We have 6 basic emotions – anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Every other emotion is a mix of these 6 in various degrees. The implication, in my eyes, is that negative emotions that we feel are hardly ever new. And if they aren’t new, it should get progressively easier for us to deal with them once we learn to identify them. How do we that? It starts with stepping outside of ourselves every time we feel negative and labelling the feeling. Once we get good at identifying feelings, dealing with them becomes easier.
I was experimenting with this approach this morning as I was dealing with a feeling I describe as “feeling unsettled.” This feeling is probably a mix of anger (20%), fear (50%), and sadness (30%). A wiser friend pointed the symptoms of this 12 months back and I am getting pretty good at identifying the symptoms of this feeling – I feel tired, irritated, impatient, and less positive/hopeful all at once. As you can imagine, I’m not fun to be around when this happens. Of late, I’ve been getting better at responding to this feeling by doing a few things that seem to help. So, as I was thinking about it as an idea for today’s post, I was led to the question – why do I feel unsettled? I realize it is because I feel disconnected, disorganized, and disenchanted with progress on things that matter most to me.
Before we examine these one by one, let me also call out food and sleep as basics that need to be gotten right first. The two of these are top priority and my first reaction when I feel unsettled is to get as much sleep as I need while also trying to make sure I get some comfort food/food I like. I love my comfort food! Over to the 3 factors next.
Disconnected. This is a feeling of disconnect from people I care about and from myself. This is one of the big reasons I feel unsettled most when I’m traveling on work as I’m away from framily (family + close friends) and often get too busy to sit down and spend time with myself. Aside from enjoying downtime and staying in close touch with those I care about, I carry photos of framily when I travel and set them up wherever I stay. This helps a lot.
So, this morning for instance, the actions that helped were a couple of catch up calls followed by a set up all these photos.
Disorganized. A clean work desk and home are critical to a clean mind in my case. So, cleaning is a natural next step when I’m feeling unsettled.
Disenchanted with progress on important things. This is why the fear component of feeling unsettled is at 50%. There’s a trigger to fear and insecurities inside at whether I’m making any progress at all on the stuff that matters. As a result, there are a couple of natural next steps – make a list of things to do (part of getting organized), knock off the quick wins and then start hitting the big ticket items.
This is probably the most important factor that needs fixing but doesn’t happen if I don’t go about fixing the first two.
(And yes, I did pick “disenchanted” to keep consistent with the other two “dis” words)
Fixing this feeling isn’t a 10 minute job. Going through this process when I feel unsettled often takes many hours but it’s a worthwhile investment because the effects of not doing the right things can result in a vicious cycle of unproductivity, irritation, and unhappiness.
The other nice side effect that comes out fixing it is that it is often followed by a period of high productivity and happiness. Dealing with the negative feeling allows me to focus on what needs to be done and the irritation that was a part of the negativity suddenly transforms into the sort of positive stress that helps me focus and get stuff done.
Every coin has two sides. In the case of negative emotions like this one, we just have to remember that we don’t have to sit down and take the outcome of the coin flip. We can always pick up the coin and keep tossing till we find the side that suits us. We can make our own luck..
A Learning a Day 