Managing My Feelings in Good Times and Bad

Originally published in the #RyersonSA blog as “SA Has the Feels 201 (Part 2): A Primer on Managing Your Emotions and Feelings.”

Have you ever wondered why it’s easier to manage feelings, including stress and anxiety, on some days and harder on others? In this article, we’ll explore why that might be the case, including strategies to help you manage different categories of feelings. If the idea of categories of feelings is new to you, check out my last blog titled “There are Different Categories of Emotions, and They Aren’t Equally Helpful.”

Manage Global Levels of Arousal

The first step in managing your feelings is to manage your overall susceptibility to experiencing strong arousal (i.e. feeling something strongly in your body), which then gets interpreted as a particular feeling given your individual context, lived experience, and cultural background. To manage emotional arousal generally, it’s wise to focus on the basics:

• Sleep enough (6–8 hours/night for most adults).
• Eat balanced meals, regularly (e.g. balancing protein and carbs to maintain steady blood sugar levels; limiting caffeine and alcohol intake).
• Drink plenty of water—even mild dehydration can impact your mood and concentration.
• Exercise regularly (preferably 20–30 minutes/day) to help balance mood, anxiety and stress.
• Include activities in your schedule that recharge your emotional batteries; these may include activities such as social time with friends, curling up in a quiet place with a good book, taking in or participating in the arts, or anything else that replenishes your soul.

Beyond the basics, actively cultivating skills in mindfulness, meditation, and relaxation techniques are all positively associated with helping to manage arousal and stress. Studies have shown that regular practice of meditation can produce visible changes in your brain in just eight weeks.

Beyond managing your baseline arousal, managing specific feelings gets us into more nuanced territory.

“Emotions are not a singular entity; each one has a distinct form and function. For example, in anger the action tendency moves people to expand and thrust forward. The function of anger is to set boundaries, and anger itself varies: it may only last a few minutes, or it can smolder for days.… [A]t any one time anger may be an empowering adaptive response to being violated; at another time it may be a destructive overreaction to a current situation, based on a history of prior abuse. Anger may be a person’s first immediate reaction, or it may come only at the end of a chain of prior feelings and thought.”

– L. S. Greenberg, Emotion-Focused Therapy: Coaching Clients to Work Through Their Feelings

To manage feelings, it’s helpful to know a few things:

• Which feeling you are experiencing, and what needs and action tendencies are associated with that feeling (see below).
• What category of feeling you are experiencing: primary adaptive, primary maladaptive, secondary, or instrumental.
• Your specific triggers that activate challenging emotions in your body.

Sound complicated? It is—but it’s also helpful once you get used to the ideas. Give me a chance to walk you through the principles and you’ll be on your way to managing feelings in no time. Let’s start with a basic overview of feelings and their needs.

In the last post, I walked you through some principles for understanding your feelings; we reviewed the idea that emotions and feelings are part of a signaling system, directing our attention towards important aspects of our environment, helping us to know what we need, and priming us for action to get our needs met. I also introduced four categories of feelings, each of which provides us with a different kind (and different quality) of information:

• Primary adaptive feelings,
• Primary maladaptive feelings,
• Secondary feelings, and
• Instrumental feelings.

If these terms are new to you, you may want to start there. In this post, I’m going to approach how to manage different categories of feelings in the reverse order from our last article.

Managing Instrumental Feelings

In the last article, I wrote that “expression of a feeling is considered instrumental if we are expressing something we are not actually feeling in order to control or manage the environment around us.”

Using instrumental expression is a form of power and control, rather than authentic emotion expression. While it can be effective in achieving an outcome, the cost can be high including undermining others’ trust in you. If you recognize this as a pattern you have learned, stop and ask yourself what the benefits and costs are. If the costs outweigh the benefits, ask yourself what you are really trying to achieve, and work to learn ways of communicating your honest intentions and feelings more clearly and transparently. Your relationships may benefit from it, and your real underlying needs are likely to be met more effectively.

Managing Primary Maladaptive and Secondary Feelings (In the Moment)

A Quick Review:

• Primary maladaptive feelings occur when you encounter a stimulus (something in your environment that draws your attention) and immediately have a feeling that is highly familiar—one that feels old, repetitive, or stuck, or that is an overreaction given your present circumstances. These feelings do not feel “fresh and new” and do not give you good information to guide your actions.
• Secondary feelings are feelings that you have in response to other feelings or thoughts. They are reactions to reactions.

Managing primary maladaptive and secondary feelings are what we’re really talking about when we talk about managing problematic feelings and their triggers. These feelings need to be managed or regulated in the moment. Regulating a feeling is like turning up or down the volume of your feeling so that you can work with it and understand what it is telling you. Both secondary and primary maladaptive feelings can be managed or regulated using similar techniques. To manage these categories of feelings, try the following steps:

1) Acknowledge and name what you are feeling.

Identify that you are feeling something. While this may sound obvious, for some of us, this step is really hard. If this is true for you, try a technique called Focusing, created by Dr. Eugene Gendlin, to increase your awareness of your feelings. Focusing involves identifying any sensations you are feeling in your body so you can make meaning of the sensation. This process will help you to name your emotions and become aware of your feelings.

Focusing Exercise — Adapted from the work of Dr. Eugene Gendlin

Turn attention inward to what is troubling, but may be unclear. Identify and pay attention to all of the sensations you feel in your body as you hold this troubling thing in your attention. This may include noticing and paying attention to the rate of your breathing, your heart rate, sensations in and around your chest and stomach (e.g. ‘butterflies,’ muscle tension, heaviness, lightness, tingling, burning). Sit and notice the whole experience of these sensations with an attitude of open curiosity for at least 30 seconds. Find a word or image that somehow captures what you are experiencing inside your body. Example of words or images I have heard include: static electricity, heaviness, a waterfall, darkness. When a word or image comes to mind, ask yourself if this word or image really captures what you are feeling. If so, continue. If not, or if your experience has changed in the naming of it, wait for a new word or image to arise that somehow captures your experience even more closely. Once you have a label for your feeling (a word or an image), ask yourself the following questions:

• What is at the heart of this experience for me?
• When have I felt this way before?
• What would it take for this experience to change, for me to feel more comfortable?

Stay with the feeling and the label until the sensations in your body shift. Over time, it will. When your internal experience changes, start this process again. Continue until you arrive at a sense of calm, or clarity, or until your experience no longer changes. When you have finished, identify what feelings lay deepest, or underneath the others. You may notice that one feeling was sitting on top of another (a secondary feeling to a more primary feeling underneath it). You may notice that one feeling is a reaction to another feeling (secondary feeling), or you may notice that one or two large core feelings sit side by side and are very familiar feelings that tend to arise again and again (primary maladaptive feelings). Once you know what your feelings are, explore your memory for times you have felt this way before. Look for patterns across situations such as common triggers, common sequences of feelings, and past actions that led you to feel better or worse. Knowing your triggers will help you predict and manage challenging feelings when you encounter them in the future.

2) Use a strategy to regulate the feeling.

Regulating a feeling is like turning the volume up or down on your feelings as needed. You will be best able to manage and understand your feelings if you are able to simultaneously feel the feeling (the signal is loud enough to hear), and are still able to organize your thoughts about the feeling (the signal is not so loud that it’s impossible to think).

Turn Up the Volume

To turn the volume up on your feelings, sit in a quiet place, pay attention to your feelings, and try one of the following:

• The Focusing exercise outlined above.
• Engage in stream-of-consciousness writing. No censoring. Set a time limit, and write exactly what comes into mind, following where your thoughts and feelings lead you. Alternate between recording your thoughts, and answering the question: “What do I feel in my body as I write this?” Name your feelings as you go.

Turn Down the Volume

To turn the volume down on your feelings, try one or more of the following:

Acknowledge and name your feelings.

Sometimes, this is enough.

Use your imagination to create distance with a feeling or problem.

Although it may sound a bit strange, emotions and feelings often respond rapidly to visual imagery.

First, imagine what your feeling would look like if you could see it. Give it a size, a shape, and a colour that somehow captures the essence of the feeling.

Then, try any one of the following to decrease the intensity of a strong feeling or a problem that seems too big to manage:

• Distance metaphors and imagery: place the image of the problem or feeling on a raft and imagine it floating out to sea, or place the problem or feeling in a train car and send it down the tracks. Notice how your feelings change as the image moves away from you.
• Containment metaphors: place the image of the problem or feeling in a box or container and apply whatever locks, walls, or security systems are necessary to keep the lid closed. Notice how your feelings change as the lid closes. When using this strategy, make sure to come back to unpack the box later, when the time is right. In my experience, even the best containment systems break down if boxes are allowed to get too full!
• Protective barriers: If you are reacting to a strong trigger in your immediate vicinity, imagine a protective barrier or layer of armor between yourself and whatever is triggering you. If you read my last post, this is a lot like Albert donning his armor. Remember, armor is meant for short-term use, not daily attire. (And also: if there is something dangerous in your environment, fear is primary and adaptive; don’t imagine—run!).
• Remember times you felt really good to help you step into different feelings: Vividly recall a time when you felt calm, content, proud, or happy. Recall what you were seeing, hearing, doing, who you were with, and what you were feeling in your body. Notice how this impacts your body in the present.
• Negotiate with your feeling. Hear the signal that your body is sending you. Mentally identify what the signal is telling you, and name what you actually need. Ask the feeling to come back at a later time, and promise to fulfill the need at that time.
• If the feeling is big, old, and familiar, and especially if it evokes memories of past hurts or future worries, pay close attention to sensory information in your immediate environment to re-centre you in the present moment. This may help your body better distinguish the past and the present. To do this try any one of the following:
• Naming five things you can see, five things you can hear, five things you can feel against your skin, five things you can taste, and five things you can smell.
• Take 10 deep breaths, focusing on the feeling of your abdomen rising and falling. Changing your breathing changes your physiology and can be especially powerful in seeking to manage stress and anxiety.
• Wrap yourself up in your warmest, coziest sweatshirt or blanket and focus on how comfy that feels, or hug your favourite stuffy and feel how soft it is against your skin.
• Power Pose! In this rather awesome TedTalk, Dr. Amy Cuddy teaches you to “Fake it ‘til you become it.” The summary: change your body posture to increase confidence. If you’re feeling ashamed, scared, or vulnerable, take up space!
• Use cognitive distraction such as: counting backwards by 7 from 100, or name a city starting with each letter of the alphabet, starting with the letter “A”. Engaging your cortex helps to regulate your limbic system.

3) Identify the trigger for your feelings.

Knowing what triggers your primary maladaptive feelings and secondary feelings can help you understand why you are feeling the way you are and can help you to predict and prepare to better manage these feelings in the future. To identify triggers that are not immediately clear, try this the next time you feel a troublesome feeling. Immediately after regulating a feeling, close your eyes, and let your memory play like a video in your mind. Right before these feelings emerged, what happened? What did you see, hear, taste, smell, feel, think, or remember that triggered these feelings? Write down your response. Keep a journal of triggers to look for patterns over time.

It is also helpful to look for patterns in what has triggered big feelings for you in the past. Most likely, you will be choosing from fear, anger, sadness, or shame. Take out one piece of paper for each basic emotion that comes to mind—for example if sadness and shame are two emotions that often recur in your life, you’ll use one piece of paper for each. Write the name of the emotion you’re reflecting upon at the top of the page, and then write out key memories of times when you have felt that feeling strongly in a way that felt “bad” or out of control. Be sure to include the first time you can ever remember feeling that way, and the time you felt that feeling at its worst. For each memory, recall to the best of your ability what it was that caused you to feel that way. Common examples include the look or vocal tone of a parent, being hurt or scared by someone, losing someone or something important, or being bullied or ridiculed. Identify any common themes amongst the triggers. Be forewarned! This exercise can stir up a lot of feelings. If you are prone to especially big feelings, let someone know you are going to do this exercise, and check in with them afterwards, or plan for some self-care after the activity. If you routinely have very big feelings or suffer from depression or anxiety, you may want to seek out a therapist who is skilled in working with big feelings to help out. Typically, therapists well-trained in Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) or other trauma-informed therapies will be skilled in these areas.

HINT: Most people are triggered primarily by maladaptive shame-based feelings, or maladaptive fear-based feelings. To get a quick sense of which camp you may fall in, or whether you’re one of the lucky few who may have both sets of triggers, ask yourself this basic question (adapted from Dr. Les Greenberg):

• When home alone on a Saturday night, are you more likely to feel nervous or scared (fear-based), or feel unloved and unwanted (shame-based)? (If you feel overjoyed and relaxed, you’re likely experiencing primary adaptive emotion in your fast-paced life—enjoy!)

If most of your triggers relate to interactions with others, try this question:

• When interacting with others, are you more likely to lose your cool when someone rejects/leaves you, or when someone disrespects/criticizes you? The first may suggest triggers related to attachment needs (a need to be liked and accepted). The latter may relate more to identity needs (a need to be seen as competent or skilled).

After identifying your triggers, try writing a script for how you’d prefer to respond when you encounter a similar trigger in the future, and practice that response—out loud. This is another great activity to try with a trusted friend or support; someone who may be able to help you see new possibilities in areas where you are stuck.

Summary

So, let’s sum up what we have learned, shall we? We have learned about primary adaptive feelings, those feelings that provide us with current and relevant information about something happening in the “here and now.” Paying attention to and understanding these feelings gives us accurate information about what we need, and points us in the direction of meeting that need. Don’t “manage” these feelings—act on them!

We also learned about primary maladaptive feelings, those feelings that can lead us astray. Like a car’s “Fix Engine” light that gets stuck in the on position, these feelings are old, stuck, and repetitive feelings that stem from past “then and there” situations. Learn what triggers these feelings, and how to manage them effectively. Eventually you may want to do some work, on your own or with support from friends or a therapist, to heal these feelings so you can more easily be in touch with your primary adaptive feelings in response to present circumstances.

Secondary feelings are feelings about feelings, or feelings about thoughts. Train yourself to identify these feelings. Then, dig deeper to find the primary feelings underneath.

Finally, instrumental feelings are a bit of a misnomer. These are really behaviours, meant to mimic the expression of a feeling, aimed at controlling or manipulating an outcome. If you think you sometimes express instrumental “feelings”, work to understand your motives, and examine the possible costs and benefits.

If you want more help to unpack the presence and impact of different categories of emotions in your life, therapists trained in Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT), will be familiar with these concepts and their implications for symptoms of depression, anxiety, and more simply in relationships and in daily life.

If you want more help to unpack your own emotions and the role they may be playing in depression, anxiety, stress responses, or relationship difficulties, our emotion focused therapists are here for you. Reach out to book an appointment with one of our mental health professionals.