How to manage difficult emotions

This article is part of Dare Be's Leadership Handbook, a guide to help people lead with impact and heart

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Do you approach the world with heavy emotional armour? Gritting your teeth and pushing away “bad” emotions like fear or anger?

It took me 38 years and a Vipassana silent retreat to realise that I wasn’t in control of emotions like these - and that I shouldn’t try to be.

You can learn the same valuable lesson without a string of 15-hour meditation days.

Consider this: Instead of fighting against your unpleasant emotions, you can turn them into valuable signals of what your mind and body need. 

Let’s jump into it.

My emotional coming out 

At the 10-day Vipassana silent retreat, we meditated from 5 AM to 8 PM.

We started by focusing our concentration using a breathing technique, then scanned our bodies to discover and accept what we were feeling. 

While simple in theory, the process challenged me and opened my eyes to the emotional barrier I put up within myself and with the world.

On the surface, the emotional barrier worked well. I did not feel my “bad” emotions too strongly and for too long. People could not see what I was feeling, and I could appear strong. 

But it was becoming harder to feel pleasant emotions such as joy, happiness and excitement. 

I was flatlining my life experience: I minimized both the trough and the peaks of being a human. 

Living with this armour was also exhausting and deflating. I knew something was wrong in my strategy. But I knew no other way. 

At some point, it stopped working altogether, and I nearly burned-out.

Wearing emotional armour to work

What are emotions? 

Our emotions exist to affect our behaviours. Emotions are E-motion, or energy in motion in us. 

They send us important information through our bodies based on what we perceive in the world and how we interpret it: move, don’t move, be ready to move, create glucose, breathe hard, etc. 

Emotions therefore are neither bad nor good: they send information about how we react to certain stimuli. They may feel unpleasant or pleasant, or a combination of both!

Emotions and memory are tightly connected with one another, for a good reason: your brain needs to remember quickly and for a long time what was good for you (generated a pleasant emotion) and what was bad for you (generated an unpleasant emotion). 

In short, emotions are meant to protect you from the bad things and attract you to the good things.

So what’s the problem with emotions? 

While emotions are there to protect us, we have developed unhelpful ways of dealing with them: 

• We’re hijacked by the monkey mind. For instance, we’re anxious about a meeting that should be fine - or at least won’t threaten our life. But rationality loses ground against the angry or anxious monkey mind. The reason is that emotions are managed by the most primitive part of the brain, which fires very quickly and powerfully. It existed for our survival. The cognitive part of the brain can therefore easily get overpowered by emotions. 

• We take out our negative emotions on others. Angry after a tough meeting with the boss, we can snap at our kids, fight with our spouse, or put down a coworker. This in turn can make these people feel angry too. 

In addition to dealing with them poorly, emotions themselves can work in a way that’s ill-suited to the modern world:

1. Strong fear-based emotions are a useful response to being chased by a sabre-tooth tiger, not to presenting at a board meeting. But in the absence of hungry predators, non-life-threatening situations can create the same high levels of fear, anger, and stress.

2. Unlike animals who let the full emotional energy move through their bodies, human language and thoughts somehow enable us to block our emotions. We try to put up a rational barrier, which creates tensions, both emotionally and physically.

So how can you reset your relationship with your emotions?

Hijiacked by the monkey mind

How to accept and let go of your unpleasant emotions

When you feel an unpleasant emotion such as fear, anger, or sadness, try this: 

1. Pause - close your eyes if you can.

2. Ask yourself: 

1. What thoughts are passing through my mind at present? 

2. What body sensations am I experiencing right now? And then scan your body. 

3. Allow yourself to feel the physical sensations that result from the unpleasant emotion.

3. Name your emotion(s) using the wheel of emotions below. 

4. Ask yourself: What unmet need is this emotion pointing to?

Emotion Wheel - Humansystems.co

Instead of blocking your emotions, this turns unpleasant feelings into helpful signals. Once you are clear about your needs, take responsibility for them by asking for what you need. 

Here’s an example:

You’re sitting at your desk and feel a wave of stress through your body.

1. First, you stop working, take a deep breath, and close your eyes.

2. You answer some questions:

1. “I’m thinking about the invitation to a surprise meeting this afternoon with my CEO.”

2. “My body feels uncomfortable - my heart is beating fast, I’m sweating, my chest is tight.”

3. You name your emotions using the wheel: anxious and overwhelmed

4. You name the unmet needs this reflects:

1. ‘Anxious’ reflects a need for certainty about the unknown - what is this meeting about? What are the potential consequences of this meeting? 

2. ‘Overwhelmed’ reflects a lack of time to get the rest of your work done on top of this meeting.

5. You ask for what you need:

1. You ask for clarity about the purpose of the meeting.

2. You reprioritize your work for the afternoon and delegate the tasks you won’t have time to finish.

Give these steps a try, and practice turning your negative feelings into valuable information.

For more help, the article Five practises to find peace (4 min), explains how you can strengthen your ability to deal with difficult emotions. 

Releasing strong anger and fear

Some emotions are stronger than others. In addition to the process above, you may need to take a few more steps to release them. Here are a few ways to release anger and fear. 

Anger

If someone behaved in a way that made you angry, and you are worried this anger may overflow when you interact with them, you could write a letter addressing all the reasons why you are angry. But keep this letter to yourself.

You could also physically release your emotions by hitting a punching ball, or, if you can find one, go deep into a forest and scream your frustration away. As odd as it may sound, it will likely help! 

Fear

We tend to avoid listening to our fears. Instead of running away, stop and “listen” to them for a short period of time.

Ask yourself: “what am I afraid of here?” Take the time to answer yourself. Take a few more deep breaths and then ask: “How often have my worried predictions been correct?”

In many cases, the situations you’ve feared may have been less drastic than the catastrophe you’ve created in your mind.

If it’s all still too much, you may be having powerful responses triggered by past trauma. In that case, it is probably best to seek professional help so that you can heal.

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