How To Sit With An Uncomfortable Feeling

We often hear that we need to learn to tolerate uncertainty and be comfortable with our feelings. However, it's not always easy to do so. Dr. Diana Hill shares psychology research, personal experiences, and practical strategies that can help you confront and work with difficult emotions.

Transcript

I'm Dr.

Diana Hill and I'm a clinical psychologist,

Author of the Self Compassion Daily Journal and I'm a feeler.

Any given day I feel anxiety,

I feel stress over the magnitude of some of the projects that I've taken on.

I feel gratitude for this little field of yellow flowers that is right outside my office and I feel sadness when I'm sitting in the room with a client who's talking about a significant loss.

Pretty much every day at 2 o'clock I also feel a bit of fatigue and pain in the left side of my lower back.

How about you?

Are you a feeler?

Well welcome to Being Human and welcome to this episode because it's all about how to get better at feeling.

As Dr.

Stephen Hayes,

ACT co-founder,

Often says,

ACT is not about feeling better,

It's about getting better at feeling.

And by feelings,

In this episode I'm including both physical and emotional feelings because although our psychology around them is different,

There's a lot of overlap in terms of our physiology and the skills that I invite you to explore today will likely be useful for both physical pain and emotional pain.

So yes,

Your chronic back pain is welcome here too.

I'm going to start by reading from chapter 4 of the Self-Compassion Daily Journal because that chapter is dedicated to difficult feelings.

Having self-compassion,

Developing the ACT process of acceptance for difficult feelings.

So this is what I write there.

I write there's a central premise of ACT.

Pain and values are two sides of the same coin.

When you consider relationships,

Work projects,

Or social causes that are most important to you,

They're also often what make you the most sad,

Worried,

Angry.

And to be your best self in these important domains,

You'll likely need to open up and be with pain that comes with them.

That is what we're going to do today.

I'm going to share with you two things not to do when a difficult emotion shows up and five things that you can do when a difficult emotion shows up.

So this is going to be a skill-building episode and I hope that by the end you have a good sense of what you can do when uncomfortable emotions show up because that is one of the most common things that we are hearing these days.

We all need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

We all need to sit with uncertainty.

We all need to step into those difficult conversations.

And what does that actually look like?

What do you actually do?

What does that mean,

Getting comfortable with discomfort?

That's what you're going to learn today.

The foundation of what we're going to be talking about is the ACT process of acceptance.

And acceptance is especially useful for tough things that you can't control or change.

When you accept reality rather than fight reality,

You become more resilient to stress.

There is actually a research study published in the Journal of Psychoneuroendocrinology that recruited 153 stressed adults to try out an app-based intervention.

They either were in a control group or they did a mindfulness intervention where they just observed and monitored their stress or they did an intervention that included acceptance,

Being receptive and open to their full experience.

Those that had the acceptance condition showed greater reductions in cortisol and systolic blood pressure reactivity.

When you practice the skill of accepting,

It actually changes your physiology.

But we have to remember that's actually not the goal because if you try and control it,

That leads to more stress.

We'll talk about that in a bit.

So first,

Two things not to do.

I know,

I'm an ACT therapist and I'm breaking one of the fundamental ACT rules,

Which is the dead person's rule.

The dead person's rule is never give a goal to somebody that a dead person can do better than you.

And a dead person can definitely do both of these better than you.

And I want you to be aware of these two things because they are pitfalls when strong emotions come up.

The first thing not to do when you are experiencing an uncomfortable emotion is to do stuff that makes it worse.

Before I became an ACT therapist,

I was a DBT therapist and dialectal behavior therapy is a therapy developed by Marsha Linehan.

I learned some of these skills directly from her.

It's an approach that's designed for folks that are chronically suicidal and who struggle with regulating their emotions and their behavior.

Marsha Linehan actually came out in a New York Times article a number of years ago saying that she struggled with this as well.

And I worked in a mental health center running these DBT groups for individuals that were cutting,

They were binge drinking,

They were binge eating,

And they were in and out of the hospital frequently due to suicide attempts.

When you get to that point,

When your feelings are so strong and overwhelming,

Oftentimes that's when we do stuff that makes it worse.

So the clients that were sitting in the groups with me were not only dealing with their original feeling,

They were also dealing with the divorce that they were facing because they had a lot of interpersonal difficulties from their anger.

They were dealing with the health consequences of binge eating or binge drinking.

The first skills that we would teach in DBT were distress tolerance skills.

We called them crisis survival skills.

They were skills to help you not make things worse.

And the most simple one was the skill of stop.

S,

Stop.

T,

Take a break.

O,

Observe.

P,

Proceed mindfully.

But just basically pause.

When you consider the things that you do that make it worse,

When you have a strong emotion or even just an uncomfortable emotion,

It often can drive us to do things to try and get rid of that emotion.

This is what we call experiential avoidance and act.

Things like distracting ourselves,

Numbing out,

Using substances,

Tensing with your body,

Opting out,

Or lashing out.

Texting that thing that you wish that you didn't text.

Or as my friend said after she listened to the Jane Chapman role play on Confidence,

She said,

I'm really good at stepping into difficult conversations,

But I'm not so good at stepping out of saying small catty things about people.

So we start with not making things worse.

Stopping and pausing when you have a strong,

Uncomfortable emotion,

That space between stimulus and response.

There are some things that you can do in that pause.

And one good example is with anger.

There was a recent meta-analysis that came out of 154 studies,

Over 84,

000 participants,

That was reported in the March 2024 Journal Clinical Psychology Review.

And they compared the impact of either doing something to vent the anger,

Like hitting a bag or going jogging,

Or folks that did activities like deep breathing,

Mindfulness,

Meditation,

And yoga.

And one of the co-authors was interviewed,

Brad Bushman was interviewed,

Professor of communication at Ohio State.

He said,

Venting anger might sound like a good idea,

But there's not a shred of scientific evidence to support catharsis theory.

What they found was that these types of venting activities,

Although they feel good in the moment,

They make things worse.

They actually increase your anger.

Going for a run,

Jogging when you're angry,

Makes you more angry.

This totally validates my friends and family,

Who I often call when I'm running.

And you can hear my rage increasing with the pounding of my feet.

But interestingly,

Those that participated in play-based sports,

Like throwing a ball,

Kicking a ball around,

Did not see this increase in anger.

They found that activities that were more about slowing down,

Centering activities like deep breathing,

Mindfulness,

Even counting to ten,

Or doing yoga,

Were much more effective with anger.

So step one,

Don't make things worse.

Stop.

Pause.

The second thing not to do when a strong emotion shows up,

Is don't add a story to it.

In ACT,

We call this becoming fused with our mind's stories and thoughts.

In Buddhism,

They call it delusion.

The story that we get all caught up in.

I've had a number of people in my life recently who are dating,

A lot of clients that are dating,

College students,

People in their late 20s,

People who went through a divorce and starting to date.

And one of the places that I hear this problem of adding a story is something like dating,

Where you have not a lot of information and you just add on.

You add on a self-critical story about yourself.

You add on a worry story about the future.

You add on,

I can't handle this.

It's going to be like this forever.

You lose the big picture.

You get really narrowed.

And when you are having a strong emotion,

This is understandable,

Right?

You're wanting to make sense of what you're feeling.

There was a research study in called Exposing Worry's Deceit.

And in it,

They had participants with generalized anxiety disorder.

So these are the people who are first-class worriers.

It's called generalized because they worry about anything and everything.

And they had these participants track these worry diaries,

Which is actually a treatment for a generalized anxiety disorder to write out your worries,

Have a schedule the worry time where you just engage with your worry for that 20 minutes.

They looked at the 10 days of journaling to find out what percentage of worries did not come true.

Do you have any guesses what percentage of worries didn't come true?

The mode,

Which is the most frequent number reported was 100%.

For most of the people,

100% of their worries did not come true.

And then the median was 91.

4%.

So there was,

You know,

Sometimes our worries do come true.

Sometimes our feared experience happens.

And the skill that I invite you to learn is going to help you with when those worries do come true.

But worrying ahead of time does not make your chances of being able to handle that worried event any better.

And there's research to support that as well.

Whenever I mentioned these research studies,

I always put them in the extended show notes so you can check them out for yourself.

So what's the story that you add on when you have an uncomfortable emotion?

Maybe think about something that's hard for you in your life right now and how you add a narrative to it.

You add on these layers,

These second arrows,

These things that make it amplified and even more uncomfortable.

What are the stories that you tell yourself?

So those are the two things that I want you to pay attention to first when you have a strong emotion.

Am I making it worse by some of the behaviors that I'm engaging in?

Pause,

Stop,

And notice where you're adding on a story.

Drop the story.

So what can you do when you have an uncomfortable emotion?

That's what we're going to practice next.

So we talked about two things not to do when a strong emotion or uncomfortable emotion shows up for you.

Here's your little quiz.

What are they?

Don't make things worse and don't add a story to it or at least drop the story when you notice that you're adding a story.

So what can we do instead?

The first thing to do is to notice that you're having an uncomfortable feeling.

I imagine you have an uncomfortable feeling right now.

Maybe there's a physical pain in your body.

Maybe there's a little bit of unease or anxiety or a little sadness.

Can you find an uncomfortable feeling in there?

When I used to run an IOP for eating disorders,

We would often start the group with a mindfulness exercise and one of my favorite ones was the styrofoam cup exercise,

Which I would never do now.

Styrofoam is terrible stuff,

But we'd give folks a styrofoam cup and we'd have them shape the cup into whatever it was that they were feeling inside their body right now.

What is its shape?

What is its size?

What is its texture?

What is its weight?

Could you do that for yourself right now?

Find the uncomfortable feeling,

Observe it,

Notice it,

And what is it what's happening in there?

And you can notice that might be changing as you bring your awareness or observation to it,

But this is the first step.

Oftentimes we just ride right over our feelings or we try and get rid of them really quickly.

This is acknowledging I'm having an uncomfortable feeling right now.

The next thing that you can do is soften around it.

Soften and let go.

Give it some breathing room.

Ventilate it.

Give it some room to reside in your body.

When you notice the places that you're gripping around the discomfort,

You can let them go by intentionally releasing.

Releasing the tension in your jaw,

Releasing the tension in your shoulders,

Maybe your hips.

Breathing in and around that uncomfortable feeling.

And like anything we know that the more space,

The less constriction that we have around something,

The more freedom it has to move through.

That's the idea of emotions that they will rise,

They'll fall,

They're like waves.

They get stuck when we grip around them.

And same with our physical tension.

When we loosen up our grip,

We give it more space to be,

Then we can carry it with us into our day.

So we observe it,

We make space for it,

And then we bring some warmth,

Some compassion to it.

This is what Pema Chodron calls compassionate abiding.

Being with.

Being with your discomfort may look like a number of different things.

You can notice where it is in your body.

You could put your hand on it,

Even imagining bringing some warmth to it.

You can be with it by validating it,

Using some validating self-statements.

Things like it's understandable that you're feeling this way,

This is painful for you,

I can see how much this hurts,

I'm here for you.

The things that you would tell somebody that was having a hard time,

What would you tell them?

How would you be with them?

How would you be with somebody who is struggling with what you're struggling with?

That is a cornerstone of self-compassion,

To acknowledge the pain and then do something to alleviate it,

To offer some care,

Some support.

So we can do that through bringing some warmth to whatever it is you're feeling.

Thich Nhat Hanh would say,

I see you sadness,

I'm here for you sadness.

Breathing in,

I'm aware of my sadness.

Breathing out,

I offer care to my sadness.

Whatever it is that you are feeling,

Breathing in,

I'm aware of my stress.

Breathing out,

I'm here for you stress.

So these first steps of observing whatever you're feeling,

Letting go of the tension around it,

Bringing some warmth and care to it.

This is sort of like getting a good massage.

I just got the best massage that I've gotten in a long time last week.

I haven't gotten a massage in a long time,

But he knew exactly those spots to tend to and to linger on and to be gentle with or then push on.

You can do that for yourself.

This is like a self massage being with your emotions.

Sometimes it's uncomfortable,

And it's really strengthening your capacity to be with yourself.

So then the final step of how to be with an uncomfortable emotion,

After you've observed it,

After you've opened to it,

After you've maybe brought a little warm hot towel of love to yourself,

Is to ask yourself,

What's important here?

Is there something that your emotion is telling you that you need?

One of those core yearnings that we talked about in the episode with Steve Hayes and Joe Sirochi is an emotion pointing to a value of yours.

For example,

If you're feeling really angry about somebody who keeps on crossing your boundaries,

Maybe there's a value there in terms of standing up for yourself.

So you can ask yourself,

What is showing up for me here?

What do I need?

What are the values that are underneath that?

And those become the actions that you take.

Those become the compassion actions,

The actions that you take to live out that value or to meet that need for yourself.

Or even sometimes we can't meet the need for ourself,

But we can just acknowledge our own needs.

And acknowledging your needs is a meeting of your own needs,

Right?

When you do those steps,

Then you can start to move more freely in your life with your emotions.

Not getting rid of them,

Not getting entangled in them either,

Not doing stuff that makes it worse,

Not adding a story to it,

But rather observing them,

Opening to them,

Softening around them,

Bringing some warmth and care to them,

And then listening to them to find the underlying value that you can act on.

In The Wisdom of No Escape,

Pema Chodron writes,

There's a common misunderstanding among all the human beings who have ever been born on the earth that the best way to live is to try avoid pain and just try to get comfortable.

You can see this even in insects and animals and birds.

All of us are the same.

A much more interesting,

Kind,

Adventurous,

And joyful approach to life is to begin to develop our curiosity,

Not caring whether the object of our inquisitiveness is bitter or sweet.

To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms,

To lead a life that is more passionate,

Full,

And delightful life than that,

We must realize that we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is,

How we tick,

And how our world ticks,

How the whole thing just is.

If we're committed to comfort at any cost,

As soon as we come up against the least edge of pain,

We're going to run.

We'll never know what's beyond that particular barrier or wall or fearful thing.

I encourage you to come up against your pain,

Whether it's physical pain or emotional discomfort this week.

Practice the skills of being with it,

Getting inquisitive,

Getting curious,

And then acting from your values.

I hope this is helpful to you.

Let me know.

Take care.

Have a great week.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Wise Effort Podcast.

Wise Effort is about you taking your energy and putting it in the places that matter most to you.

And when you do so,

You'll get to savor the good of your life along the way.

I would like to thank my team,

My partner in all things,

Including the producer of this podcast,

Craig,

Ashley Hyatt,

The podcast manager,

And Yoko Noguen,

Who is the social media manager.

And thank you to Bangold at Bell and Branch for our new music.

This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only,

And it's not meant to be a substitute for mental health treatments.

Reviews

I love every single thing you post. ACT changed my life.

I loved this talk! It was filled with so many helpful and insightful tools. I look forward to incorporating them into my daily practice. Thanks so much!🙏