hurt you. Empathize with that wounded version of yourself and get stronger from it. Ground yourself into reality and realize there’s nothing to be afraid of. Take a step forward and use fear to propel you into the strongest version of yourself you can possibly be.
Along with fear, anxiety can also get reframed into something more positive. Author Sam Harris pointed out that anxiety feels no different than excitement—our minds just frame them differently. The feeling before you go to your favorite concert, and the feeling you get when you can’t find your dog, are the same; the context surrounding them are just different. This fascinating observation serves to show that the harshness of feelings can get entirely changed by perspective. Although I am firmly against delusional optimism, and a big proponent of doing your shadow work, this trick can become a lifesaver—but make sure to use it sparingly. Anxiety can show us what wounds we still have to tend to, but sometimes we have to continue with our lives and act in spite of the feeling. So, if you get anxious, and you have time to sit with yourself and investigate, do that. But if you are on the go and need to get your shit together, simply reframe the anxiety as excitement. If you are going on a first date and you are anxious, instead of telling yourself things such as “Oh my god, they won’t like me,” shift it to, “Wow. I’m so excited.” Sounds like this would never work, but I promise you it genuinely does. Feel free to DM me hate mail if it fails to serve you.
Now, on to depression and grief. Both feelings are the hardest ones to deal with, in my opinion. Being suicidal and addicted to drugs for two years, I’ve gotten to know these feelings well. However, what I can say is, down days serve up the biggest lessons. Pain is our greatest teacher if we allow it to be. I still have my dark days—probably about once a week. While I am nowhere near suicidal anymore, on those days I do feel quite down. And that’s perfectly fine. The best mentality I can recommend to make the day easier, is telling yourself, “I’m gonna learn something great today.” Weather the storm and the sunshine will come out. Stick to those words in down times and you will see the beauty of redemption. Every article I have written has stemmed from a dark day. Although they are not easy to get through, I tolerate them a lot better knowing that they make me infinitely stronger.
THE OBSERVER
Until recently, whenever I felt down and had no energy to keep going, I would blast 50 Cent’s “Many Men” and picture the amount of people who doubted me in my life. A crazy surge of energy would hit me and I dived right into whatever it was I had to do. However, I eventually realized that it was never “Many men wishin’ death upon me,” it was just me versus myself. The “many men” were the choir of negative voices in my head, telling me I could never amount to anything. If somebody tells you that you will not accomplish your dreams, and you choose to believe them, you are ultimately doubting yourself—it’s not them. Thankfully it hit me that I have to learn to pick and choose which thoughts I listen to in my head. But who controls that? The answer is the observer.
A weird, godlike voice exists in your head that has power over the other ones. Find this voice and use it to expel the haters. Let this voice lead you toward the good thoughts and away from the bad ones. Many call this the higher self, but I like to call it the observer. The higher self is tied to potential, which strays away from reality. On the other hand, the observer is as real as it gets. They just watch over you and get to choose what’s worth paying attention to. Cultivate the observer and watch the quality of your life skyrocket. The observer’s job is not limited to thoughts, they help handle feelings too. Rather than becoming the feelings, allow yourself to watch them as they vanish. Like watching a dark cloud pass on a rainy day. Additionally, the observer can help to notice when you are using your emotions to create fictitious stories. For example, allowing anxiety to create a worst-case scenario in your head. The observer can step in and say, “This is not based in reality. Come back to the present moment.” As humans, we are addicted to mental stories to take us away from the present moment. To combat this, we have to cultivate a voice that keeps us grounded.
CLIMB THE MOUNTAIN
Simply put, growth is highly uncomfortable—for two key reasons. One, shedding bad habits and not reacting to negative feelings is an incredibly arduous process. Two, once we lose parts of ourselves, our bodies tend to grieve. If any of that didn’t make any fucking sense, it’s ok, let me expand. To outgrow bad habits and behaviors, the only thing we can do is learn to tolerate the feelings associated with them. For instance, if you want to stop smoking cigarettes, you must learn how to sit with cravings, riding them out to the glorious end. And this is a highly uncomfortable process. Let’s consider another example—a John Doe with mommy issues falling in love with an independent woman. Whenever the woman acts distant and doesn’t include John in her plans, he feels the same way he did as a kid, begging his mother to not leave him again. The only way he can learn to not react from those feelings is to tolerate the pain. He must sit with the anxiety and connect with his inner child, rather than using his feelings as a mechanism to control. This takes us to the central question: why are feelings funny? Because we think they serve as a trustworthy device to trigger behavior, but most of the time, all they do is hold us back. We have to learn to pick and choose when our feelings are useful to act on. And know when they exist to teach us a lesson in patience and restraint. We can only get to this place through weathering the storm. If we constantly act on our emotions, we will never know what lies behind them—our true identity. We have to give ourselves time to find that voice of reason, which is impossible if we impulsively act on every emotion. This is no easy process by any means, but it's the only process to master ourselves.
On the other hand, once we stop giving our negative emotions power over us, and consequently fix our toxic behaviors, our bodies will start to grieve. Certain behaviors are so ingrained in our identities that when they start to vanish, we unconsciously treat it as if a part of us is dying, even if we consciously want to lose that part of ourselves. Thus making growth quite resistible—since no one wants to experience the feelings of loss. This painful pattern is why people keep going back to bad habits or people. But through having awareness of this post-growth grief, it shouldn’t hold as much power over you.
Embrace the suck of emotional growth because beauty exists on the other side. Believe your heart has the power to work through any pain that comes its way.
