Hi there,
Welcome to this podcast called Inside the Mind of a Sport Psychologist.
Today we will talk about dealing with negative emotions and feelings.
There is no real way to avoid negative feelings or emotions in life.
We all encounter sadness,
Anger,
Fear or frustration at times.
For me the thing that triggers my negative emotions the most is something actually happening to my body,
Because I love being able to move around and when something happens that triggers stillness in me,
I can get really really annoyed.
Life has thrown me many challenges in this way.
I have had my shoulder dislocated over 35 times and often found myself in hospital at the end of a journey.
About every single time I got myself in a situation like that,
I was using the same two tactics to deal with emotions.
Most of the time,
I found myself stuck in trying to run away from the negative emotion by going into the avoidance mode.
For me the avoidance mode meant finding distraction and keeping busy,
For example by playing excessive amount of sports or eating sweets.
But everyone has different avoidance strategies.
Some people might prefer drinking or using drugs,
Others having sex and others gambling.
Next to this tactic I often found myself analyzing the emotion and asking myself why the emotion is happening,
What it is telling me and how I can get best rid of it.
It is only recently that I see that both of these tactics were super inefficient.
They led me to get stuck in the negativity even more and to get stuck in the emotions even more.
It caused the emotion to stay inside my body or grow bigger because I gave it so much attention.
Let's take a personal example to illustrate what I used to do with negative emotions.
I have always loved being active and playing sports was a massive part of my life.
But at the age of 14 my shoulder started dislocating.
Apart from the physical pain that this caused,
This also led to a lot of mental pain because it meant that I had to rest sports for at least 3 months,
Most of the time even longer.
I really clearly remember the first time it happened.
My shoulder dislocated and I kept on trying to analyze it and looking for things that I could have done better.
Everything for me takes the form of why questions.
Why did I go out on a wet tennis field for gods sake?
Why did the guy tell me it was not dangerous to go,
That it was okay to enter the field?
Why did this happen to me?
All these why questions caused me to spin rounds within my emotions or in other words to get stuck inside the emotion.
Next to this there were also times where I was too frustrated,
I just did not even want to feel the emotion.
I wanted to pretend that everything was just fine,
So I would just go out to play tennis.
It would not go as I expected or the pain would come back allowing me to get even more frustrated.
Both this avoidance mode as well as the analyzing mode did not work for me at all.
But since I had no alternative option,
I would use either one of these two modes when I encountered a negative emotion.
Now I have an alternative.
This week I was on a surf coaching week and I fell down off a wave on my leg causing an intense pain in the inside of my right leg.
This time I was very aware of the situation,
So I noticed my frustration and my tendency to want to analyze it since this is what I have always done.
Every time I found myself analyzing the pain,
I would go back to the pure feeling of it and pause my thoughts.
I sat down a number of times just feeling the pain from the inside.
While zooming in on this pain I noticed my mind wanted to avoid zooming in on it,
But I would still do it.
It almost took the form of a kind of meditation,
Where there will always be thoughts running through your head,
But every time you notice a thought,
You can kindly bring the attention back to the breathing.
Here I would kindly bring my attention back to the sensation of the feeling inside my leg,
Without trying to label it.
The more I could watch this feeling,
The more I felt my energy moving there.
Instead of the negative feeling being stuck in my leg,
It now started to move and make space for healing.
Feelings simply want to be felt,
And if we allow them to be felt,
They will make space for new positive emotions.
And indeed two days later I was able to walk and move again as I used to.
I am so happy I now have an alternative way and a more successful method to deal with negative feelings and emotions.
So the next time you experience a negative feeling,
You will have a choice as well.
Fighting it,
Or feeling it.
Fighting it will probably allow it to become bigger and gain energy,
While feeling it will allow the negative feeling to move into the light.
And whenever something comes into the light,
Darkness will automatically disappear,
And healing will occur.
At least that's what I believe in.
In this podcast I explained to you how I deal with negative emotions and feelings,
And what works best for me.
This is in no way the best way or the only way,
But it is the way that works best for me at the moment.
It would be great to hear from you,
How you deal with negative emotions,
And what works best for you.
Maybe you have great tips for the people that are listening at the moment,
So feel free to comment below.
For now,
Thank you so much for listening to this podcast.
I hope you have a great day,
And of course,
I hope to see you back next time.
