It can seem irrational to have feelings about things that are outside of our control.
That’s my friend’s conclusion, anyways.
After years of seeing the news cycle get worse, the things covered in it more unnerving, and people’s emotional responses to it more intense, his approach to dealing with his own feelings about what’s going on in the world is to convince himself that he shouldn’t have them.
Logic over feelings?
He looked off into the distance as he told me this over coffee at our local bagel shop. The way he sees it: the best way to deal with the world is to not have any feelings about what’s going on.
“It doesn’t make sense to,” he told me. “It’s not logical. Why would I feel things about issues and situations that I can’t change or that I’m not directly involved in?”
He was convinced there was a way to override what he feels. Like the heavy, confusing feelings he has around the election, the Middle East, the prison system, the climate crisis…
“If this part of me that knows it’s irrational to feel these things was just strong enough…” his thought trailed off. I could see his internal world working hard.
Knowing me, he knew I’d make a light pitch to try processing what he feels. I gently toed my way towards the idea, but was met with resistance. “Feelings just make things worse,” he pushed back. “I end up being reactive and doing shit I regret.”
My pitch to him
It's tough to figure out what to do with a 24/7 news cycle that’s constantly in our faces, and that makes the best of us feel hopeless at times.
We, as people, have never had such an intimate, information-filled relationship with the world before. Not as a society or as a species. So we’re faced with needing to figure out something new.
On top of that, we’re sorely missing key messaging and education on what emotions are and how to work with them as a society. This leads many of us to land where my friend did—in a mindset that there’s someway to force ourselves not to feel them.
“Your logic makes sense.” I told him. “But emotions just don’t work like that, unfortunately.” He softened a bit, signaling me to go on.
For the next hour we went deep on the neurobiology of emotions, what to do with them when we feel them and why, and the all-too-common experience of dissociating while reading the news.
Below are highlights from our talk. Let me know what you think.
Mental gymnastics don’t work with emotions—emotions live in the body. Intellectualizing our way around them doesn’t help longterm.
More skills, not less emotions—emotions are inherent to being a human, so they’ll always exist. By learning how to work with them they become less scary and turn into a resource.
Taking less in grounded > Taking in more dissociated—the news is overwhelming and leads a lot of us to dissociate. We can notice when this happens and take steps to slow down.
A personal share ~
This video-podcast thing is something new I’m experimenting with—what do you think? I’m keeping it low lift at this point. You should be able to find the podcast (“We Heal For All”) on all major platforms—Apple, Spotify, etc. Let me know what you think!
Are there any topics or themes alive for you these days I might be able to cover? Things I’ve unpacked in the past you’d like to see more of? If so, please let me know. I’d love to do so.
Alright, advice to my friend:
Mental gymnastics don’t work with emotions
Emotions live in the body, not just the mind. They’re actually bundles of physiological responses that have evolved over time to help us respond to our environments. Environments that now, in the 21st century, include a more intimate relationship with the larger world.
While I sympathize with my friend’s logic, we talked about the fact that emotions just don’t work that way. They don’t go away through sheer willpower or mental gymnastics that try to contort them into being something they’re not, or push them away so they don’t exist. Those tactics might help for a bit, but not for the longterm.
At their core, emotions are energy. And energy needs to move. This is what processing emotions is all about—helping emotional energy move instead of letting it get stuck and lead us to do or say things we regret, or make us feel sick and unwell.
More skills, not less emotions
My friend doesn’t want to feel things about the world. I get that. There are plenty of times when I roll my eyes or feel grumbly about having to deal with my emotions.
But at the end of the day, emotions just are and they won’t go away. They’re here to stay. And while at first glance this can look like a bad thing to someone like my friend, with the right tools and support it can actually become a really good thing.
Over time with more skills and opportunities to practice processing what we feel, emotions can become a resource to us that we can use to navigate the world. They become less foreign, and therefore less scary, as we understand them more and get better at caring for them.
They can eventually become our allies. Emotions reveal things to us because they’re packed with adaptive info. They can give us insights into our values and needs, which we can then translate into the almighty question of: how to be a human in this crazy ass, every-changing world.
Taking less in grounded > Taking in more dissociated
As we went on, my friend got on board to what I was saying, but was also like, “Cool, cool, cool—sounds awesome… But, like how do I do it?”
We took a recent experience of his with the news. He was reading an in-depth series of articles about the drug cartels in Latin America. He churned through piece after piece. Afterwards he felt sick. He couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was, but he just felt awful.
I asked him if he noticed feeling floaty or like he wasn’t in the room anymore at any point while reading. He said he wasn’t sure.
Often times, when reading about an issue in the world, a whole range of different feelings can come up because these topics are layered and complex. When this becomes overwhelming to us, our mind-body system can turn to creative forms of self protection to help us handle it.
A common one is dissociation. While this looks different for each of us, dissociation often manifests as feeling disconnected from our bodies or having an out-of-body experience. For some it can feel like the world around them is a dream or a movie. There’s a quality of spacey-ness that can come with it. It is as if there’s a bunch of space created between a person’s consciousness and their body in order to protect them from feeling whatever they’re feeling.
When this happens, especially while reading the news, we can use that as a cue that our system is having a hard time and that we need to slow down. We can learn how to recognize when we are dissociating (what it uniquely looks for us) and then take steps when we notice it’s happening.
Steps can look like placing your feet firmly on the floor and pressing your big toe into the ground. It can look like big belly breaths, sending your breath to the lower part of your belly. It can look like getting up and shaking your arms and legs out, getting stuckness to move. And then noticing what you notice. Do you feel more grounded? More in your body? Less dream like?
There’s a trade-off here. By reading the news with more emotional and somatic mindfulness you might not be able to take in as much information as quickly. But—what my friend and I talked about—there’s a net positive here because the quality of the experience and your ability to absorb what you take in changes. You can integrate the information you’re taking in better—both the media and data kind of information, as well as the sensory information.
I’m curious how this lands for you? Can you relate to my friend’s experience of trying to override his feelings? Or to the experience of getting floaty while reading the news?
Big thank you to my friend for giving me permission to share this here with you!
Grateful to you for reading this and connecting with me in this way!
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Much love, be well
Should we have feelings about things we can't control?