Answering The Most Difficult Question: How Are You?

Today’s feature is aimed at helping mainly two kinds of people:

• “I have so many emotions that I don’t always know what to do with them”
• “What is an emotion, really? I think I felt one some time ago”

So, if either those describe you and/or a loved one, read on…

Alexithymia

Alexi who? Alexithymia is an umbrella term for various kinds of problems with feeling emotions.

That could be “problems feeling emotions” as in “I am unable to feel emotions” or “problems feeling emotions” as in “feeling these emotions is a problem for me”.

It is most commonly used to refer to “having difficulty identifying and expressing emotions”.

There are a lot of very poor quality pop-science articles out there about it, but here’s a decent one with good examples and minimal sensationalist pathologization:

Alexithymia Might Be the Reason It’s Hard to Label Your Emotions

A somatic start

Because a good level of self-awareness is critical for healthy emotional regulation, let’s start there. We’ll write this in the first person, but you can use it to help a loved one too, just switching to second person:

Simplest level first:

Are my most basic needs met right now? Is this room a good temperature? Am I comfortable dressed the way I am? Am I in good physical health? Am I well-rested? Have I been fed and watered recently? Does my body feel clean? Have I taken any meds I should be taking?

Note: If the answer is “no”, then maybe there’s something you can do to fix that first. If the answer is “no” and also you can’t fix the thing for some reason, then that’s unfortunate, but just recognize it anyway for now. It doesn’t mean the thing in question is necessarily responsible for how you feel, but it’s good to check off this list as a matter of good practice.

Bonus question: it’s cliché, but if applicable… What time of the month is it? Because while hormonal mood swings won’t create moods out of nothing, they sure aren’t irrelevant either and should be listened to too.

Bodyscanning next

What do you feel in each part of your body? Are you clenching your jaw? Are your shoulders tense? Do you have a knot in your stomach? What are your hands doing? How’s your posture? What’s your breathing like? How about your heart? What are your eyes doing?

Your observations at this point should be neutral, by the way. Not “my posture is terrible”, but “my posture is stooped”, etc. Much like in mindfulness meditation, this is a time for observing, not for judging.

Narrowing it down

Now, like a good scientist, you have assembled data. But what does the data mean for your emotions? You may have to conduct some experiments to find out.

Thought experiments: what calls to you? What do you feel like doing? Do you feel like curling up in a ball? Breaking something? Taking a bath? Crying?

Maybe what calls to you, or what you feel like doing, isn’t something that’s possible for you to do. This is often the case with anxiety, for example, and perhaps also guilt. But whatever calls to you, notice it, reflect on it, and if it’s something that your conscious mind considers reasonable and safe for you to do, you can even try doing it.

Your body is trying to help you here, by the way! It will try (and usually succeed) to give you a little dopamine spike when you anticipate doing the thing it wants you to do. Warning: it won’t always be right about what’s best for you, so do still make your own decisions about whether it is a good idea to safely do it.

Practical experiments: whether you have a theory or just a hypothesis (if you have neither make up a hypothesis; that is also what scientists do), you can also test it:

If in the previous step you identified something you’d like to do and are able to safely do it, now is the time to try it. If not…

• Find something that is likely to (safely) tip you into emotional expression, ideally, in a cathartic way. But, whatever you can get is good.
  • Music is great for this. What songs (or even non-lyrical musical works) make you sad, happy, angry, energized? Try them.
  • Literature and film can be good too, albeit they take more time. Grab that tear-jerker or angsty rage-fest, and see if it feels right.
  • Other media, again, can be completely unrelated to the situation at hand, but if it evokes the same emotion, it’ll help you figure out “yes, this is it”.
    • It could be a love letter or a tax letter, it could be an outrage-provoking news piece or some nostalgic thing you own.

Ride it out, wherever it takes you (safely)

Feelings feel better felt. It doesn’t always seem that way! But, really, they are.

Emotions, just like physical sensations, are messengers. And when a feeling/sensation is troublesome, one of the best ways to get past it is to first fully listen to it and respond accordingly.

• If your body tells you something, then it’s good to acknowledge that and give it some reassurance by taking some action to appease it.
• If your emotions are telling you something, then it’s good to acknowledge that and similarly take some action to appease it.

There is a reason people feel better after “having a good cry”, or “pounding it out” against a punchbag. Even stress can be dealt with by physically deliberately tensing up and then relaxing that tension, so the body thinks that you had a fight and won and can relax now.

And when someone is in a certain (not happy) mood and takes (sometimes baffling!) actions to stay in that mood rather than “snap out of it”, it’s probably because there’s more feeling to be done before the body feels heard. Hence the “ride it out if you safely can” idea.

How much feeling is too much?

While this is in large part a subjective matter, clinically speaking the key question is generally: is it adversely affecting daily life to the point of being a problem?

For example, if you have to spend half an hour every day actively managing a certain emotion, that’s probably indicative of something unusual, but “unusual” is not inherently pathological. If you’re managing it safely and in a way that doesn’t negatively affect the rest of your life, then that is generally considered fine, unless you feel otherwise about it.

If you do think “I would like to not think/feel this anymore”, then there are tools at your disposal too:

• How To Manage Chronic Stress
• How To Set Anxiety Aside
• How To Stop Revisiting Those Memories
• How To Stay Alive (When You Really Don’t Want To)

Take care!

What’s on your mind, really?

We hear a lot about “the evidence-based benefits of mindfulness”, but what actually are they? And what is the evidence? And, perhaps most importantly: how do we do it?

What are the benefits?

The benefits of mindfulness are many, and include:

• reducing stress
• reducing pain
• improving quality of life
• reducing fatigue
• providing relief from digestive disorders
• reducing symptoms of sleep disorders
• improving immune response
• providing support for caregivers

The evidence is also abundant, and includes:

• Effects of mindfulness exercises as stand-alone intervention on symptoms of anxiety and depression: Systematic review and meta-analysis
• Fusing character strengths and mindfulness interventions: Benefits for satisfaction and performance
• Evidence for the Role of Mindfulness in Cancer: Benefits and Techniques
• Effects of mindfulness-based stress reduction on anxiety symptoms: A systematic review and meta-analysis
• The benefits of meditation and mindfulness practices during times of crisis such as COVID-19

Sounds great… What actually is it, though?

Mindfulness is the state of being attentive to one’s mind. This is at its heart a meditative practice, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be sitting in the lotus position with candles—mindfulness can be built into any daily activity, or even no activity at all.

An exercise you can try right now:

Take a moment to notice everything you can hear. For this writer, that includes:

• The noise of my keystrokes as I type
• The ticking of the clock on the wall
• The gentle humming of my computer’s processor
• The higher-pitched noise of my computer’s monitor
• Birdsong outside
• Traffic further away
• My own breathing
• The sound of my eyelids as I blink

Whatever it is for you, notice how much you can notice that you had previously taken for granted.

You can repeat this exercise with other senses, by the way! For example:

• Notice five things you can see in your immediate environment that you’ve never noticed before. If you’re at home reading this, you probably think you’re very familiar with everything around you, but now see that mark on the wall you’d never noticed before, or a quirk of some electrical wiring, or the stitching on some furnishing, for example.
• Notice the textures of your clothes, or your face, or perhaps an object you’ve never paid attention to touching before. Your fingertips, unless you have some special reason this doesn’t apply to you, are far more sensitive than you probably give them credit for, and can notice the tiniest differentiation in textures, so take a moment to do that now.
• Mindful eating can be an especially healthful practice because it requires that we pay every attention to what we’re putting in our mouth, tasting, chewing, swallowing. No more thoughtlessly downing a box of cookies; every bite is now an experience. On the one hand, you’ll probably eat less at a sitting. On the other hand, what a sensory experience! It really reminds one that life is for living, not just for zipping through at a speed-run pace!

What about mindfulness as a meditative practice?

Well, those are meditative practices! But yes, mindfulness goes for more formal meditation too. For example:

Sit comfortably, with good posture, whatever that means to you. No need to get too caught up in the physical mechanics here—it’d take a whole article. For now, if you’re sitting and comfortable, that’s enough.

Notice your breathing. No need to try to control it—that’s not what this is about today. Just notice it. The in, the out, whether you breathe to your chest or abdomen, through your nose or mouth, don’t worry about doing it “right”, just notice what you are doing. Observe without judgement.

Notice your thoughts—no need to try to stop them. Notice noticing your thoughts, and again, observe without judgement. Notice your feelings; are you angry, hopeful, stressed, serene? There are no wrong answers here, and there’s nothing you should try to “correct”. Just observe. No judgement, only observe. Watch your thoughts, and watch your thoughts go.

Did you forget about your breathing while watching your thoughts? Don’t worry about that either if so, just notice that it happened. If you have any feelings about that, notice them too, and carry on observing.

We go through so much of our lives in “autopilot”, that it can be an amazing experience to sometimes just “be”—and be aware of being.