The swirling vortex of emotional experience
Turns out, pushing uncomfortable feelings away has the opposite effect: they don’t disappear. They get louder!
Mindset Mastery is a free monthly newsletter about the psychology of small business ownership for freelance creatives from me, Jenni Gritters. If you’d like to support my work, I invite you to become a paid subscriber for $5/ month! Paid subscribers receive monthly journaling prompts, along with other perks.
Welcome to a special mini series!
This week, I’m sharing three short newsletters with y’all to let you in on the curriculum for ADAPT, my new business coaching program for freelancers living with constraints. Registration for the program closes this Sunday, March 26th (my birthday!) at midnight PST.
I only have a few spots left in the live track, and I hope you’ll consider joining. If this program isn’t right for you, please share it with a friend!
If you missed my first newsletter in this mini series, which is about accountability, check it out here! The second, all about space vs time, can be found here.
Third up: Feelings. Let’s talk about them.
Last week, I got sick. I had a full day of work planned and ended up staying at home in bed all day instead. My husband and two children had been sick with the virus for a few weeks and I thought I’d avoided it — but of course I picked it up right as they all started feeling better. (If you’re a parent, you know this is absolutely standard.)
I’ve always struggled with being sick. It’s part of why spending 18 months with hyperemesis gravidarum during both of my pregnancies really challenged me. I tend to gaslight myself (“you weakling, you’re not really that sick) and I still get angry when I can’t show up to my day in the ways I planned. Part of this is being a freelancer; if I don’t work, I don’t get paid. And part of it is childhood trauma that rears its head when I get sick.
I’m getting better at knowing when I need to take a break (today was a clear red light day, because I woke up with a fever), but that doesn’t mean that I don’t experience a very, very frustrating cocktail of emotions when I’m sick.
When I coach people, they often complain about this emotional cocktail. “I want to be able to take a break from work without the guilt and emotional discomfort and anger,” they say. And I’m here to tell you that unfortunately, managing tricky feelings is part of being a human being. It’s doubly part of running a small business. And it’s triply part of the experience if you’re dealing with any kind of constraint, like caretaking, chronic illness, and beyond.
Here’s my emotional experience of being sick: I get overwhelmed by my to do lists, I panic about how I’m going to make money if I can’t file my stories on time, and I feel angry that I can’t help around the house or with the kids in the ways I think I “should.” I try to ignore these feelings but more I push them away, the louder they get. I try to make a rational choice — climbing into bed so I can rest, for example— but somehow I end up wandering around the house with swirling emotions instead. I’m not actually resting! And I have absolutely no connection to my physical body in that moment; I’m in rumination mode.
In short, getting sick makes me feel like a hot, chaotic, panicked mess.
You too? Great. You might enjoy ADAPT. Because in ADAPT, we’re going to learn how to acknowledge our feelings and emotions rather than pushing them away. As it turns out, when you try to push the feelings away, they just get louder.
I once ghostwrote part of a best-selling book about emotions management and came to appreciate the “riding the waves” metaphor used by many psychologists. Basically, if you’re surfing or swimming in the ocean and you try to muscle your way through a wave break, you’ll end up struggling. You’ll get water up your nose. You’ll be tossed around. But if you let your body relax and you ride that wave, or you duck into it, you’ll end up on the other side rather ease-fully, where it’s calmer.
If you try to muscle your way through your emotions by shoving them away, the result isn’t great! If you ride the waves, they move through pretty quickly. Here’s what “riding the waves” looks like for me: I pull out my journal and label my emotional experience.
Check out this handy tool called a feelings wheel:
If you, like me, have a history of ignoring your emotional experiences (because the emotions are uncomfortable or triggering), you’ll find this tool to be useful. It can be hard to label your emotions beyond “happy, sad and mad,” but doing so actually gives us a lot of information.
Here’s what I wrote about my emotional experience of being sick:
I feel bad. Breaking that down, I can see that I feel stressed. I’m overwhelmed by this emotional experience and by how much work I have to do. I feel quite out of control. I’m tired (unfocused) and anxious (overwhelmed, again). When being sick makes me feel weak, that shows up as feelings of worthless. Being weak feels quite exposed and interestingly, I worry that I might be excluded because my being sick inconveniences other people in my life.
I can see that I also feel sad about not having the day I want to have, and that makes me feel guilty that I can’t do my work today. I’m ashamed of those feelings.
On the flip side, I also feel relieved that I might actually get a break and be able to rest.
Journaling about this made me feel calmer, somehow. I didn’t actually change anything about my plans. (I stayed in bed all day and slowly picked at my work.) The emotions weren’t gone. But just acknowledging them seemed to help me come out of rumination mode. I felt like I could proceed with meeting my own needs, rather than flailing around in a pile of uncomfortable feelings.
There’s a lot of research that backs up this experience: Labeling your emotions helps to regulate your amygdala, which is the emotion-processing center of the brain. Labeling brings you back into executive function mode, which allows you to lean into rational thought (paired with an acknowledgement of your emotional needs — because now you can see what those are!).
This is a key tool we’ll be working with in ADAPT. When you find yourself stuck in cycles of rumination and panic — which inevitably occurs when life gets in the way of our work plans — this is an approach that infuses you with self-compassion. But it’s also practical: If you can clear the noise, you can take care of yourself and use the space you have available to accomplish a few small things.
If ADAPT sounds appealing, I hope you’ll sign up. And if it’s not right for you, please share with a friend.
Either way, I’ll leave you with this: Permission to be angry when your kid gets sick. Permission to feel frustrated when you can’t meet a deadline. Permission to feel ashamed when the work you hand to a client isn’t your very best. Permission to have a complicated internal experience. We all have complicated internal experiences. Permission to listen to what your brain is shouting, then kindly move on. Permission to be a human, full of conflicting experiences, emotions and needs. Permission to put those needs ahead of your work, today and always.
Sending love,
Jenni
Curious about my background? I’m a writer and business coach based in Central Oregon. I have two small children and I work part-time so I can spend a lot of time with them. Lately, I’ve been obsessed with non-linear business building and teaching people how to build successful businesses that support their human needs first. Check out my coaching offerings here and follow me on Twitter & Instagram!