Feel Your Feelings with Dr. Laurie Santos

(light music) Headspace Studios. (light music) Hi everyone. Welcome to Radio Headspace, and to Friday. It's Doctor Laurie Santos here. Thanks so much for having me as your guest host all week. Today I'm gonna talk about why we shouldn't run away from uncomfortable feelings. Sometimes it may seem easier to ignore tough emotions, but research shows that acknowledging those feelings, and dealing with them, can bring us closer to the happiness we seek. These days our negative emotions can spring from so many different sources. I think sometimes our negative emotions come from the things we experience online. We read the news, and we're feeling frustrated, we're feeling scared, we're feeling angry, but sometimes we experience negative emotions interpersonally. We get upset at a colleague of ours. We feel sad when something bad happens to someone we care about. And then sometimes these negative emotions just arise within us. We have these brains that spontaneously start to ruminate about the bad things that are gonna happen in the future, or have happened in the past. Negative emotions come from all over the place. By definition, negative emotions don't feel that good, right? Like, that's why we call them negative emotions. And that can lead us to wanna run away from them. But the sad and ironic thing is the act of running away from our negative emotions, winds up making them worse. The analogy I like to tell my students is that trying to shove down a negative emotion, like sadness or anger, it's akin to sort of, when you used to, as a kid, take the beach ball and like shove it under the water, like in the pool, or at the beach or something. You can put a lot of work in to shove that beach ball underwater, but eventually it's gonna pop out. My mom would say it's gonna fly over and, you know, hit your brother in the face, right? Like it's not gonna fly out and do positive things. And so I think we need better strategies for dealing with our negative emotions. Pushing them away doesn't seem to work in the way that we think. One of the best strategies for dealing with our negative emotions, ironically, is just to allow them to be there. I think sometimes we believe if we just let our emotions stay there, they're gonna take over and be awful, but the evidence suggests that emotions are kind of like a wave, you know, an ocean wave. They'll go up at first, and you might feel them a little bit more intensely, but eventually they're gonna crest and go away, and a lot of the evidence suggests that even the most painful of negative emotions, when you allow them to be there, when you commit to being with them, and being present with them, they're gonna run their course in like 10 to 15 minutes. One of my favorite specific strategies for allowing your negative emotions comes from...