Negative emotions are definitely part of the human experience. I've never known any single person who's only felt positive emotions throughout their entire lives. Have you?

Some negative emotions are welcome. One example of that is grief. If someone very close to us passes away, we don't generally want to feel good and happy immediately. As a culture, we understand that grief is important and is part of the healing process when going through loss.

But we don't generally welcome the rest of the negative emotions. We don't like feeling disappointed, bored, lonely, panicked, furious, or exhausted.

When we feel negative emotions, there are a few ways we can respond.

The three main things we do with uncomfortable emotions are to resist them, react to them, or avoid them.

When we resist negative emotions, we actually make the emotions more intense. Resisting emotion provides no relief to us. It's like holding the door shut to the emotion, rather than opening the door and letting it in to be experienced. Resistance does not allow the emotion to flow away;  all that happens is more tension is created.

When we react to negative emotions by yelling at our kids, screaming at our husbands, or crying, we are not actually feeling the emotion. It does seem to release some of the tension when we act our feelings out, but in doing so, we are not actually processing the emotions or feeling them at all. In fact, after reacting, there is the additional downside of eroding away the relationships we have with the people we unleashed on.

When we avoid our negative emotions, we use something in our lives to try to make us feel better so that we no longer have to feel uncomfortable. This has become super culturally acceptable.

The main ways we avoid our negative emotions are by overeating, overdrinking (not necessarily to the point of addiction, but more than we would otherwise like), doing drugs, overspending, overworking, gambling, or looking at porn.

When we use any of these things to make ourselves feel better, we are attempting to buffer or dull that negative emotion so that it feels more tolerable to us. Glennon Doyle Melton uses the term “the easy button,” meaning if you're not feeling great, just tap the easy button (eat or drink, etc) and you'll feel better and not have to process the negative emotions.

The downside to buffering our emotions with food is mainly weight gain and physical discomfort.

So how can we process our emotions in a way that serves us and doesn't have any downside?

It's important to not be fearful of our emotions. A feeling is simply the physical response we feel when we think certain thoughts. Some people like to describe it as a vibration in our bodies. We have to believe that feelings can be felt without reacting in any way or taking any action.

Truly feeling an emotion does not look like acting a certain way. Feeling an emotion can look like sitting in a chair and experiencing the physical response that the feeling is. (For more on what a feeling really is, check out this blog post here).

Feeling your feelings can be like carrying a heavy handbag or backpack. The heaviness is there and you notice it often, but you don't have to do anything accept continue to feel the heaviness and go about your daily activities. If there is no avoiding, resisting, or reacting to the feeling, you experience the physical response  in your body that is the emotion and then let it move away in its own time.

Depending on what the thoughts are that are causing the negative feeling, it may pass in a few minutes, or it might be days or even weeks. But when you start allowing yourself to feel those feelings, you build your confidence in the fact that you can feel any feeling without needing to hit any “easy button.”

You no longer need to use food or drink to make yourself feel better because you are confident that you can feel your emotions in a way that serves you.

And when this happens, getting to your ideal weight is practically effortless!

I welcome any questions that you have in the comment section below. If you have any particular topics you'd like me to address on this blog, feel free to email me at katrina@katrinaubellmd.com!

Next week I'll write about how to figure out what the feelings are that you're having that are driving you to overeat in the first place. Click here to make sure you never miss a blog post or podcast!