For All of Those Having a Hard Time Right Now, Read This

When we are caught up in an emotion, it’s difficult to imagine ourselves feeling any other way, isn’t it?

When we’re happy with our partner and we feel that ecstatic love, we can’t imagine ever not feeling that way. We think it will last forever. The same goes for negative emotions too. Those times when we are heartbroken and sad and struggling to get out of bed. The struggle is harder because we almost can’t see a way out of that feeling.

What if we could speed up that healing process?

We can’t skip through all the steps because they’re important to go through to properly heal, but the hardest part is starting at the healing process because it takes us some time to have faith in our ability to be okay and want to get better. That initial step is the toughest, and even the happy times don’t last forever. Learning to feel our emotions at the moment without replaying the same story in our heads over and over, is an important hack for having power over our emotions.

The first thing we should understand is that the emotions we feel in this situation are the only real emotions. These are the feelings that have physiological effects on our brains. Those are the emotions with real power, whatever we feel afterward is the part of the story that our minds make up.

According to neuroscientists —

The physiological lifespan of an emotion is about 90 seconds. That’s how long we physically feel everything — the tightness in our chest, the racing heartbeat, the adrenaline. These things start, rise, and disappear within 90 seconds or so, but there’s no way that we feel that emotion for 90 seconds. It feels as though it can linger for days or weeks afterward. Because you see, once an event happens and it triggers an emotion, we create a story around it and these stories help us to process what happened and it justifies what we are feeling, and then the ego steps in and we do even more mental gymnastics.

To strengthen itself, the ego will either blame the other person or congratulate itself for being right. It leads us to tell ourselves the same story over and over, just so that the ego can pat itself on the back. We keep creating and playing through the stories that keep the emotions alive.

“The more we recreate the story, the harder it is to let it go!”

Our brains can’t forecast future emotions. It’s the chairperson of living in the present. It lives so strongly in the present that when a strong emotion hits you, you fall into a spiral that feels like you’ll stay there forever. The spiral makes tough moments even tougher.

When our minds are turbulent, we’re more prone to questioning our behavior, our choices, and our future. We are more open to understanding ourselves, to try and figure out what we’ve done wrong, and why we did it, but newsflash — that’s the worst time to do it.

When our minds are unsettled, we simply can’t trust ourselves. The person that comes through in your mind during these difficult times isn’t the true “you”, it is someone that our brains create to deal with the situation and this person is formed from our old memories where the situations were similar. It’s a well-intentioned defense mechanism, and sometimes it does help us, but it also means that we cannot trust the person we are during turbulent times because our introspection will bring up more harmful blame and shame instead of constructive guilt. We’ll wonder more about what’s wrong with us rather than what’s right with us, which is what we need during difficult times, and with this misdirected superhero fueling our thoughts during these difficult times, we find it even harder to remember that the pain is temporary. It feels like this pain will go on forever because that misdirected superhero makes us feel like it’s our fault.

Do not use these difficult times to investigate why you did something a certain way, it’ll make those negative emotions last even longer. Instead, give yourself a break. In these difficult times, you need to do everything in your power to give yourself grace. Take a step back and work on the situation, then come back to yourself later.

Poet and Speaker Yung Pueblo spoke about resilience. He said that —

“In difficult times, we have to be conscious about feeling our emotions but to never let them control us. Give your emotions a chance but set clear boundaries so they don’t dictate your future feelings.”

We can get through turbulent times. We’re built to withstand storms, but we have to know that we cannot trust ourselves when we are caught in the storm. The time to work on yourself and better yourself — that comes when the emotions get easier, but for right now, when you’re in the thick of the storm, it’s important to take it one step at a time. Try to remember that these emotions, they’re only lingering because you’re playing the stories over and over in your mind, the stories that you’ve crafted around these emotions — they’re not real, they’re fictional, and you can make them go away. You need to be gentle but firm with yourself because you’ve got this. Tough times don’t last forever and we’re rooting for you every step of the way.

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