Have you ever taken action in order to feel better?
Whether it’s calling your co-worker as soon as you can to smooth over an argument, doing the thing you didn’t want to do because it would make things “easier” with the family, or here’s the clincher, buffering in the form of food, alcohol, or the internet in order to feel better instantly.
If you’ve ever been in any of these situations, and trust me, there isn’t a human in the world that hasn’t done this at least a few times, I’m here to tell you there’s a more effective and insightful way of truly making yourself feel better than taking action on a a false positive.
We call these actions a false positive because while you may feel better in that moment it doesn’t truly allow you to act from a place of true honor, and it only temporarily relieves you of your pain until the next situation comes up where you have to act again in order to not feel discomfort.
The reason why it’s so easy to act on false positives is because we instantly feel relief, and to our minds the pleasure of relief indicates that we should return to this pattern of behavior even though it doesn’t necessarily mean the action was justified.
Unfortunately, we are only playing defense with the false positives.
The more we act on false positives, the more tired we become in the long run because we are constantly in a reactive state.
What if instead we became friends with discomfort? Isn’t that why we act so fast on false positives? Because we want the discomfort to go away?
What if instead we got to know the discomfort and we got to understand why we feel the way we do, and that the reason we feel the way we do is because of an underlying belief that is causing our pain?
For example, you’re anxious about an upcoming presentation you have to give at work and thinking about the speech and all the ways in which your nervousness will show is making it unbearable. So you reach for the bag of cookies, and before you know it the entire bag is gone.
Or here’s another one, you get into a raging fight with your partner and can’t believe how angry your partner is when you know full well you seem to be “right” in this particular situation. You are fuming and find yourself pouring a glass of wine (again) in order to take the edge off.
You see, in both examples we turn to the false positive in order to feel better when really, what we need to do is face the discomfort of what we are feeling in order to understand what is REALLY going on.
In the example of the presentation, if we dig deep enough, that anxiety could really be masked as fear of rejection or acceptance, and that can hurt big time. In the second example, that anger can be a mask of feeling hurt, not seen, or unloved.
When we really get to understand what the discomfort is trying to tell us, we allow ourselves to truly honor the feeling we need to acknowledge and accept so that we can process in a healthy way and develop patterns and behaviors that serve us, not limit us.
By practicing this self awareness we can get to the real work and growth of our own emotional maturity so that when we experience life and its wide spectrum of situations with confidence in our abilities to handle ourselves wisely.
In mindful wellness,
Susan
Susan is a Life Coach based in Seattle, WA. Her main focus is to coach people build a strong emotional container so that we can experience the fullness of life coming from a place of deep confidence. Susan also coaches clients looking to heal adrenal fatigue by using a mental meta-model aimed at breaking down old mental patterns and behaviors so that we can finally tap into our own personal power.