Embracing My Bad Moods

Nothing has gone wrong here.

It’s ok not to be ok.

I’ve been repeating these two phrases to myself with increasing frequency over the last couple of months.

Nothing has gone wrong here.

It’s ok not to be ok.

I’ve been employing these mantras because I recently started to notice myself fighting against my negative emotions and my bad moods. And it was a different type of fighting-against than what I had observed in myself in the past.

I wasn’t shoving the feelings down; I wasn’t trying to eat or drink them away; I wasn’t reacting strongly to them by being moody and stomping around. Instead, I was viewing my negative emotions as a indication that there was something wrong with me.

See, I’m a person who is always striving to feel good and to be well. I think most of us are striving for this in many ways, but I personally put a lot of intention and energy into this quest. This serves me most of the time; it has helped me to grow and stretch and understand myself differently than I had before. And I used to think that my resistance to my bad moods or negative emotion was a part of my quest to feel better and be a better version of me, and in turn that this resistance was part of me growing.

What I’ve come to realize, though, is that the resistance was not actually growth, it was just me trying to fix or improve myself.

Let’s dig into this a little bit because it really is quite nuanced.

What I noticed is that because I’m trying to live in a way that places value in trying to feel good and be the best version of me – it can sometimes feel like a failure if I am not in a good mood, if I’m not having a good day, or if I’m not being my best self.

I’ll sometimes get down on myself about the fact that I am feeling down – which sounds ridiculous as I write it, but it’s what I do. I’ll be having a rough day – maybe I’m sad, tired, stressed, or unmotivated; or maybe I’m struggling with physical pain. Instead of just being compassionate and holding space for myself on this rough day, I instead have this thought/belief that says:

I should feel better.

I should be able to handle this

Something is wrong with me.

And because I believe in striving to be better, I then start searching for a reason that might explain why I don’t feel well, searching for what has gone wrong. Now, on the surface, this type of investigation could be a good thing and sometimes I do it in a way that serves me – with curiosity and compassion.

But other times I find myself searching through the lens of what’s wrong with me? or I shouldn’t feel this way – and this is the problem.

Because that is not self-compassion. That is not curiosity. It’s self-criticism and self-judgment. It’s me telling myself that the difficult emotions I am experiencing indicate that something has gone wrong, or that something is wrong with me. And that is simply not true.

When I’m struggling with something like this, I like to think to myself: what would I tell a coaching client if she were struggling with this same thing? And when I look at it from that perspective the answers and clarity tend to come more easily.

If a client came to me with this issue, I would tell her that when she is feeling sadness, fatigue, pain, or anxiety – what she is experiencing is simply part of being human. I would tell her that nothing has gone wrong here. I would also tell her that it’s ok not to be ok.

And if she wanted to investigate the thoughts, beliefs, or circumstances behind her struggle, we would do it with curiosity and compassion. And I would tell her that sometimes we don’t need to investigate – sometimes we just sit with the pain, we accept it, hold it, and allow it to move through us.

We all seek good times, positive feelings, and enjoyable experiences. This is natural, but it is also important to remember that part of being a human is that our lives consist of both the good and the bad; the positive and the negative; the enjoyable and the crummy. When I am experiencing the rough emotions, it doesn’t mean that anything has gone wrong. It doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with me. It doesn’t mean that I need to fix something. It just means that I’m human and that I’m experiencing the not-so-great part of the human experience.

Negative emotions might not feel great when they occur, but they can add to the richness of our lives. They provide contrast. Research shows us that is is not the perpetually happy people who feel the most alive. It is actually the people who allow themselves to feel the full spectrum of emotional experiences who feel the best about their quality of life.

Additionally, it’s impossible to eliminate negative emotions – that would be weird and fake. Difficult things happen in our lives and feeling sad, angry, hurt, worried, etc. would be the honest and true response. We want to feel sad if our beloved pet dies. And sometimes we feel a negative emotion and don’t know why. And that is ok. The goal is to allow ourselves to experience the appropriate negative emotions, to feel them fully and then to have the skills to be able to move through them.

Easier said than done, I realize. If I am having a good day or am in a decent mood, this all makes perfect sense and I am 100% in. But when I’ve been hijacked by a difficult emotion, all of this becomes more difficult to understand and execute.

We can also learn a lot from our negative emotions. In her book titled Emotional Agility Susan David discusses how our emotions can be signals of our values, our beliefs, and of the things we deeply care about. She explains that humans don’t tend to feel strongly about things that are not meaningful to us. And that if we tune in and pay attention to the full spectrum of our emotions, rather than trying to shut down the negative ones, they can lead us to more deeply understand who we are and what matters most to us.

What might I learn about myself if I could start to see my difficult emotions as signals or guides into the deeper parts of me instead of feeling like I am failing at something because I experience them?

I still believe that we can and should work to make our lives rich and wonderful. I don’t want to settle with feeling crummy; I want to be curious, to investigate and dig into my feelings, my thoughts, who I am. I love that work and I will keep doing it and helping others to do it.

But it has to be done with compassion and curiosity, rather than in a way that makes me feel like I am doing it all wrong or that is questioning my self-worth.

Because experiencing negative emotions does not have to mean that anything has gone wrong with us. It does not have to mean that we are doing life wrong. It is simply part of the human experience, and while I do prefer the good days, I am going to practice accepting and allowing the difficult emotions along with the lovely ones. I’m going to embrace the contrast and stop feeling bad about feeling bad.

Nothing has gone wrong here.

It really is ok not to feel ok.