Loading practices
Loading practices
Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Letting it out safely
Think how strange it would be if someone heard they had come into a fortune and just said thank you and carried on with the morning. Joy gets up and moves about. So does sorrow. Children get the wriggles for the same reason adults end up pacing the kitchen at two in the morning. The real question is never whether it comes out, because it will, but which route you give it.
Of Ya'qub the Qur'an says that 'his eyes went white with grief and he was filled with sorrow' (Quran 12:84). His grief is described plainly, with no suggestion that showing it was a failure.
يوسف
وَتَوَلَّىٰ عَنۡهُمۡ وَقَالَ يَٰٓأَسَفَىٰ عَلَىٰ يُوسُفَ وَٱبۡيَضَّتۡ عَيۡنَاهُ مِنَ ٱلۡحُزۡنِ فَهُوَ كَظِيمࣱ
and he turned away from them, saying, ‘Alas for Joseph!’ His eyes went white with grief and he was filled with sorrow
Qur’an 12:84read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A study of Chinese American breast cancer survivors found that feeling constrained about expressing emotion, and feeling ashamed of the illness, both went with poorer sleep. It was cross-sectional and one specific group, so it cannot show that the holding in caused the bad nights. It is still a reminder that what gets kept in tends to surface somewhere physical.
Wu IHC, Tsai W, McNeill LH, Lu Q. (2020). The associations of self-stigma, social constraints, and sleep among Chinese American breast cancer survivors.. Supportive care in cancer : official journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
The feeling shows up in your body whether or not you give it somewhere to go, so it is kinder to give it somewhere.
Write the exact thing you are furious about on a paper plate, tape it to the wall, and throw wet cotton balls at it. It sounds childish, and it does more than swinging at nothing.
Punching something to get the anger out is the piece of grief advice that gets argued over most, and the honest answer is that hitting rarely leaves a person calmer.
Give the anger a room rather than a target. Music up loud, walk fast, dance badly, shake your arms out until something in you settles.