What strategies do you use to cope with negative feelings?

How often does your mind begin a slow descent into thoughts, which once they build momentum, very quickly build into a complete avalanche of negativity? One day you are motivated, ready to make things happen and full of enthusiasm and a seemingly insignificant event or comment from someone can begin to fester and your rumination over what was said, how you reacted, what they think of you, why you reacted like that, becomes a complete crisis of yourself and your life?

If you can’t relate to this, you are doing awesome and if you can, you are absolutely smashing life too! Training my mind to not catastrophize, analyse every shortcoming of myself, every conversation and action I take, is something that I have literally had to teach myself. I haven’t always reacted so negatively, at least not to the extent that it started to make me feel miserable but life events I think, just made me scared to feel big intense emotions and I worried about my own ability to cope, so my brain would try to protect me by picking up on every threat and trying to avoid it or change my behaviour to diffuse it.

I am learning that feelings need to be felt for them to then leave us, they need to be worked and moved through. Avoiding them kept me stuck and anxious and eventually low. To help me actually feel these emotions safely, I have over time created a toolbox of ways to help me counteract the spiralling thoughts. I can use them in situations where I am overthinking, starting to fall into negative thinking and anxiety. I’ll share the ones I use most often that seem incredibly simple but sometimes require real willpower to utilise.

Firstly I stop the distractions. I get off my phone, turn off the tv, turn off my podcasts, stop being busy and sit in quiet. Busyness is for me a way to avoid facing things. The distractions were subconsciously my way of avoiding the feelings. Doom scrolling is a classic way to avoid life. Often I will feel my body and mind craving silence and I know it’s time to switch off.

When I find some quiet with just me and my thoughts, then I have space to find a way to dig into the emotions I’m avoiding. For this often I will journal or write, whatever I want to put down on paper. I just express it all. There’s no right or wrong, no real purpose to it, I’m just getting my thoughts out of my head and onto paper. They maybe random or jumbled but often will bring up things that make sense about why I am feeling and reacting as I am, what has triggered this negative reaction to life events and what part of me feels wounded and hurt.

Breath work is another tool, which always gives me an intense emotional release. It literally helps me to express emotions that I can feel sat in my chest and throat like a tight ball. I have learnt to just “let go” as the tears, the ugly crying, the sobbing is exactly what is needed. Crying is always my therapy in happiness, anger and anxiety, tears will usually arrive.

A more physical and practical tool is running. Very often running is something which helps me work through anger and frustration more than anything else. Getting outside in nature and my own thoughts, processing events of the day and releasing emotion through music, my thoughts and pushing myself hard can do wonders for any pent up anger. Anger is something I don’t often feel, or I never thought I did growing up but these last few years, anger has become an emotion that I’m learning to embrace and not stifle down. Anger is a normal response to feeling hurt or disrespected and when it’s not suppressed or ignored it won’t overwhelm us. In my younger years, I didn’t feel I was “allowed” to express anger as a girl. It wasn’t what young ladies did, honestly. So it almost feels a bit alien and “wrong” to express anger ,mostly when I’m angry I cry but I’m learning to tap into it more and use it in a positive way.

I believe all emotion is there to be observed and felt. That doesn’t mean we should sit in it for a long time and make it our identity but we move through it and acknowledge it. Life is cyclical and when you are sad, you are likely to feel happiness in the future and the opposite is true. The only constant is change and that for me is a comfort.