Negativity is inevitable, everyone experiences bad situations: days not going right, reaching out to others who only deliver disappointments and critical responses in return, or worse, no response, and then you’re left hanging onto a hope that they never intended to respond to. They say when you feed a fear, it grows, and with it, all that the fear brings with it comes stronger into your situation. The feeling that things are only going to get worse is powerful to the person who can’t seem to shake that feeling off, the reason for that being your feelings are more powerful than your thoughts in drawing an outcome. Thinking positive isn’t really a solution to a bad situation, the outcome of the situation is determined by how you feel about the outcome. In other words feeling preceeds thought, though we often think it’s the other way around. We never say, “I want to think better,” we say, “I want to feel better.” We’re a lot more connected to our emotions than we realize.
If you’re feeling resentment for an activity you’re doing, like helping a friend move some heavy furniture, you’re more likely to feel the physical pains of moving that furniture the next day, or worse, injure yourself during the process. This is because you’re giving your attention to the dominant feeling of pain, of the “lord, I wish I didn’t have to do this” anguish rather than the “I’m helping someone I love better his life” warm feeling. How do we solve this problem of always seeming to increase the bad of a bad situation?
We do it by checking into our feelings before taking action with everything we do. Notice how you’re feeling all the time. For example when you wake up in the morning, take a moment to check in with yourself, “How do I feel?” “Why do I feel like this?” and finally “Is there a better thought or way I could feel like this so that things will get better rather than worse?” Breathe during this process, not just simply breathing in and out, but regularly take a deep breath in and out several times, breathing with your mid section (when your belly rises and the chest remains stationary).
Practice this all day long, when a bad feeling or thought comes over you, check in with yourself. It’s not always easy to instantly go from a feeling of sadness or anger to a feeling of joy, but just checking in with yourself and asking these questions can raise your feeling tone to a little more positive, feeling a little better bit by bit. When you can gradually raise your feeling tone, you’ll see things that hurt you before won’t feel as bad, and eventually, won’t even affect you. Here’s to healthy feeling habits <3
