You ever have a day where you just get hijacked by your own negative thinking? Yeah, me too. Nothing is broken or wrong with you though, this is natural to do. Whether it’s your worry about the tough day you just had and wondering if your going to have another today. Or, your fidgeting about the bad news you have to tell your significant other, it’s all natural and will happen.
When we don’t address them and let them drive us into the ground, is where we invite destruction on ourselves.
One of the most powerful things you can do is not deny what your feeling, but recognize it’s there and begin to deal with it. Don’t push it down into that box, put heavy chains around it, and then throw it in your mental deepest ocean you can conjure up. This can have some serious consequences. You won’t be able to conjure up a big enough ocean eventually. It will boil over in an uncontrollable and unnecessary hot mess.
Dan Harris of 10% Happier app, book, and podcast learned this the hard way. Instead of addressing the feelings brought up by reporting on and witnessing the brutality of war, he turned to drugs. His refusal to acknowledge and manage his negative emotions led to a full on-air panic attack during one of is TV segments, with thousands of viewers watching.
I’ve learned from reading the book and using his app daily to meditate with, you can handle these emotions better. Practicing mindfulness has helped me find skills to let go and let these emotions be. Practicing for over a year I’ve learned how to acknowledge my negative feelings and just let them be without judging myself for having them.
The first step in this process though is to recognize the emotion they bring on, allow it to exist, check into how it’s making you feel, and then finally realize its a state of the mind. You get to separate yourself from it after that. You will find you can give yourself permission to let it go by instead of holding onto it.
Easier said then done. It does take time to learn the skill. To get you started check out the book:
10% Happier by Dan Harris
Here’s the App:
And try the podcast too if you just want to be curious before you jump all in:
We can let the negative thoughts we have get in our way of reaching our 2019 goals or we can recognize them for what they are, emotions, and move on to finish what we started. We can learn from them. We can be actually become much better equipped because we understand them more.
Thanks for reading and checking Dan out. Hope you’re having a great week.
✌🏻 Shawn
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