Stop Fighting the Emotions.

Even uncomfortable emotions are completely normal and serve a purpose.

There’s no escaping an overall fluctuation of emotions in your life. Sometimes, we find ourselves feeling down, lethargic, angry, or frustrated. In these moments, it's natural to want to escape these uncomfortable feelings as quickly as possible. But trying to force ourselves out of an emotion will always make the problem worse.

When we feel an uncomfortable emotion, our first instinct might be to push it away or deny it.

We might tell ourselves to "snap out of it" or try to distract ourselves from the feeling. But emotions are our body’s way of processing experiences. They come up and move through us for a reason, and pushing them away doesn't make them disappear. It actually just means that you’re actively resisting what your body is trying to naturally do, and you end up holding on to that emotional energy, preventing it from being processed and released.

Forcing yourself not to feel your emotions ultimately leads to a buildup of emotional energy that has nowhere to go. This unresolved emotional energy then keeps trying to come up to get solved (as it should have been the first time), but because it continues to feel uncomfortable, we perceive it as a threat, and then we develop defense mechanisms to help us avoid that pain, creating more problems in our lives, leading to more and more unresolved emotions that we get more uncomfortable dealing with.

Moreover, when we tell ourselves that the way we feel is wrong, we add guilt and shame to the mix. This compounds the problem, making us feel even worse about ourselves and our emotions.

Instead of trying to force an emotion away, we should learn to recognize and accept it. This doesn’t mean we act on every impulse our emotions bring, but it does mean acknowledging our feelings without judgment. Recognizing that it's okay to feel sad, angry, or frustrated helps us avoid adding guilt or shame to our emotional experience.

By acknowledging our emotions, we give ourselves the space to process them.

This can be as simple as taking a few deep breaths and naming the emotion we’re feeling. "I’m experiencing sadness right now," or "I’m experiencing frustration at the moment." This practice can help us remain calm and mindful, even in the midst of an emotional storm.

Our goal is to learn to stop resisting the emotional experience; To allow it to pass through us without resistance. When we can master that, we find that they do, indeed, pass through us. Sometimes they’re uncomfortable… but they don’t harm us.

Emotions are temporary. They have a natural rhythm to them. By staying present and not feeling threatened by our emotions, we can navigate through them without reacting in ways we might later regret.

Remember, emotional storms always pass. By learning to recognize and accept our emotions, we can process them healthily and move forward with greater emotional resilience and peace.