138 Choosing Negative Emotion

There’s no amount of thought work, green juice or yoga that’s going to ensure you never feel bad. We can’t control that life is balanced between negative and positive, but we can often control which negative and which positive we choose. So in this episode I’m talking about emotional tradeoffs; how to choose your negative emotion in order to achieve what you want rather than experiencing negative emotion by default.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• Which negative emotions keep you stuck and which help move you forward.
• To see emotions as fuel 
• The mindset shift you need when you feel lousy

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Transcript

This transcript was auto-generated, please forgive any weirdness.

 Hi, and welcome to the Mindful Shape Podcast. My name is Paula Parker and I am a certified coach. I specialize in helping people reach their desired weight and feel more in charge when it comes to their decisions around food, so that they're the ones in charge and not the food. Something I've been thinking a lot about lately is how we relate to how we feel, especially when we're feeling negative, when we're feeling down.

When you're feeling great, things just seem in flow, and for me at least, there's less examination or reflection. There's just a lot of doing. I'm just in the flow. When I say relate to how we feel, I mean how we are thinking about how we feel, whether we think, oh, this is great, or we think, or we don't think anything at all.

If things are going well or if we're feeling badly, we might think something has gone wrong or this is a problem. Or if you're like me, you're. Overanalyzing maybe, or there's a lot of reflection. So when things are not in the flow, when instead of inspired action, your life just feels like more of a mechanical effort, all the things that you need to do, like send that etransfer, take out the recycling, clean the kitchen, get the groceries, move your body, all that life stuff, it seems like.

There's a lot of resistance. It just seems like we have more negative emotion. There's more dread, there's more boredom, discontent, disappointment, overwhelm, frustration, all of those negative emotions. Of course, we can't control that. Life is balanced between negative and positive, but we can often control which negative and positive we choose.

So what I've been thinking a lot about lately is what if we choose our negative emotion? In order to achieve what we want rather than experiencing negative emotion by default. What if that is actually the key to releasing the weight or really achieving any goal that you have? So oftentimes the reason we say, oh, screw it and just overeat, you know, couple bowls of cereal or something, is because it's an avoidance strategy.

We're trying to avoid a negative emotion. Cereal just happens to be a convenient strategy to do that. So think of the last time you overindulged or you overate. See if you can name the emotion you were trying to avoid or not feel. Was it overwhelm, anxiety, sadness, discontent. Anger, disappointment, and maybe nothing comes to mind and we can just go with unease.

That can be one. Or you might think, well, there was not really any negative emotion. I just thought the food looks really delicious and I just wanted it, so then I would ask you. How you would have felt if you then said no to yourself instead of Yes. Then that becomes the emotion that you were trying to avoid.

Maybe it would've been deprivation, sadness, self-pity, disappointment, that you don't get to eat that delicious food. Whatever it is, that's the emotion that you're avoiding. What we do is to avoid that temporary negative emotion. We eat the food, we eat the cereal, but then later of course we feel all that negative emotion.

Maybe it's just a different flavor, so maybe it's regret, it's feeling discouraged or uncomfortable in our body, or even self-loathing. So what if you decided, okay, I'm going to feel a balance of negative and positive either way, whether I release the weight or not, whether I eat on plan or not, there will be emotional trade-offs.

What are the emotions, the negative emotions that you would choose? So instead of avoiding, you're now inviting in the negative. So instead of self-loathing, you're choosing deprivation. Instead of regret, you're choosing sadness. When someone says, I have some good news for you and I have some bad news, which do you want first?

What do you always say? You always say, I want the bad news first. Right? Why you wanna get it over with? Think of it that way. You can have immediate. Temporary deprivation, or you can have the longer term discomfort in your body later, but there's negative emotion either way. So being intentional about it, choosing negative emotion will make you feel stronger.

More resilient, at least this is kind of what I'm playing with lately and my parenting coach is always saying, as parents, we need to let them, the children make mistakes. We need to let them experience negative emotion and be there for them and emotionally coach them, of course, can't just like set up a situation in which they experience a lot of negative emotion and be like, well fend for yourselves.

Right? This is, this is the parenting of the eighties maybe, but not today. Right? Why? Because. It fosters learning and it builds emotional resilience, and I think that's true for us as well as grownups, as adults. Okay, so use emotion. It's there as fuel, as a power source, and you'll notice there are emotional trade-offs that you make in every other aspect of your life.

But for some reason we relate to negative emotion in other areas. I think with a little bit more tolerance then when it comes to saying no to ice cream or the hamburger bun. Okay, so I worked at various corporate jobs for 15 years before I decided to quit my job and run my coaching business full-time, and there were emotional trade-offs.

So I traded in boredom of my nine to five job for confusion. Okay? I traded in the powerlessness. That's inherent in, you know, many respects of being an employee for a lot more uncertainty. Maybe you're considering a change in your life, considering a big move, starting a new workout plan, getting a pet above and beyond the logistics.

Consider the negative emotional trade-offs. You're trading in discontent for the annoyance of moving. You are trading in inadequacy of how you're feeling in your body. For the dread of those workouts you might be trading in loneliness. For obligation or the inconvenience of having a pet. And you know, when you travel, you have to set all of that up.

And as you're thinking this over, like which emotions do you want to choose and which you will trade in? Transmute, consider that there are some emotional states that keep you stuck, meaning you're not moving forward, you're not gaining any new information or learning. You're not evolving or growing as a person, so you stay stagnant.

When you indulge in them. So these are the ones that you may want to trade in, meaning you notice when they come up for you and you choose a different emotion intentionally. Okay? So I'll give you a list. These are the ones that keep you stagnant, apathy, self-pity, avoidance, aversion, envy, and overwhelm.

Consider choosing the following emotions instead, and then I'll give you a few practical examples. So consider that you are choosing anger, sadness, grief, disappointment, fear or anxiety, heartbreak, regret. And shame. Shame comes with a little bit of an asterisk because thoughts that produce shame are typically really sticky, meaning they're hard to shift.

So because of that, it makes sense to hold some space for shame. Okay, so I wanna give you some examples. If I'm feeling apathetic, I might need to take action, feeling angry about it. So I don't like it. I'm feeling angry, but I am taking action. So I'm trading apathy for anger. If I'm feeling self pity because I've been, you know, in quotations doing all the right things and still not where I wanna be, I can feel disappointed.

And then try something different. If I'm in self-pity and I'm indulging in that, it's all like poor me. It's victim mindset. If it's disappointment, it's more like things didn't go how I expected, but I still have agency I. See the difference. So if I'm feeling aversion to my health and body, the perfect example is you see a picture of yourself and you don't like it, and you're like, oh man, I thought it was looking good.

And then you see a picture and you're like, oh, I don't look good in that picture. Right? We can trade that in for grief, allow it to be there. The grief of what you had wanted maybe to see in that picture, the grief for years gone by in a body that wasn't in alignment with who you are and allow that to be there.

And then move forward. Okay, so that's more clean. That's like healthy. You're a human. You're gonna experience negative emotion. We don't wanna try to avoid it. We want to experience these healthy, clean emotions that move us forward. And you'll notice that the main difference between those two lists of negative emotion is that.

One keeps you stuck, keeps you kind of spinning your wheels, and the others are more conducive for taking action, trying something different. They lend to moving you forward. That's essentially how you can tell the difference. One of our privileges as human beings is our ability to choose. We can choose the pain of being overweight in a body that doesn't feel like it's us or the pain of deprivation.

We can choose the pain of growth or the pain of stagnation, staying the same, feels painful to release weight and change our relationship with food. We need to learn how to move forward and allow all of that negative emotion that comes with it. Specifically when we're talking about food making changes to our, what we're doing in relation to food, it's going to be allowing desire, deprivation, fomo, like fear of missing out, and awkwardness.

In exchange though, we get to release emotions of stagnation, self-pity, scarcity, embarrassment, confusion, frustration, all of that that we experience when we're not feeling good in our body. Or in charge with food, our tendency is to avoid them by forever trying to find the perfect way of eating. Or we do things like we keep the ice cream out of the house or we hide from them.

Pretending they aren't there, like pretending we aren't experiencing the negative emotion we're experiencing and we white knuckle it when we want something, rather than getting curious with myself like, oh, why do I want, why do I have all this over desire? Why do I want this in the first place? Or we rebel against ourselves by quitting and just indulging and saying, screw it.

So if you are going to experience the balance of emotion, no matter what, you might as well choose feelings that move you forward and closer to what you want and closer to your desired weight. I think this is like just a nice reminder to have in the back of your mind in terms of how you want to relate to negative emotion.

Because whether you are currently facing an obstacle and you're in negative emotion or you are feeling great, but we know that. It becomes a cycle, right? There's gonna be tough times ahead or there's gonna be like a dip in your motivation for the next time this comes. You can be more readily.

Available in your consciousness of, oh yeah, when it comes to negative emotion, I signed up for this. I'm choosing this, I can allow it. So I'm choosing temporary restriction for longer term freedom when it comes to. The ease in which I, you know, move in my body and the freedom that I feel around my choices around food, rather than choosing immediate, temporary freedom, what feels like freedom.

I call it like false freedom and then regret, or the self-loathing that follows. I. Consider your brain is used to some particular negative emotions. I was talking to my sister recently and she was saying something about how, yeah, I think my brain likes to go to self pity, and I was like, I think mine goes to self pity pretty quickly too.

This is just like a memorized pattern that we both have. No doubt learned from our parents, right? Not to blame them, but it's like we both have this tendency, okay, probably learned from family of origin. It's totally fine. We're all doing our best, but your brain loves familiarity over anything else. This is why quitting is so tempting.

This is why overindulging on Sunday and repenting on Monday is so compelling. That whole rollercoaster of negative emotion is tried and true for your brain. And because of that, if you feel a different negative emotion that Sunday night, you, your brain will want to bolt and go back to the familiar negative emotions.

Okay? So instead, the key is to open up and breathe in. That new negative feeling so you can process it and let it run through your physical body. So use movement. If you have to use your body, the very body that is experiencing this emotion, maybe walking, stretching, breathing exercises, and allow what you are feeling.

This will teach your brain that negative emotion is actually harmless. It can't do any permanent damage unless you are trying to avoid it or resist it. And I don't know about you, but I have not found that trying to eliminate negative emotion in my life has ever worked and I've tried. So you can try to distract yourself with food, with tv, with buying stuff, with making more money, even with other people.

But there is still a balance of negative and positive. So instead, I'm going to intentionally start choosing negative emotion because my hunch is that the way to success getting what I want is through emotion. That emotion is the fuel. And if that's true, then the way to extraordinary success is through extraordinary emotion.

So if you are on board for that too, keep moving toward the negative emotion. Choose desire, in this case, unmet desire. Choose deprivation, fomo, awkwardness, sadness, any of the negative emotions that come up for you when you want to. Adhere to your plan when you want to eat, only when you are very hungry, and stop it enough and choose foods that serve you when you wanna follow through on that.

And it feels hard. It's only hard because of the negative emotion. So decide intentionally which emotions you're going to. Choose on this path toward reaching your desired weight and of course feeling in charge with food. This is like such a helpful tool in feeling in charge, where you're mastering your emotional awareness and you're mastering your capacity to transmute negative emotion.

So start to see this negative emotion as being part of achieving your desired weight, because it will be there in one form or another. Either way. Alright, I hope that was helpful and I'll talk to you again soon. Bye.