Areas › Low mood and hard feelings
Low mood and hard feelings
Feelings are information before they are problems. The practices here are about naming what you feel accurately, sitting with what will not move yet, and acting on what matters to you even on the days nothing feels like anything.
What works for this
Behavioural activation
The strongest self help evidence in this whole field says the way out of a flat heavy state is through what you do, not through what you think. You act first and the feeling follows, which is the opposite of what the state tells you.
One move, today
Choose one small thing you used to do and do it today without waiting to feel like it. Ten minutes is enough. Waiting to feel like it is the trap.
What matches
6 practicesSay the frightened thing rather than the sharp thing. It is far more exposing and it is the only version that tends to get a kind reply.
Under most rows sits something like I think there is something wrong with me, or I have already lost you and I am pretending I have not. Sharp words…
Going numb is a good way to survive something and a poor way to live near someone. It shuts the line in both directions at once.
When you cannot feel your own signal you also stop picking up theirs, so the room goes quiet even when they are reaching for you. The loneliness that…
Put something in before you take something out. Removing the only way a person has of coping leaves them with nothing, which is not safer.
In practice this looks like smaller steps than a promise to stop: cutting the frequency, changing what is used, agreeing to wait ten minutes and do…
The same sentence lands completely differently depending on who says it. If nothing stirs when it is described second hand, let the person it belongs to say it to you directly.
A therapist repeating what your partner said is information. Your partner turning to you and saying it, in their own voice, is an event. That is why…
Rather than arguing with someone who says they feel nothing, say plainly what would ordinarily hurt about it. Hearing that the person you love is disappointed in you is a hard thing to hear.
Said warmly, this is not a challenge. It sets out what a person would usually feel and leaves them to notice the gap between that and what they are…
If you can see shame arriving in someone, say so gently and make it welcome. Something like: it looks like there is some shame here, and it is alright that it came.
Naming it does the opposite of exposing it. Left unnamed it works away in private, and the person assumes you have noticed and are judging. Said out…