A client recently asked me, “How do I get off this roller coaster of feeling so up and down all the time?”
I believe the answer to that question lies in our ability to change our thoughts, not with our ability to change our circumstances.
But we cannot cultivate our ability to change our thoughts unless we cultivate our awareness of our thoughts. The average person has over 5000 thoughts a day—the majority of them never reach our conscious mind.
I believe the way to get off that “roller coaster of emotions” starts with awareness. The reason we feel so “up and down all the time” is because of the thoughts we have, most of which we are unaware of at a conscious level—yet they still cause us to feel emotions.
Many times I have an emotion and I’m not sure where it came from. I feel bad—negative, or down, sad or irritable—and I have no idea why. I have learned to recognize when I’m experiencing a negative emotion and to ask myself, “What is the thought causing this emotion?”
It’s not always easy to find. Sometimes I don’t figure it out for hours and I continue to feel the negative emotion because I’m still (unconsciously) thinking the thought. In the past, I would experience a negative emotion for days at a time, and it was only after life had moved on long enough for me to start having other thoughts that the negative emotion would leave me. Sometimes I never did figure out what had caused my “bad mood,” I’d just be grateful it was gone.
Many years ago, in the midst of years of trying to have a child, I got some bad news from the fertility doctor my husband and I had been seeing. The doctor looked at my lab results and told me he couldn’t do anything for us. A few days later my husband said something that upset me and I felt totally isolated from him for days. I was angry and sad and felt disconnected from everyone around me. It took me days to realize that I was walking around thinking thoughts like: I’ll never be a mother, and Tom and I will never have a child together.
I realized what I was thinking during a rant to one of my sisters: “Molly (a wise friend) would say I’m really mad about my infertility, but I’m just really upset at what Tom said.”
As soon as I said those words, I realized my emotions had nothing to do with Tom and all to do with my thoughts about not being able to become a mother.
It would take me a while longer before I started questioning those thoughts, but just having the awareness of what I was thinking diffused my anger and allowed me to see my husband as the loving man he is, rather than as the villain I had painted him to avoid thinking about my infertility.
Awareness is the necessary first step to getting off the roller coaster of emotions, or at least turning it from Kingda Ka (currently the tallest roller coaster in the world) to a much more manageable ride, like Disney’s It’s A Small World ride.
Next time you experience a negative emotion, try to find the thought that caused the negative emotion. It’s not always easy, but it’s worth the effort.