Dealing with Difficult Emotions: A Mindful Guide on Facing Your Feelings

Difficult emotions are unpleasant to deal with. They make functioning in your daily life hard, interfere with achieving your needs and goals, and can increase your stress levels. While people do not strive to feel sadness, anger, jealousy, fear, and anxiety, these emotions serve a purpose – an important one, too. 

Experiencing ‘negative’ emotions can help us tune in and understand when something has hurt us, if a situation has become unsafe, or it can allow us to mourn healthily. By learning to accept and embrace these emotions, we can help improve our emotion regulation, leading to fewer mood swings, improved relationships with others, and the ability to process situations and issues in our lives more effectively. If you suspect you struggle to deal with difficult emotions, this mindful guide to facing your feelings may be able to help you.

Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash

What are difficult emotions?

Difficult feelings are often identified as ‘negative’ emotions, although it is important to note that no emotion, no matter how troublesome, is inherently bad. These emotions are often very normal reactions to experiences or events and can help us to process the experience, manage interactions, and guide decision-making. These difficult emotions only become problematic when they become persistent and interfere with your ability to manage daily life. 

What constitutes a difficult emotion may vary from person to person, however, common types of these emotions include:

• Anger, contempt, and hate
• Anxiety and fear
• Apathy
• Jealousy or insecurity
• Regret, guilt, and shame
• Sadness, loneliness, and grief

What causes difficult emotions?

Difficult emotions can arise for a variety of reasons. 

• Specific experiences or events may trigger a short-term emotional response. This may include losing a sports game, which causes you to become angry, or having a fight with a parent, which may cause sadness. Other experiences may cause more long-term responses, such as losing a loved one and feeling grief. 
• Ongoing relationship conflict with friends, family, or coworkers is a common source of a range of difficult emotions. Having unmet needs may also result in loneliness and envy. 
• Drug or alcohol abuse can disrupt the emotional regulation process, leading to either heightened or dulled emotional responses. 
• Mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, and ADHD  can contribute to emotional dysregulation. 
• Poor coping skills resulting from everyday stress can often end up making a problem worse and even introduce new problems and emotions to the mix. 

What does unhealthy coping look like?

For many people, the first reaction when experiencing difficult emotions is to reject, hide, or avoid them. Some unhealthy ways of achieving this include escape mechanisms like drug or alcohol abuse, emotional eating, gambling, overspending, negative self-talk, self-harm, or indulging in risky sexual behaviour. 

While avoiding or suppressing your emotions (consciously or subconsciously) can be very appealing, it will likely worsen things in the long term. Difficult emotions provide clues to your mental state, and ignoring them can impact the healing journey and make it more challenging when you finally have to face reality. A healthy balance would be reaching a point in between overwhelming emotion and no emotion, known as emotional acceptance. 

Avoiding your emotions is an unhealthy coping mechanism. Photo by Lidya Nada on Unsplash.

How to cope with difficult emotions

Identify what you’re feeling

If you are suddenly faced with managing a difficult emotion, take a moment to identify exactly what you are feeling and consider what has triggered this emotion. Considering the reason and reframing your thoughts can help halt or modify any extreme first reactions you may have, which is the first step towards regaining control. 

Accept your emotions

Trying to downplay your feelings to yourself – i.e. telling yourself it is “not a big deal” or to “calm down” – will not help you become better at managing your emotions. It instead invalidates your experience because this is a big deal to you. Accepting your emotions at the time you feel them allows you to become more comfortable with them, allowing you to react in appropriate ways. 

Give yourself some space

When we talk about space, we mean temporarily creating some distance from the intense feelings you are feeling to take a breather. This may involve physically removing yourself from a situation or mentally distancing yourself with a distracting walk, social media scroll, starting a conversation with friends or family, or cuddling your pet. 

Keep a journal

Tracking your difficult feelings and emotions in a journal can help you uncover and interpret disruptive patterns. Putting it down on paper allows you to reflect more deeply and pinpoint when specific events or circumstances trigger you, allowing you to better prepare to manage them.

Find an outlet (exercise, meditation, or a hobby)

Making healthy changes in your life to better manage difficult emotions is a great way to cope with stress. Everyone’s needs and abilities differ, but some outlets you may like to try include:

• Regular exercise can give you an emotional lift and provide a temporary distraction if needed. 
• Mediation provides many people with the time and space to work through their emotions so they do not become overwhelmed.
• Finding a hobby you truly enjoy can help relieve stress and inject positivity into your daily life. 

Stay on top of stress

Easier said than done, we know, but taking steps to stay on top of your stress can help reduce heightened and uncontrollable emotions from coming forth. Some ways you may like to help cope with stress include:

• Practicing meditation
• Getting enough sleep
• Making time to exercise, see friends and family, or spend time outdoors
• Committing time to relax
• Pick up a hobby

Talk with a mental health professional

If your emotions are significantly impacting your life despite attempts to face them, it may be time to seek professional help. Mental health professionals, therapists, and those who have completed a requisite Graduate Certificate of Psychology can help provide compassionate support to explore your triggers, address the impact on your life, and practice coping mechanisms to help you move forward.