Emotions are involuntary. It means we can’t just choose to feel one emotion instead of another. But we can influence emotions to increase or decrease in intensity and that will make a difference too.
The following is an exercise that is incredibly valuable and that you can repeat over time. You will need pen and paper and your brain because we need to do some thinking. You can always take breaks and continue another day.
Create a spreadsheet with 5 columns for
- emotion
- situation
- own reaction
- decrease
- increase
Pick an emotion you want to look at more closely. You can find a list for inspiration here. Make sure to look at both comfortable and uncomfortable feelings and always end this exercise with a comfortable one.
Write down the emotion and think of a situation where you might feel it.
This will support our reflection. Make sure to keep it shallow, if it is a difficult emotion and choose a situation that is simple and small. Stay in the position of an observer.
Next you write down your own reaction when you feel this emotion. Look at your impulses to act, your thoughts and body reactions. You don’t always have to find all 3 aspects, but you could try.
Then you take a big step away from yourself to explore options how someone, who is not you, could act in this situation.
What could they think that would decrease the emotion?
How could they act to decrease it?
How could they change their physical experience to decrease the emotion?
Then you can move on to increasing, asking the same questions about thoughts, actions and body experience.
It might look like this
Feeling: Upset
Situation: I dropped a cup
Own reaction: swearing, wanting to take the matching cup and break it too, thinking that I don’t deserve nice things and everything always goes wrong when I touch it, making fists with a lot of energy in them
Decrease: think: oh well, I will buy another one, it will be a good excuse to go to Ikea. Action: create art from the pieces, put matching cup in a safe place, thank the cup for its long service and the coffee I could drink with it, do a butterfly hug and release all the energy to support my heart with it.
Increase: Imagine all my cups broken and the plates too. Swipe all the other cups to the floor too. Tell myself that I am clumsy and too stupid to hold a cup right. Imagine all the coffee I can’t drink from this cup anymore. Cut my hand on the broken pieces on purpose. Tell myself constantly what I should have done to avoid this.
When we are done with our notes (and they are allowed to be a little outrageous or extreme, this exercise can be great fun!), we can take some time to compare our original reaction to the ways for increasing and decreasing we found.
Sometimes there is an overlap or at least similarities.
Do we increase things we want decreased without noticing it? Do we sometimes stop a good feeling we wish to savor by decreasing it somehow?
Next time we experience that feeling, we can remember how to influence it, one way or another, and pick our actions wisely, change our thoughts and pay attention to our body sensations.
Take some time to look at a comfortable feeling next.
Some people struggle with this exercise because they cannot keep a distant position. They tend to fall right into the feeling, the situation they picked becomes alive for them and they drop out of their window of tolerance or at least have a very stressful time with the exercise. And some people feel deep down that they are not allowed to express emotions, so they are too scared to even think about them.
If this is you, try imagining that all this is not happening with you. You can use your gift of imagination to create a very expressive cartoon character. You can dress it as you like, give it a name and then send it into all kinds of emotional situations. It can think the most outrageous thoughts and say them out loud (things you would never dare to say!), they make funny faces, shake their fists at people, they can cry rivers or jump like a rubber ball. They can do all kinds of things you might for some reason think you can’t. Let your cartoon character show you the different possible responses. You can negotiate it inside and maybe try a tiny little thing that would make a situation better and see if that is safe for you.
This exercise only works if you do it, I cannot take that from you. If you run out of ideas, ask a friend or your therapist.
Leave a Reply