You Can Feel Good from Feeling Bad
“Even if we don’t like our negative feelings or outlooks, we still remain stuck in them because they feel safer and strangely more comforting than unfamiliar, positive feelings.”
-Abigail Cole Hardin, CLC: PNLP
By Abigail Cole Hardin, CLC; PNLP
Circumstantially, it makes sense if you have been feeling negative emotions lately considering the pandemic, political unrest, natural disasters, financial stress, and isolation consistently for almost one year and counting! These circumstances evoke constant feelings of fear, worry, stress, anxiety, powerlessness, sadness, anger, and depression. However, these feelings may become our new norm if we are not careful.
Our brains are designed to conserve energy by using habits.
However, the brain does not recognize habits as “good or bad.” Instead, it looks for “familiar or unfamiliar.”
If a good behavior is unfamiliar, our brains resist this change and label it as “bad or not worth it.” If a bad behavior is familiar, our brains endorse and even crave to repeat it to save energy and reward with “feel-good” hormones.
Thus, we can actually feel good from feeling bad if the bad is familiar.
For example, if we have been under constant stress, our brain recognizes that as a familiar state. Thus, it will attract us to stressful situations to stay in the familiar state. Or if we are used to feeling anxiety, we can stay in an anxious loop instead of finding and integrating positive ways to calm down. Just like habits form with constant repetition, repetitive emotions send us into an emotional loop where we get stuck. Sadly, even if we don’t like our negative feelings or outlooks, we still remain stuck in them because they feel safer and strangely more comforting than unfamiliar, positive feelings.
So how do we stop the familiar emotional loops and live the feelings we actually want to feel?
Step One: Detect the Feelings You Feel the Most
Notice familiar feelings by going through your day and asking these questions:
What is your typical day-to-day routine, and when do you feel the most negativity?
When you wake up, how do you feel? What is your first thought?
When do you start feeling a negative emotion?
Are you already anticipating feeling bad or fearing that you will feel bad?
Which emotion do you feel the most?
What makes you start to feel worse?
What makes you start to feel better?
Is there someone in your day that hears how you’re feeling?
Do you feel better when you list all your negative emotions or stressors to a person or on social media?
Do you long for others to rescue you or want others to comfort you?
Do you contain your emotions or do you eventually need to express them?
Do you vent and feel better after venting?
Do you check the news to confirm negative suspicions?
Do you focus on the same problems that never seem to have a solution?
Now, look at your week and determine how often you feel negatively and for how long. If you have these negative emotions as part of your weekly routine, your brain has become accustomed to negative emotions, and you are stuck in an emotional loop.
A lot of the time, we can feel as if we are being proactive about our circumstances by “feeling” our way through them.
We feel worry as if we are preparing to respond to a problem before it happens. This makes us feel good by being proactive, even though it is a bad feeling. We can feel sad for ourselves because it makes us feel good to not have to face change and use energy to do life differently. Emotional loops allow us to use feelings as our best option to manage our life versus looking at options that are going to help us live our best life.
Step Two: Expand Your Options with the Help from Another
An emotional loop is an internal experience that is hard to detect without the help of another. Even though I invited you to create self-awareness of your negative emotions, it is hard to see the alternative response because your brain does not want you to, since this would be unfamiliar. However, with the help of a coach, counselor, or motivating friend, you can find new options of how to respond to your circumstances.
In my training as a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) Practitioner and coach, I have learned that having only two options keep you stuck, but three or more get you to move forward.
What’s a limited-option, “stuck state” sound like?
“I have to vent, or I can’t let it go.”
“I feel sad, and I can’t help how I feel.”
“If I don’t worry, then I won’t be prepared.”
“I have to stay in this stressful job because it’s the only way to make money.”
“I have to watch the news even if it makes me more anxious.”
These stuck states are dictated by negative emotions. The help from another helps you have alternatives to process your feelings and not be blinded by them.
A professional can coach you how to integrate change and fight the pushback from your brain.
Too many times, we give our power away to our negative emotions, when really, we just got in a bad habit.
We are not our feelings. We get a choice.
Step Three: Allow Yourself to Feel Positive Emotions
Dr. Rick Hanson, author of Hardwiring Happiness, explains how it’s easier to have a negative bias than a positive bias. In other words, most people feel good from feeling bad. However, we are stuck in negative emotional loops when we haven’t trained our brains to travel down positive neural pathways or “happy streets.” To form a positive bias, we need to consciously allow ourselves to feel positive emotions.
Take at least twenty seconds (try timing yourself) and allow yourself to feel loved.
Where do you notice it in your body?
How does your breath change?
How do your muscles feel?
How can you soak in the feeling of love even more?
If every day, you take twenty seconds to soak in the experience of feeling loved, you have created a familiar habit of positive emotions. The conscious awareness of how your body feels different with this emotion solidifies the positive shift even more than writing down things you are happy about or grateful for.
The key to feel good without feeling bad is to allow yourself to get more familiar with experiencing positive emotions.
These three steps have been monumental in my emotional growth.
I was stuck in many negative emotional loops after coming out of a high-stress lifestyle in New York City for over four years. The loops continued, years later, even being out of the stressful environment. I was sick of feeling semi-good from feeling mostly bad. Thus, I had to do conscious work with the help of another and take responsibility for my emotions every day.
The struggle is real.
My brain fought me so hard to even have a positive emotion towards myself let alone my circumstances.
So, for those in the emotional trenches—my message is:
You are allowed to experience good emotions even when your circumstances are bad.
You do not have to look to your circumstances, or your past, to tell you how to feel.
You must look to the ultimate truth:
“Set your mind on the things above and not on the things here on earth” (Col. 3:2).
For above is our heavenly Father, who “never leaves or forsakes you” in bad circumstances (Heb. 13:5), but “works [them] together for our good” (Rom. 8:28).
And “even if our hearts condemn us, God is greater than our hearts” (1 Jn. 3:20).
“Nothing can [stand in the way or] separate you from His love” (Rom. 8:31).
So, soak in these truths and experience them, as they become the “renewal of your mind” (Rom. 12:2).
Scripture has been the game-changer in me taking down my negative emotional loop.
Through the Lord’s truth, I realized the life I am allowed to live.
I may be “afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing” (2 Cor. 4:8) because I “have a hope that does not disappoint” (Rom. 5:5).
When Christ purchased us a new life, we got the choice to choose how we feel based on who He is and not the world.
So today, what choice will you make?
Abigail Cole Hardin is a Certified Life Coach and a Neuro-Linguistic Programming Practitioner for Hardin Life Resources
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