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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › Tolerate distress
Plenty of people were raised to treat their own sadness or anger as a failure of character, so the feeling arrives and shame arrives just behind it. The shame is the part that jams everything. You can take a feeling in portions, ten minutes with it and then something ordinary, without having to decide you should not be having it at all.
Suffering has truly afflicted me, but you are the Most Merciful of the merciful (Quran 21:83). Job states the pain plainly and does not treat having it as a fault of his own.
الأنبياء
۞وَأَيُّوبَ إِذۡ نَادَىٰ رَبَّهُۥٓ أَنِّي مَسَّنِيَ ٱلضُّرُّ وَأَنتَ أَرۡحَمُ ٱلرَّٰحِمِينَ
Remember Job, when he cried to his Lord, ‘Suffering has truly afflicted me, but you are the Most Merciful of the merciful.’
Qur’an 21:83read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A meta-analysis of 306 experimental comparisons found that simply trying to hide a feeling was among the least effective ways of dealing with it, while deliberately changing how you think about the situation reliably shifted how it felt. So pushing it down is the weak option, in experiments at least. These were short laboratory tasks rather than a lifetime of habit.
Webb TL, Miles E, Sheeran P. (2012). Dealing with feeling: a meta-analysis of the effectiveness of strategies derived from the process model of emotion regulation.. Psychological bulletin doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A feeling you are allowed to have moves through, and one you are ashamed of gets stuck.
Let your face go. Unclench the jaw, let the lips lift very slightly, and let the loosening carry back through your head and shoulders.
Putting a film on, reading, letting the internet have an hour, all of it counts as a real skill when you choose it on purpose and know what you are choosing it for.
Say it out loud before you start: you decide how much of this you feel, and when. Stopping for a bit is part of the plan, not a failure of it.