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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 practicesAsk what the feeling is trying to do for you. Anger clears an obstacle, fear gets you out, sadness calls for comfort, shame hides you from being seen.
Once a feeling has a job it stops being a defect you have to apologise for. That matters, because the ones we treat as shameful are precisely the…
Often nothing is buried. The pieces are all there, they have simply never been put next to each other.
This hurts but I do not know why usually means the event, the feeling in the body and the meaning are being held separately. So join them up out…
Emptying the feeling out at somebody does not shift it, and being told what to do instead skips over it. What changes things is feeling it with someone who stays.
You can tell the difference from the inside. Venting has a rehearsed quality, the same phrases coming round again with the heat kept up. Advice…
When someone says they feel nothing, find out where the nothing reaches. All the time, or only towards good things, or only here, in this conversation, when criticism is in the air?
The three answers point in quite different directions. Numb everywhere, day and night, is worth taking to a doctor. Numb to good things while the bad…
If a medicine has taken the edge off everything, including the good things, that is worth raising with whoever prescribed it. Taking the sharpness out of pain is one thing. Feeling nothing at all is not a way to live.
It matters practically as well as personally. Anything you are trying to change, in a relationship or in yourself, needs some feeling to work with,…
With someone deep in shame, your steady presence is not the warm up before the useful part. It is the useful part.
That means resisting the urge to fix, to explain the psychology of it, or to hurry them along to a better feeling. Sit at their pace. Keep your tone…