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It's easy to be driven by our emotions. We know we should exercise, but it's cold outside and we just don't feel like it. We're depressed because we're out of a job, and know we should get ourselves down to the unemployment office, but we feel so tired, and so wind up just sitting on the couch watching the CSI marathon. This type of thinking - don't feel like it, don't do it - can happen to us over little and big things dozens of times a day.
But I've recently been reading about Morita therapy. Morita was a Japanese psychiatrist who worked and wrote in the 1930s. He was a contemporary of Freud. But unlike Freud who based a lot of his mental health ideas on Judeo-Christian thinking, Morita based his on Buddhism. Where Freud and many of us in the West think a lot of about the whys of our emotions - mentally analyzing, tracking down their roots, telling ourselves we shouldn't feel this way or needing to somehow kill the feeling through drugs, medication, addictive behaviors - Morita basically said, give it up. All this attempted unraveling of emotions was useless, he believed, and actually could make our feelings worse. The antidote to bad feelings, he believed, was clear action. Here is a quick summary of his major ideas:
• You can't control your emotions by will. There is no way we can will ourselves to be happy. What we absolutely can control is our behavior, what we do so do that.
• Accept your feelings. Don't mentally fight them, deny them (never deny reality, said Morita), or even dwell on them. Instead Buddhist acceptance. Acknowledge, feel, but then act in spite of them.
• Emotions will with time fade unless you stimulate them. This is where endless replaying that emotional loop -- dwelling on the argument with our partner, obsessing about the breakup with the boyfriend - merely fans the emotional flames. Again, feel, accept, but move on and they will fade.
• Emotions serve a purpose. But they are not all bad, or bad at all. Feelings, like pain, provide information about a problem to be solved, something we need to pay attention to, about what we need and are not getting. You don't have to spray your emotions around. Instead, extract the information and use it.
• While we can't directly control our emotions, we can influence them. If you are lonely, go out and see friends. If angry, go run around the block until you're tired, meditate, or write down how you're feeling to help drain the anger away.
The message here is don't wait to feel like it to do it, rather do it, and you actually might come to feel like it. But what is it you should do when you're feeling lousy and should do? A few options:
Act planfully. Figure out what the emotion is telling and take action. If you are waking up at 3 am obsessing about your finances, sit down, take stock, and come up with a budget. If you worry that your boss doesn't think you're doing a good job, be proactive, and schedule a meeting to discuss your performance and get her feedback. Put out the emotional fire through action.
Act purposefully. Purpose here means those behaviors that give you a sense of purpose - the things that drive you, that you feel passionate about, that when you do them you become creatively caught up in the flow. These behaviors - gardening, helping others, making music, spending time with your kids -- are what you can always return to when your emotions are down. Chances are that once you start doing these things, the worry, the depression, will disappear.
Act mindfully. Like Morita, Eckhart Tolle suggests that if you have to do something that you don't like to do - change a flat tire, scrub out the bathroom tub, whatever it is - rather than focusing on the emotions and yapping in your head about how this isn't fair or how it is awful - try instead to be as mindful as possible while doing it. Feel your muscles working as you lift the tire or the sponge in your hand, listen to the sound of the tightening bolts, the running of the water. By increasing your attention on the present, there's less room for all the mental chatter and crummy feelings.
The bottom line here is you running you, rather than continuing to allow your emotions to run you. Morita's constant question and mantra were: "What is the next thing I need to do?" rather than the more common "How do I feel?" So what is the next thing you need to do?
Do it and you may be surprised how your feelings will sort themselves out.
