Do you major in feeling bad or worrying? That might not be an easy question to answer…if you think that bad feelings are normal for you, you might not be able to realize that you are having them. There are those underground subconscious negative emotions that are always there. They aren’t too obvious. There is just a general sense of something not quite right. Know what I mean?
For some people, that can be a sense of numbness, of not actually feeling anything. If you don’t feel anything and are neutral about most events in your life, chances are that you are in the throes of bad feelings or even depression.
"If you believe that feeling bad or worrying long enough will change a past or future event, then you are residing on another planet with a different reality system." ~William James
What Happens When We are Feeling Bad?
When we feel bad, the creative part of our brain shuts down. We literally are depressing our feelings…shoving them underground. Unfortunately, when this happens, our negative emotions are keeping us in chains. We become prisoners of ourselves.
It is almost impossible to come up with creative solutions to problems or issues when you feel bad. It is a stuck state, not a moving forward in a creative problem solving mode.
When we are focused on feeling bad… it becomes a vicious circle, you feel bad, you imagine negative events and a dark future, you feel worse and then become stuck in the emotion. You get the picture, right?
All difficulties are temporary, even if they seem to take forever to pass. Really. Think of a time in your past when you thought the struggle you were having would never be over. Then…when it was…it seemed like it wasn’t that long, didn’t it? It’s like when you were a child and you were waiting for Christmas…it took forever to get here and then…bang…it was here, just like that…
It can happen like that for struggles as well as events that we look forward to. Time is funny like that. We can distort how we look at it in many ways…
Motivating Yourself by Feeling Bad
Do you use any of these tactics to motivate yourself?
Criticism (You’re useless unless you ____________)
Bribery (I’ll give you a treat if you ____________)
Manipulation (You have to do it or I’ll _________)
How is that working for you? Unfortunately, these tactics might have worked for you in the past in the short term.
You can’t feel good about negative motivation. No one can. Just because your parents, teachers, bosses or colleagues might have used those tactics in the past, doesn’t mean that they are good or even efficient. The question to ask here is “How is that working for you?”
How does Feeling Bad Affect your Relationship?
Let’s take a look at the negative emotions that come up in that kind of motivation strategy.
- Fear
- Resentment
- Anger
- Frustration
In NLP, this type of motivation strategy is called an “away from” strategy. People move “away from” perceived pain. When you are in relationships with people and your prime motivation strategy is to get out a whip of negative emotions and bad feelings…it’s not pretty.
When you are feeling bad about yourself or using negative emotions to motivate yourself, your relationships suffer. You can't be feeling bad and expect to have a light as sunshine, happy relationship. You certainly can't expect the other person to be responsible for your happiness either…when you expect your partner to be in charge of your emotions, you are in trouble.
Fear breeds fear…resentment breeds resentment…anger breeds anger…frustration breed frustration…none of these are love. This leads to fighting, misunderstandings and in some cases, abuse.
There is a kinder way to motivate yourself that will make all of your relationships that much better. And we’ll talk about it in the next post…remember that the relationship that you have with yourself is the most important one…see you on the other side!
“Drive your own life…you deserve to, don’t you?” Sherie Venner
Sherie
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Comments on this entry are closed.
“When we feel bad, the creative part of our brain shuts down.”
When we are under stress, our higher brain functions do not work. Essentially, this is death. Death to our potential or pending goals and accomplishments. When we are shut down to the point that we cannot perform adequately, everything falls. Conversely, when we are freed, we can create and we can accomplish miracles.
Feeling bad can affect all our relationships. We need to identify when and why we feel bad. What’s causing it? If we know the source, we need to work to eliminate the source. The source can be a job, person, situation, or even just past programing within ourselves. Either way, we need to free ourselves of it so we can function.
Once again, Sherie, you do a great job of defining the specifics–the ways in which people can do their own health checks. For example: motivation tactics–criticism, bribery, manipulation.
Thank you so much for your comment, Eva! You’ve got it right…we really need to keep that creative part of our brains functioning so that we can create what we want and express our potential. We have to let get of feeling bad…