Tag: moods

How to Be Sure External Factors Aren’t Affecting Your Decision

“Don’t make a permanent decision for your temporary emotion.” ~Unknown

It was a beautiful day today. The sun shone brightly, kissing my face and warming my bones, the sky was as blue as a lover’s eyes, and there were those little fluffy clouds that seem like aimless but happy sheep floating gently in the sky.

And my heart sang.

I felt joy deep down in my soul.

I smiled at bus drivers and baristas alike.

Nothing could dent my good mood.

Currently mulling over medium-term plans (I started living as a digital nomad two years ago), I started to consider seriously the idea of a short-term let in the English countryside, or a house-sit in some glorious old farmhouse surrounded by living green or golden fields, a cat on my lap, a dog by my feet, and chickens out back.

Whooooah Nelly.

I snapped back to reality with a click, the sunlight suddenly seeming harsh instead of kind, the blue of the sky austere instead of abundant, and the sheep in the sky suddenly moving with threatening purpose.

I’ve been living in Thailand for nearly two years now, drawn there initially to experience something other than the total-work-immersion and the health issues that had previously dominated my life.

Gradually, as I had begun to understand more the activities that brought me delight and awoke my passions, I eased into building a life there.

I was happy to come back to the UK for periods of four to six weeks, a couple of times a year, but I wasn’t currently planning on living there. Not right now, anyway.

It was then I was reminded how much our environment—in this case, the weather—affects our emotions and moods.

It was easy to see how much the weather that day was influencing me. And I could remember lots of times when cold days and drizzle had made everything seem a little bit harder, a little bit more difficult to bear, a little more wearing on body and soul.

And I wondered what other decisions I might have made in those circumstances, unconscious of the fact that the weather might have been influencing how I chose to move forward.

Had I rejected social opportunities because my body had withdrawn into the comfort of sofa and duvet on days with biting winter winds?

Had I declined to return a phone call from a recruiter that might have brought new possibilities because I didn’t want to take my gloves off on a cold day?

Had I turned down a second date with a potential lover because the idea of trekking into the city to meet him in the rain felt like too much trouble?

Alternatively, when the sun was shining, haloing those around me with a golden light, had I given people the benefit of the doubt?

Had the energy to be kind to strangers?

Gone out of my way to visit friends and family to share the warmth that the sun had brought me with them?

This all led me to consider what other unseen or unheard things influence the decisions I make—decisions I think I am making independently, through my own free will.

Environment, weather, the people I’ve just seen, the people I’m about to see, a song on the radio, the colors in the café where I’m writing out my pros and cons list.

Buying a house is a classic example. Estate agents try to take photos of houses with a blue sky, with spring the best time to sell a house in the western hemisphere, and the sullen month of January the worst.

There’s no question we can be influenced more than we realize by external factors. Marketing relies on this. But we can grow our awareness, and free ourselves from at least some of the stuff that isn’t really “us.”

Here are my suggestions for how to ensure any decision you make is as much “yours” as it can be.

1. Listen to your gut, then wait.

This is one of the reasons I think it’s always a good idea to make a decision and then sit on it for a day or so.

It’s taken me a long time to really hear my gut, and listen to my inner self. It’s important to listen to our instincts as part of any decision-making process, and combine that with experience, logic, and time to make the best possible decision.

2. Consider your choice in different environments and difficult circumstances.

Does it seem as good an idea in the dark night as it does in the bright day? In the cold as in the warm?

In the dead of night, alone in bed I sometimes experience huge anxiety about things that in the day wouldn’t trouble me at all. I know now not to make a decision based on that anxiety alone.

3. Get to know yourself better.

Do you know what moods different external factors put you in? Do you love summer rain, or being cosy by the fire in autumn? Or do colorful spring flowers and snow at Christmas put you in a good mood?

When you know what’s likely to increase your optimism or pessimism, when you’re thinking about a decision, take this into account.

4. Track your moods.

Moodscope.com is great for this. This engaging online tool presents you with twenty different emotions and asks you, via flipping cards, to rate yourself on each feeling every day. This can give you a very clear understanding of how you feel each day, and can help you to make your decisions accordingly.

5. Make more of an effort.

When you know you’re being affected negatively by outside circumstances, go out of your way to be kind not only to others, but to yourself.

Hold off on big decisions where you can, and don’t sweat small decisions; it really doesn’t matter if you have the pasta or the risotto for your dinner. Have the other one another time.

—

Reminding ourselves that our emotions affect our decision-making, and that our emotions in turn are affected by many external factors, can help us to step back and understand how we are actually making a decision.

As with many human processes, it’s not quite as simple as it looks, but it doesn’t take much to think about what else is going on, and allow for it.

Man at a crossroad image via Shutterstock

September 23, 2014
How Sensitivity Can Be a Gift (And How to Give it to the World)

“We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure without being more sensitive to pain.” ~Alan Watts

Are you good at noticing subtle details? Are you able to learn without really being aware that you are learning? Do you notice other people’s moods? Do these moods affect you?

Are you sensitive to pain? Are you equally sensitive to beauty?

If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you, like me, are a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). Chances are, you are constantly trying to make sense of how being sensitive fits into a world where a certain amount of insensitivity is seen as the key to getting ahead.

Chances are, you have both deeply valued your sensitivity and pushed away from it. While it makes up the core of who you are, it also makes life complicated.

Like you, I have struggled with being sensitive. First, it was because I had absorbed the cultural definition of sensitivity as weakness. And then when I did start understanding what being an HSP meant, starting from reading Elaine Aron’s classic The Highly Sensitive Person, I struggled to integrate this knowledge in my life.

Today, while I still find my sensitivity tricky, I have started seeing it differently. Now, when I think about sensitivity, the picture that comes to mind is of a thoroughbred horse.

This horse has a lot of nervous energy. It also has many gifts.

When I can direct this horse properly, it has the capability to perform at the highest standards. But if I misunderstand it, the horse’s energy is scattered, out of control. It can’t even get out of the gate.

So, how do we guide and direct this horse? How do we gallop out into the world instead of shying away from it? How do we bring our sensitive gifts to life?

Let’s look for some answers.

As sensitive people, we first need to ask: What holds me up?

At some point in your life, you might have absorbed the words that most HSPs hear: “You are too sensitive,” “You feel too much.” You might have believed these negative injunctions and gone through life in the absence of people who could see your gifts and champion them.

If you are still looking for those people, now is the time to go on a quest for them. While it may take time to find a friend or adviser, the process of exploring can itself be rewarding.

As an HSP, I have greatly benefited from being a part of online HSP groups. They help me see that I am not the only one having my experiences. I have also found people walking ahead on the path, and seeing them lead their lives shows me the way for leading mine.

We all need this—to be seen and validated for who we are. And when we find our believing mirrors, whether HSPs or non-HSPs, we can have the containers that shelter us from the storms of over-stimulation and anxiety.

And while we are working to find our champions, we also need to move inside and learn how to give ourselves what we need. When I moved from India to the United States two years back, I struggled with exactly this. In the absence of a support network, I did not know how to take care of myself.

How could I give myself love and attention? Wasn’t it what someone else gave to you?

Then, out of sheer necessity and through some trial and error, I started getting a glimpse of what nourishing ourselves means. I volunteered as a reading tutor, took photography classes, and embarked on my dream of being a writer.

In those moments when I felt connected to something bigger, I felt whole. There was nothing missing.

I started understanding that this was my area of growth, that this is what Elaine Aron means when she says that “part of maturing into wisdom is transferring more and more of your sense of security from the tangible to the intangible containers.”

So, think of all your safe harbors, all the containers in your life. Do you have enough of the intangible ones—work, faith in something bigger, a spiritual practice? Know that you can create an internal structure that holds you up, that sustains you emotionally even as people move away or life changes.

Once you have this inner stability, you can ask:

How do I participate in the world more?

As an HSP, being on the margins of the culture might have contributed to you feeling “less than.” Or you might have had a traumatic experience that you felt keenly, and you might not have found your way out of it.

Whatever the basis of low self-esteem, the truth is that without having a basic sense of self, we are adrift. Among other things, one of the reasons that I clung on to my ill-suited corporate job for years was the feeling that I would crumble into nothing without it. And I wasn’t very sure that I deserved something better.

In his wonderful Honoring the Self, Nathaniel Branden talks about this, and says, “The greatest barrier to achievement and success is not lack of talent or ability but rather, the fact that achievement and success, above a certain level, are outside our self concept, our image of who we are and what is appropriate to us.”

So, if we don’t believe that we deserve something better, we will often unconsciously put up barriers to getting it. The good news is that we can build our sense of self, brick by brick.

I strengthened my self-esteem by taking small risks, which grew into something bigger.

I left my low self-worth job for a better one. I freelanced on the side.

In effect, I worked hard and took concrete actions to earn my own respect.

Having once earned it though, it’s important that we keep acting to maintain our self-belief. For some time during my transition to the United States, my sense of self became shaky again. In the last several months, I have started remembering what I had learned—that action builds our sense of self.

I started to take risks again. One of them was coming out as an HSP through my writing.

My entire experience of life has been colored by my sensitivity, and yet I felt like it was something I needed to hide, fearful that people would label me. They still might. But I am a little more okay with sharing myself discerningly; reaching out in those spaces where I feel it can be helpful to others.

Whoever you are, wherever you stand, the task of building yourself up and finding your lost spaces is not going to be easy. But it is going to be worth it when you can stand in your center, and live from that place.

In the end, the fundamental question that we are all asking is:

How can I be more of myself?

As HSPS, we have the additional task of unlearning all that we have learned. We might have adapted in the wrong ways. Instead of learning to manage our feelings of overwhelm, we might have started avoiding the world altogether. Or we might have shrunk inside, hurt at being misunderstood.

But the world needs people like us—people who can empathize, who care, who can feel others’ pain. It is both our privilege as well as our challenge to learn how to do this effectively.

We need to take up more space, to show up as who we are. We need to unfurl.

It’s time to bring our sensitive gifts into this world.

Photo by Marta Nørgaard

July 31, 2014
Good News: Bad Moods Don’t Have to Be So Bad

“Most of the shadows in life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

How many times have you heard “Follow your heart” or “Let emotion be your guide”?

Too many to count, I’d bet.

It’s generally good advice; it’s certainly wiser to follow your own feelings than to blindly do what other people think you should do.

But reading into your emotions can also lead you astray.

You see, you are always feeling your thinking. You are not necessarily always feeling “the truth,” or even your own personal truth.

Every emotion, feeling, or mood you experience follows directly from the thinking you are experiencing. That thinking is not always accurate or important. It does not always indicate what’s best for you.

In reality, your feelings are nothing more than feedback about your thinking.

Feelings are not feedback about your mental health, the state of your life, or whether you have the “right” job, partner, or dietary habits.

I used to think they were. When something in my environment seemingly aroused negative emotion in me, I’d jump into action. Life became a game of adding in the “right stuff” and subtracting out the “wrong stuff” in order to feel as good as possible.

I thought this was very enlightened; after all, I was no longer willing to put up with what didn’t feel good and I was consciously choosing more of what did.

I’d notice some negative feelings about my job and immediately start looking for a new one. Clearly, my job wasn’t a good fit. I deserved a job where I could be nearly-always happy, I reasoned.

Predictably (in hindsight), the moment I decided the job wasn’t a good fit, a million examples of how it wasn’t perfect would show up—things I had never noticed before. I took those as “signs”—further evidence that I had better focus on that exit strategy, and fast.

Since I decided that my job was the cause of my distress and that I’d feel much better when I found a new one, that naturally led to the conclusion that that I wouldn’t feel better until I was in that new job.

I innocently set things up so that I couldn’t possibly be happy until I made the change that was supposed to fix everything.

I also did this in reverse, by the way, adding in more of the good-feeling “stuff” that I thought were the source of the positive emotions I craved.

Although I thought this an enlightened way to be, hunting and gathering good-feeling “stuff” and playing whack-a-mole with bad-feeling “stuff,” it was based on the gigantic illusion that my feelings were based on my surroundings.

In truth, my feelings were simply feedback about my thinking, and my thinking was not dictated by my job or anything else outside of myself.

Thinking isn’t dictated by anything. It just arises, with emotion tagging along, and we hold on to it and tell stories about it.

Or we don’t.

Nothing needs to be done.

Rather than jumping into addition or subtraction action, relax. There is nothing to do with or about bad feelings. Because thoughts are transitory, impersonal, and always in motion, feelings are too.

The word emotion means in motion, as in always moving.

From the time you woke up this morning to right now, you’ve probably had a few hundred thousand thoughts and feelings to which you paid virtually no attention. Paid no attention, they promptly floated away—in motion—and were replaced by new thoughts and feelings.

Each time your mind drifts from the morning staff meeting to your lunch plans and back to the meeting again, it’s happening. Each time you cycle through, “I’m having a fantastic hair day” to “Did I clean the cat hair off this jacket?” to “I hope it’s warm enough to go without a jacket tonight,” it’s happening.

Thoughts and feelings change all day every day with absolutely no effort or fanfare.

This would be true of all thoughts and feelings if you treated them all the way you treat the ones about meetings, lunch, and hair.

But since you’re human, you don’t treat them all the same. You hold on to some thoughts and spin them around in your mind. You give them importance and meaning. You imbue them with emotion and attention, which are the equivalent of mental superglue.

Thoughts are like breath—when you stop holding your breath, new breath rushes in. When you stop holding your thoughts, new ones rush in, bringing new feelings in tow.

All you ever have “to do” is nothing. The only position you ever have to take is of non-interference.

What’s Possible

Nearly everyone I talk to wants bad feelings to go away. Even when they intellectually understand that bad feelings aren’t meaningful or harmful, and even when they intellectually get that feelings are always in motion, they feel down and instantly try to feel better.

They think I’m naive or unrealistically spiritual when I tell them that bad feelings don’t have to be a big deal. They don’t have to feel so “bad.”

“You don’t understand my emotions,” they say. “Mine hit harder than others’.”

Or, “But everyone knows shame is the hardest to handle,” or “I’ve had these since birth, so they’re more real than most.”

I still say they don’t have to be so bad.

The more you understand that your experience of life is entirely thought-created and that “you” aren’t what you think you are, your attachment to feelings—good and bad—begins to shift.

You connect and identify with something deeper, something beyond fleeting feelings.

It becomes obvious that bad feelings are only your surface psychology; they can’t touch who you truly are. You can rest in your true self which is always stable and always there.

As it turns out, much of the negative experience of emotions is the cover-up. It’s when you resist, hide, or try to change those emotions that you experience them as painful.

When you do that, you’re playing with mental superglue again. You’re putting so much pressure and focus on those emotions that they are held in place. Remember, when you don’t hold on to thought and emotion, new thought and emotion rushes in.

I can honestly say that my experience of bad feelings is drastically different than it once was. This may sound insane, but I don’t mind feeling “bad” so much anymore.

In fact, sometimes it’s kind of nice to settle into a bad mood. It’s a little like the comfort you might find in a rainy day once you accept that the rain is a reality and stop wanting it to change.

I find myself deciding to just lay low and ride out the mood, just like I would the rain. I know it will change. Paradoxically, when I approach bad moods in this way they end up changing before I have a chance to experience them as “bad.”

Emotions are naturally in motion. There is an awareness and distance that prevents me from being taken down by them.

This is completely possible for anyone, even you.

July 1, 2013