Emotions

Down in the Dumps

By  | 

The best way to manage those periods where you feel down in the dumps is to mindfully accept that they are an inevitable part of human life. The mental health industry, and especially pharmaceutical companies, have done humanity a grave disservice by capitalizing on our belief that we should spend all our time feeling the pleasant emotions, convincing us that any other state is a definite sign of dysfunction and needs to be medicated.

In my view hopelessness stems not from unpleasant emotions and experiences but from the egocentric belief that they will last forever. Powerful emotions often grip us so strongly that our field of vision is narrowed and we forget that these emotions are transitory, evolutionarily designed to give us quick and decisive information about our environment so that we can act appropriately without having to think too much. Their purpose is not to stay around forever, and pleasant or unpleasant, they never do.

When you’re feeling down in the dumps, let yourself feel down in the dumps. There’s probably a good reason for it and the idea that your state is dysfunctional just adds to the misery, leading to more negative thoughts and emotions. A concept that helps a lot of people is being able to differentiate between primary emotion and secondary emotion. A secondary emotion stems from the value judgement you place on your primary emotion. For example, you might experience a situation that occasions sadness and your desire to cry, but as a culturally typical male you judge this feeling to be a sign of weakness, at which point you start to feel shame. The correct emotion for the situation is replaced with an incorrect emotion, and you never get the chance to move through your sadness in a healthy way because you won’t even let yourself feel it.

In the case of feeling down in the dumps, let yourself feel down in the dumps. Don’t put a value judgement on the experience or worry that it means you’re dysfunctional in some way. Stop thinking that you should always feel happy and upbeat. The belief that life should only be filled with pleasant emotions is an insidious cause of mental illness. You end up hurting yourself more by feeling bad about feeling bad than you would by just accepting your state as a normal part of life while also reminding yourself that it will likely pass on its own soon.

Related posts:

  1. Losing Interest One of the criteria for diagnosing depression is diminished interest in activities that used to seem pleasurable. We will delve further into this idea to help show how depression, rather than being extreme sadness as is popularly assumed, is better conceptualized as a lack of emotion. Emotions are symptoms of a person’s engagement with life. […]...
  2. Pleasant And Unpleasant Emotions Most people have an ambivalent relationship with their emotions, since they can’t imagine life without the pleasant ones yet fantasize about how wonderful life would be without the unpleasant ones. The fact that they are unable to see that emotional engagement is an all or nothing affair, where you either expose yourself to the possibility […]...
  3. Happiness Is Allowing Ourselves To Feel Sad Sometimes If you ask most people what their deepest desire is they’ll say it’s to be happy yet for all that thinking and planning and action that goes into bringing about the wanted state happiness eludes them. A paradoxical reason why is the erroneous assumption that negative, unwanted emotional states can be smothered out to make […]...
  4. Bad Day Not A Bad Life You’ve probably seen the quote “It’s a bad day not a bad life” all over the social networks. From an emotion focused point of view it rings true and is worth bringing to your conscious awareness when those powerful negative emotions rise up and threaten to overwhelm you. Emotions always pass on their own in […]...
  5. Sadness and Anger Anger and sadness have an alliance. One emotion often stands in for the other in situations where consciously experiencing the proper one feels threatening. This ability we have to shift away from the authentic emotion in order to protect ourselves can lead to a lot of problems in general functioning and in our human relationships. […]...
  6. Crying As A Sign Of Weakness If you’re male then it’s more than likely that you feel discomfort around the idea of tearing up. You’ve been indoctrinated with the idea, since you were very young, that boys don’t cry, that crying is a sign of weakness. It’s something girls do. As such you keep a tight lid over the external expression […]...
  7. Pleasant Emotions While Grieving We tend to put a lot of energy into trying to make our life experience conform to how we think things should be instead of how they actually are. In the context of emotions, we often repress the ones that don’t seem to fit the situation or we get down on ourselves for having them, […]...
  8. All Emotions Are Equal In The Eyes Of Evolution The regulation of emotions through drugs and talk therapy is a multi-billion dollar industry whose success can in large part be attributed to the culturally agreed upon fallacy that some emotions are good while others are bad. There’s no question that some are subjectively preferable to others, that some are pleasant and therefore wanted while others are […]...
  9. The Difference Between Depression And Feeling Sad There’s a massive difference between clinical depression and feeling sad. It’s actually important to make the distinction since ‘I’m depressed’ has become an integral part of the lexicon, something people say to express negativity in the face of all manner of unwanted happenings. One of the major differences between clinical depression and feeling sad actually […]...
  10. Accept Your Emotions Most of us want our pleasant feelings to last forever but they don’t and want our unpleasant feelings to go away as quickly as possible yet they sometimes linger. Emotions, just like everything else in life, are transitory. They are not meant to be permanent states of being. Changing your attitude towards both your pleasant […]...
  11. Let Yourself Be Joyful An advantage of keeping tight control over your emotions is that you don’t give people ammunition to bring you down if you don’t give any outward sign of being up. You stay under the radar. It’s strange to think of pleasant emotions seeming dangerous, we usually think of unpleasant emotions like fear or anger being the dangerous […]...
  12. Accepting The State Of Sadness “One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.” – Erich Fromm Sadness Hurts But It Is A Healthy Hurt No one likes being sad and this is probably why so many of us try to run from the state, which compounds the problem. Existentially speaking, sadness is difficult to bear […]...
  13. Primary Emotion And Secondary Emotion Secondary emotions can cause a lot of needless distress in your life. They are usually a result of conscious or unconscious value judgments you place upon your primary emotions. Leslie Greenberg has a quote I like that says “Although thought can produce emotion, not all emotion is produced by thought” (Leslie S Greenberg, Emotion Focused Therapy, […]...
  14. In a Bad Place If you feel like you’re in a bad place the best thing you can do for yourself is to let yourself be consciously aware of the fact. Your emotions are probably exerting a more powerful pull over your thinking than your rational, logical side, and as we all know this can compel you to say […]...
  15. Dealing With Anger I was recently asked how to deal with clients when they are really mad. I think this is a worthwhile topic because all of us find ourselves in situations with people who are extremely angry sometimes. The common responses are usually to shy away from the encounter or meet it head on and get angry […]...
  16. Congruence When people talk about difficult past experiences you might notice that they laugh or smile even though what they’re recounting was and still is very painful to them. This is a defense mechanism, a way to try to dampen down or even transform the pain around what happened by making it seem funny or ironic. […]...
  17. Expressing Emotion A huge mistake that many of us make in the realm of emotions is to assume that one size fits all, that since emotions have objective universal attributes, properly expressing these emotions like everyone does is indicative of mental health. We neglect the obvious fact that people have different temperaments, and these temperaments play a […]...
  18. Holding a Grudge Holding a grudge is one of the stupidest things you can do because it creates negativity in your present. In an existential sense there is a difference between your underlying state of being and the fluctuations of emotion that make up your daily existence. Some days we feel positive and upbeat, while other days we […]...
  19. Emotional Detachment and Suppressing Powerful Emotions A Chosen Strategy for Psychic Relief When we write about emotional detachment as a syndrome it’s essential to understand that we don’t mean that there’s any inherent flaw in the emotional apparatus as such. People with emotional detachment are capable of empathy and capable of experiencing the full emotional spectrum. Emotional detachment is not an […]...
  20. Frustration If you’re feeling frustrated then what you’re probably really feeling at a deeper level is helpless. Frustration stems from the inability to manipulate variables in your environment to your liking. This inability of course amounts to the same thing as helplessness. This is why frustration is likely to turn into anger. The psychology is pretty […]...
Related Items