Who Said You Were Supposed To Feel Good All The Time?

Inside Nat's Notebook - Real Reflections for Real Change

Somewhere along the way, I think we got the idea that feeling good was the goal.

Not enjoying our lives. Not experiencing them. Not being fully alive for the whole messy, glorious, occasionally irritating business of being human.

Feeling good.

Preferably calm, grateful, positive, well-rested, emotionally regulated and in possession of a morning routine involving lemon water, right?

And if you’ve done any work on yourself at all, there can be an even stranger expectation lurking underneath it. Surely you should be better at this by now?

You understand yourself. You’ve learnt things. You’ve changed things. You know how to calm your mind. You’ve become better at noticing what is happening inside you. So why are you still annoyed? Why did that comment bother you? Why are you sad today? Why did you wake up in a foul mood when absolutely nothing is wrong?

Honestly. All this personal growth and still having feelings. Outrageous.

But who said emotional wellbeing meant feeling good all the time?

Because I don’t think that’s wellbeing. I think that’s a very exhausting job description.

Imagine waking up every morning and immediately checking whether you’re achieving the correct emotional state. Happy enough? Calm enough? Grateful enough? Have you reacted appropriately to the weather? Are you appreciating your life sufficiently? Excellent. Please report back at lunchtime for another assessment.

We can turn almost anything into something to be good at if we try hard enough.

And feelings are particularly easy to do it with because some of them are simply more comfortable than others. Joy feels lovely. Contentment feels lovely. That delicious moment when you realise you have nowhere to be and nobody currently wants anything from you? Absolutely glorious.

Anger? Grief? Frustration? Jealousy? Disappointment? Not so much.

So naturally we prefer some feelings and would rather not have others. I don’t think there’s anything terribly enlightened about pretending otherwise. Nobody gets stuck in traffic thinking, How wonderful. An unexpected opportunity to explore my irritation.

You’re annoyed.

Be annoyed.

The interesting part is what happens next, because we have become incredibly inventive at trying not to feel what we don’t want to feel. We distract ourselves. We talk ourselves out of it. We decide we shouldn’t feel that way because somebody else has it worse. We immediately start searching for the lesson. We try to reframe it, breathe it away, think positively, cheer ourselves up or work out what on earth is wrong with us.

Sometimes before we’ve even allowed ourselves to admit, Actually, I’m really disappointed.

What if nothing has gone wrong?

What if disappointment is what disappointment feels like? What if grief hurts because something mattered? What if anger sometimes appears because something doesn’t feel right? What if nervousness turns up when you’re doing something that matters to you? What if being fed up occasionally is simply part of being a person who lives on Earth and has to interact with other people?

That doesn’t mean every feeling is telling you the truth about the world. You can feel left out without anybody deliberately excluding you. You can feel nervous about something that turns out beautifully. You can be furious with somebody and, after food and a decent night’s sleep, discover that your case against them has weakened considerably.

Feelings are real experiences. They aren’t always reliable narrators.

But there’s a difference between questioning the story you’re telling yourself about a feeling and deciding you shouldn’t be having the feeling in the first place.

I think we make life harder when we confuse the two.

Because once a feeling becomes unacceptable, you now have two things to deal with. There’s the original sadness, anger, fear, disappointment or frustration, and then there’s the judgement you’ve piled on top of it.

I shouldn’t feel like this.

Why am I letting this bother me?

I thought I was past this.

I should be grateful.

And gratitude is a particularly interesting one, isn’t it?

You can be deeply grateful for your life and tired of it today. You can adore your family and want everybody to stop speaking to you for half an hour. You can love your work and desperately need a holiday from it. You can know how fortunate you are and still feel sad, lonely, frustrated or completely fed up.

Humans can hold more than one thing at once.

Thank goodness, really, because otherwise relationships would be extremely difficult. Imagine only being allowed to love somebody while finding absolutely nothing about them irritating. The human race would have packed up years ago.

Life is full of these apparent contradictions. You can miss somebody and know you don’t want them back. You can be excited about a change and frightened of it. You can be proud of something you’ve achieved and exhausted by what it took to get there. You can have a lovely life and still have a terrible Tuesday.

One feeling doesn’t cancel another.

And maybe that’s where we’ve made emotional wellbeing far more complicated than it needs to be. We’ve imagined that the goal is to get ourselves into the good feelings and stay there, when everything we know about being alive tells us that nothing works like that.

The sea doesn’t stay still. The weather doesn’t pick one setting. Seasons move. Bodies change. Energy rises and falls. Things begin, end, grow, fade, return and disappear altogether. Yet somehow we’ve decided that the human emotional experience should find a nice pleasant setting and remain there indefinitely.

Good luck with that.

Rumi wrote about this beautifully in The Guest House, imagining each human emotion as a visitor arriving at the door. I love that image because it changes the job completely. You don’t have to become the visitor. You don’t have to redecorate the entire house because sadness has arrived. And you certainly don’t have to hand anger the keys and tell it to make itself comfortable for the next six months.

But maybe you can let it through the door.

Maybe you can meet what is here before deciding what you need to do with it.

What are you feeling?

Where do you feel it?

What happens if, for one moment, you stop arguing with the fact that it’s here?

There is something quite freeing about that. Not because every uncomfortable feeling magically disappears the moment you welcome it. Sometimes you’re going to be sad for a while. Some losses deserve grief. Some disappointments take time. Some anger has something important underneath it. Some days are simply difficult.

But you don’t have to make being human a problem on top of the problem.

And you don’t have to measure the quality of your life by the percentage of it you spend feeling cheerful.

A life that feels good to live is not a life in which you feel good every minute.

Surely it’s a life in which there is room for all of you?

The joyful you. The tired you. The peaceful you. The furious you. The ridiculously excited you. The you who laughs until you can’t breathe and the you who occasionally needs a little cry without immediately turning it into a personal development project.

All of you gets to be human.

Maybe the aim was never to perfect how you feel.

Maybe it was to become a little better at meeting yourself wherever you happen to be.

Imagine how different life could feel if you stopped treating every uncomfortable emotion as something to overcome. If you could recognise what you're feeling, understand what your mind and body are telling you, and meet yourself with a little more kindness, even on the difficult days. There's a whole different relationship with yourself waiting to be discovered inside Little Soul Shack. 

#Rebel Moment

The next time an uncomfortable feeling turns up, see what happens if you don’t immediately try to improve it. Before you fix it, explain it, reframe it or tell yourself you shouldn’t feel that way, give yourself a moment to simply acknowledge what is here.

You don’t have to hand it the steering wheel.

Just stop throwing it out of the car.

And if you're ready to stop treating every uncomfortable feeling as something you need to fix, come and join us inside Little Soul Shack. 

Stay Blessed!

LoveLove

Nat x

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