I’ve heard this phrase a lot, but never really understood what it meant. Yesterday morning, when I was just thinking and reflecting on the past weekend, I suddenly felt a type of anxious and uncomfortable emotion come over me. It was the type of hard emotion that made my heart clench and my brain fog.
I immediately thought of reaching for my phone to distract myself on social media like I am used to doing, but instead, I stopped myself and thought I would try “sitting” with this uncomfortable emotion.
I thought about where this emotion was coming from and why I was feeling this way. I let myself feel the emotion for a moment, really acknowledge how it was making me feel, and then mentally stepped back from my emotion to just focus on my thoughts. I reflected on the thought that caused this emotion to arise. I pondered it from an outside view and countered it with reasoning and a more realistic perspective. After a few minutes of working through my thoughts (and it really only was a few, like five, minutes), I felt my heart start to unclench and a sense of relief and contentment wash over me.
This is when I realized how well the process of “sitting with your uncomfortable emotions” really worked and how easy, quick, and beneficial it was. I thought about how I would have been feeling if instead of doing this exercise, I went on my phone to distract myself like I was about to. I thought about how I probably would have still had that clenched, tight feeling in my chest and how I would have carried it with me throughout the day, trying to push it down, and not knowing how to get rid of the feeling because I didn’t even remember the source of it anymore. I also thought about how many times I have done this in the past that led me to feel shitty and anxious for the rest of the day, which now I know is easily avoidable.
From now on, every time a hard and uncomfortable emotion arises within me, I am going to challenge myself to sit with the emotion instead of finding a distraction. It helped put my negative emotion and the thought that caused it into perspective and made me realize that I didn’t have to let these type of thoughts dictate how I felt, and therefore, how I acted. It made me realize that it is possible that one uncomfortable emotion arising does not affect the whole rest of my day. That if I dealt with the uncomfortable emotion at the time that I first felt it, I could work through and resolve it and not be impacted by it for the rest of the day.
I hope you all take this into your own lives. Any time you feel an uncomfortable emotion, I challenge you to “sit” with it instead of defaulting to an unhealthy coping skill, like pushing it down and distracting yourself (like me). It really only takes a few minutes and is so extremely beneficial. Acknowledging the uncomfortable feeling and how it makes you feel, and then dissecting the thought that caused it, looking at it from an outside perspective and countering it with logic. Just remember that I am right here along with you, challenging myself to sit with my emotions too, and that we can do this.
– Avery
Mentally, I’m Here 