Spice of Life | Sit with it: Processing your emotions is key to healing

When you allow yourself space to think about your feelings before acting rashly upon them, you become a conscious decision-maker. Your decisions become not merely a response to what happens to you, but a conscious choice of what you would choose to go ahead with

When was the last time you sat with your problem? No, this is not a spouse joke. When was the last time you sat to process your emotions in absolute solitude? As a generation surrounded by gadgets all day long, distractions are always a finger tap or click away. Ergo, how do you make time to introspect your emotions without being distracted by the omnipresent smart devices? Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

By the end of the day, when your head hits the pillow all those emotions are bound to rise and gather around in the front of your mind, demanding attention, causing frustration and insomnia. (HT File)

Our number one option whenever we get stressed is to ignore and suppress it for later consideration. We push it to the back of our minds with doom scrolling, streaming, or indulging in seemingly more important other activities. We override our emotions with screen numbness or overworking. In front of the screen, we push our troubles to the back of our minds. Whether it is anger, fear, disappointment, nervousness, or anxiety, we have become habitual in abandoning and suppressing them in the matrix of our minds.

I recently came across this concept of ‘sitting with it’ and have been tuning my brain to adopt it in my day-to-day routine. Whether it is anger, fear, disappointment, nervousness, or anxiety, I take a moment and sit with it. I try to process my feelings and the reason behind them. I do not speed up to toss out the troubling thoughts and put my mind at ease with aloofness. I process them and then take action to release them into the world if and when needed. You don’t always need to understand them, act upon what you can do to make yourself feel better and release the others out in the open. We cannot act upon every thought that troubles us. Some thoughts are mere jumbled words put together by incoherent insecurity or words and we need not pay much attention to them. Not every emotion needs to be acted upon, some need to be left out in the open because they are nothing but a temporal situation that doesn’t require over-analysation. They do not require a permanent place in your mind. You can feel it, and then let them go holding onto thoughts that truly matter.

When you allow yourself space to think about your feelings before acting rashly upon them, you become a conscious decision-maker. Your decisions become not merely a response to what happens to you, but a conscious choice of what you would choose to go ahead with. Because life will always move ahead, even if we are stuck in the loop of overthinking and procrastination. Then, life will not be something that always happens to you, but how you lead those situations with your decisions to direct your emotions.

js.ks09@gmail.com

The writer is a freelance contributor