feeling emotions

[ellie freegan]

i have anxiety about an event coming up my natural responseis to try toconvince myself that will be fine and distract myselfbut in terms of TMS healing do you think its better just to feel the anxiety.

 

[balto]

My thought is: don't try to feel it or distract yourself from it. It is what it is. Anxiety is a normal human respond to situations that we perceived as "unpleasant". Your body is completely normal, why try to do anything to change it. There must be something wrong with your body if you don't feel anxious facing that event. Don't try to feel it. Don't try to change it, nor distract from it.... just let it happen. Just be happy and realize that your body is doing exactly what it were designed to do.
The only way to overcome anxiety produced by this event is "exposure therapy". Keep expose yourself to whatever trigger anxiety in you and the anxiety level will reduce, will go down, will lessen, ...will disappear. You go to that event often enough and you won't feel anxious anymore.
It's life. Not every thing we feel are bad. It is just the way it is.

 

[Forest]

Hi Ellie,

This is a tough one! I always struggle to find the right balance where I am mindful of my emotions but still moving in a positive direction when those emotions are negative.

.... hmmm ... the forum just told me that @balto just posted and I think that what he wrote is great, but I'll also continue with what I was going to say.

I think acceptance works wonders. I do my best to accept the things I cannot change, recognizing that it may take a while for my heart (i.e. emotional brain i.e. limbic system) to accept the change. While doing that, I also try to keep a positive attitude. Mindfulness means being aware of how my heart/emotional brain/limbic system is really feeling without dwelling on it. I don't want to fool myself that I have accepted something when, deep in my true heart, I really haven't.

I think that we tend to focus too much in our movement on our bad experiences. I think Steve Ozanich captured this brilliantly when he ended his book with "Happiness first, and good health will certainly follow…." That really gets to the heart of it. You want to spend most of your time on the positive, building positive connections in your brain.

I wrote a post about this called Feeding the Wolf vs. Lancing the Boil:
http://www.tmswiki.org/forum/threads/feeding-the-wolf-vs-lancing-the-boil.320/
I should rewrite the post, because I believe that it is one of the most important ideas on the site. To me, the thread means that once you've explored the bad stuff, you don't need to wallow it. With your new awareness, you can move forward, putting the past behind you. Dwelling too much on your negative feelings sometimes only serves to reinforce them (there is solid neuroscience that explains why this is true, later in the thread).

 

[Forest]

With that said, if you really want to work about your anxiety related to the upcoming event, you could try tapping. At first I wasn't a fan of tapping because I don't know of any scientific justification for the idea of meridians. However in the end I decided that I didn't really care about that - all I care is whether it works. And it seems to. There is actually a peer-reviewed article in a journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA) that reviews the scientific evidence about whether "accupoint tapping" works. It concludes not only that it works but that tapping meets the standards to be considered an "evidence based" practice for a number of conditions that might be relevant to you. While others might argue with this conclusion, the fact that a peer reviewed article in an APA journal would even assert this really impressed me. I've purchased Nick Ortner's new book called The Tapping Solution and am looking forward to trying it out.

However, if you want to give it a try, it's actually super easy to get started. The "Basic Recipe" from Gary Craig, the guy who essentially invented tapping, only takes 10 minutes to learn and is free:
http://www.emofree.com/eft-tutorial/tapping-basics/how-to-do-eft.html

The research article that I mentioned above argued that tapping could be considered an "evidence based" practice for the following conditions:

—to meet the criteria for designation as a “well-established treatment” include phobias (Wells, et al., 2003; Salas, Brooks, & Rowe, 2011) and test-taking anxiety (Rubino, in press; Sezgin & Özcan, 2009). Acupoint protocols appear to meet the criteria for designation as a “probably efficacious treatment” for PTSD (Church et al., 2011; Church, Hawk et al., in press; Connolly and Sakai, 2011; Karatzias et al., 2011), depression (Brattberg, 2008; Church, De Asis, et al., in press; Karatzias et al., 2011), and public speaking anxiety (Schoninger and Hartung, 2010; Jones, Thornton, & Andrews, 2011).

Most of these conditions seem to be related to anxiety, so it might be worth a try to use tapping for anxiety.

You can read the full paper here if curious:
https://innersource.net/ep/images/stories/downloads/Acupoint_Stimulation_Research_Review.pdf

But still, I wouldn't spend too much time on it. I'd do a little bit of tapping because tapping is basically a form of exposure therapy like what balto mentioned. But then, I'd get out in the world and just enjoy the best parts of your life. Your anxiety might stick with you, but as Balto mentioned, that's perfectly fine. That's just your body doing what it is designed to do. In truth, you are perfectly safe, even if it doesn't feel that way. (No matter what bad thing is on the horizon, you can overcome it. Trust me.) Just float on...