How are you feeling this week? How natural is it for you to be looking for what is good?
You might be starting to feel more optimistic and hopeful as restrictions ease and society opens up again. Here in Scotland, we are allowed into each other’s houses from next week and we can….
Hug again!
Who will you hug first?
Just imagine the release of all those pent up emotions and lack of physical connection.
Equally you might be feeling anxious, slightly agoraphobic and overwhelmed at the prospect of coming out of these difficult months where our homes have been our castles and sometimes it has been good and safe to shut ourselves away and pull the drawer bridge up. There has been safety in that and space; there is a fear and an uncertainty about the idea of mingling again with a lot of people.
All of these reactions are important and valid. And all of them are emotions.
Emotions are the next key to happier living, as outlined by Action for Happiness. Or more specifically,
Looking for what is good.
I know that as an instinctive, gut-reactive type of person, when there are a lot of emotions swimming around, it can be hard to sort through them to a rationale response. Knee jerk reactions based on the top level of emotions are more common place. This can land us in trouble as we react instinctively rather than respond objectively.
We say or do things we might then regret.
Months of living with a global pandemic and associated restrictions have taken their toll on many of us and there is a real emotional weariness. Margins to cope with life are erroded – more on this in last week’s post on resilience.
And so we can find ourselves reacting to events, people and circumstances from that place of weariness and the weight of those negative emotions pressing down on us.
This can become a negative cycle – we react based on difficult emotions of fear or anxiety or overwhelm which creates a sense of anxiety in the other person or about the situation, and that keeps us stuck in that negative mindset.
All emotions are important. It is what we do with them and how we learn to respond rather than react that creates growth.
Looking for what is good in our situations starts with being able to identify how we feel about what is going on in the first place.
Paying attention to our emotions is a hot topic at present, as the toll of Covid is assessed, researched and discussed. In my own small world alone, the number of recent webinars I have been on around this subject speaks to our need to talk more, pay attention to our emotions more and grow in our emotional intelligence.
So as we consider looking for what is good as a key to happier living, let’s start first with learning to notice our emotions.
When something happens to us – a conversation, an event or something that triggers us – our feeling brain reacts first. Our thinking brain takes longer (there is a lot of science behind this). This is why we sometimes feel that we have been hijacked by our emotions, and why there is a lot of behind that old adage of counting to 10 before you react to something.
Taking that short pause before reacting allows our thinking brain to catch up with our feeling brain and thus we can choose to respond more appropriately rather than react impulsively.
This might feel like a tangent away from the emotions as a key to happier living, especially looking for what is good.
But I am coming to realise that with such an emotional overload facing many of us, the first step is to learn to stop and notice what those emotions are. We are then much better placed to think through those emotions, acknowledge them as valid (and perhaps process them through writing or similar, more on that here) and then choose to shift instead to a positive emotion like gratitude, hope, lifting our eyes above our own situation and being simply present to what is good in that moment. Positive emotions broaden our perspective and perceptions of the event, which helps to open us up, whereas negative emotions narrow our perspective and our perceived ability to cope.
So this week, perhaps keep note as you go through each day of various events and conversations –
- What happened?
- How did you feel at that point?
- What was happening in your body?
As we practice noticing our emotions, we become more aware of what certain emotions feel like for us. We can then spot them more easily and this allows us to understand and regulate those emotions. We are more able to take constructive remedial action to get out of the situation, or attend to the underlying need. We can then make different choices and practice shifting from negative to positive as we acknowledge the negative, let go of it and choose a positive response.
Looking for what is good starts with looking for everything that is going on. This takes practice as we grow in self awareness. And this truly is us on the path to happiness.