Use Your Emotions Rather than Worry
Here are some simple steps to develop a better relationship and acceptance of your emotions.
- Notice Your Emotions
- Use Your Emotion to Tell You about Your Needs
- Climb a Ladder of Meaning
- Accept Your Feelings
- Use Images to Create Feelings
- Feel Less Guilty and Ashamed
- Recognize that Almost Everyone Has These Feelings
- Accept Contradictory Feelings
- Be Irrational
- Face the Worst Case
I will be discussing emotions and anxiety a lot more in future blogs. But think again how you think about your emotions. Are you afraid to feel arousal, tension, or fear? Do you seem to have an overly negative view of feelings? Do you struggle against the way you feel or are you able to let your feelings come and go?
You can humanize your emotions, recognize that contradictory feelings mean you may know a lot about someone, realize that being irrational is part of being alive, and recognize that your feelings of sadness, anxiety and anger may point to what you need-and what is missing.
You can climb a ladder of higher meaning if you realize that sometimes we feel sad because what is missing points to a higher meaning-what you aspire to. If you worry about being lonely, perhaps that illustrates that you are a loving person---and that the higher meaning of painful feelings is what makes life important to us. And also makes it hard for us at times.
I discuss these ideas in two of my books, The Worry Cure: Seven Steps to Stop Worry from Stopping You and my new book (coming out in a couple of weeks), Anxiety Free: Unravel Your Fears Before they Unravel You.
More in a later blog.
1Tallis, F., Davey, G. C., & Capuzzo, N. (1994). The phenomenology of non-pathological worry: A preliminary investigation. In G. Davey & F. Tallis (Eds.), Worrying: Perspectives on theory, assessment and treatment (pp. 61-89). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Son.
