Areas › Low mood and hard feelings
Low mood and hard feelings
Feelings are information before they are problems. The practices here are about naming what you feel accurately, sitting with what will not move yet, and acting on what matters to you even on the days nothing feels like anything.
Narrowed down
4 practicesTheme · Tolerate distress
How long you have · A minute
Approach
When · Under stress
Tell yourself the true thing: this feeling is real, and it is temporary. No state lasts. Ride it out.
You do not have to fix it right now. You only have to outlast it. Feelings crest and fall like weather.
Wise mind is not a calmer version of you. It is the state where what you feel and what you have thought through are both in the room, and neither has thrown the other out.
In practice it means you can feel the heat in your chest and still choose the next sentence. Neither half is the enemy: pure logic talks you out of…
Let your face go. Unclench the jaw, let the lips lift very slightly, and let the loosening carry back through your head and shoulders.
You are not pretending to be happy and nobody has to see it. The face holds a lot of the tension of a bad state, and it is one of the few parts you…
You are allowed to put something down. Put it down with a time to pick it up again: Thursday morning, with my therapist, not tonight.
Without the appointment, setting it aside quietly turns into never touching it, and the thing keeps all its power by never being looked at. With the…