It's okay to not process your feelings

At least not in the way popular psychology tells you to.

Warning: This article is written keeping in mind people like me who are not suffering from a mental health illness but feel shitty from time to time. If you’re someone with a lived experience of a mental health illness, read this piece along with your case history and doctor’s advice. The contents of this article are not a substitute for medical or professional advice. 

I’m writing this post as I’m feeling pretty low about my life. Everything that I’ve been reading recently tells me that I need to sit with this feeling. That I need to process it. I need to wallow if need be. I should take a day off work without feeling guilty. I should try to cry it out. Popular psychology tells me that once I “process” this low, I will start feeling better. Will I? 

And even if I do feel better, will that be because I sat with my feelings? Or will it be because I took a day off work? Or was it the wallowing that proved helpful? 

Is it possible that I started feeling better because I went out for a run? Or because my dog finally seems to have overcome her fear of crackers? Or because I pushed past the shittiness and got myself to do some work?

The point that I’m trying to make is that I could have felt better because of any one of a number of different things or because of a helpful combination of a few of them. We live in times where we are constantly asked to prioritise our wellbeing. This sounds like a sensible thing to do. We need to feel well to do well. How do we do that though? We’re told “Sit with your feelings and process them”, “Don’t brush your issues under the carpet”, “Bring them to the surface”, “Talk about it”, “Process what happened”, “Go to therapy” (Where we can sit with our feelings again). We’ve become like a bunch of parrots who keep repeating the claims of popular psychology to each other without fully understanding the nature of the messages we share.

How Popular Psychology tells us to process our feelings

In popular psychology parlance, any suggestion at emotional processing comes with a strong implication that there is a specific form in which difficult feelings have to be processed, typically involving an inordinate amount of time and attention devoted to those feelings.

Not feeling good? “Why don’t you take a day off work?” “Why haven’t you quit your job yet?” “Have you reached out to that therapist?” “Why don’t you go away for a few days?”

Do you need to take a day off work every time you feel low? Do you need to quit your job if you’re having a bad week? Do you need to pack your bags and leave every time you feel sad? Maybe you do if your circumstances warrant, but popular psychology offers you no choice. Popular Psychology Processing (hereafter PPP) methods strictly instruct you to not just allow yourself to feel terrible but also to not let yourself forget that you’re feeling terrible. And oh, if you’re feeling terrible about feeling terrible, that’s even better. Let your body soak in all those negative feelings. The PPP practitioners also licence you to get upset at anybody who encourages you to stop feeling terrible. 

Here’s my take on the topic: Processing your feelings will be helpful only if it’s done in the appropriate form for the appropriate duration for the appropriate circumstance.

What does it mean to process your feelings in the appropriate form for the appropriate duration for the appropriate circumstance?

I decided to collect some anecdata to help explain this better. For 7 consecutive days, I documented at least one instance during the day when my mood was low and feelings were negative. I tried to process these feelings in ways I found appropriate and noted down afterwards what in my observation made me feel better. 

• Feb 10 -  journaled when low -  took me 30 minutes to recover

• Feb 11 - did a work call -  felt better in 5 minutes

• Feb 12 - really bad day - cried in the bathroom - took 7 minutes to recover

• Feb 13 - Read a funny book - started recovering in 5 minutes 

• Feb 14 - walked for 10 minutes - felt better afterwards

• Feb 15 - felt irritated - quibbled with sister - felt better in 15 minutes (maybe I passed my mood onto her?) 

I know a 7-day chronicle of my life is a really small sample, a micro-sample if you will. But a few things are still clear from this: There is no one thing that made me feel better. One day, walking helped me feel better. On another day, crying helped. It’s also pretty clear that depending on my circumstances, I can take anywhere between 5-30 minutes to begin to feel better. I journaled for 30 minutes on Day 1 before my mood started shifting. On Day 2, I did a work call and felt better in less than 5 minutes. If I was documenting this on a different week, it’s possible that the journaling could have helped sooner and the crying could have helped later.

This exercise is not rigorous but serves to illustrate some near-universal mental health patterns (listed below) that have deep roots in mental health literature, which has fairly big implications for the style of processing that popular psychology viz. PPP recommends: 

1. Negative feelings are not an infrequent, rare phenomenon: We can experience undesirable, negative feelings almost on a daily basis. We go through thousands of different feelings every day, some of those will not be so pleasant to experience. This makes sense because feelings are volatile entities. When King Solomon said, “This too shall pass.”, he was talking about our feelings. Won an award and felt happy? The feeling of victory is going to wear off in a few days. Just got married and feeling lots of love? Soon the day-to-day mundanities will kick in and you’ll start feeling things other than love. 

Also anything, literally anything can trigger a negative feeling. You can feel low because of the weather, you can feel angry because the burger tastes bad, you can feel disappointed that your career is going nowhere, you can feel irritated because your partner once again forgot to soak the dirty dishes, you can even feel upset at a promotion because you don’t want to take on all the new responsibilities. Anything can make you feel low and weird, anything can send you spiralling down to the depths of sadness. 

PPP Implication: If you’re going to laboriously process every one of the thousands of  negative feelings that you experience in a day, you’ll run out of time to sleep, eat, love or work. If anything can make you feel bad at any time, according to PPP, you have to be forever alert and ready to process every negative feeling that can appear from anywhere. How can you feel better if you’re always required to be in a ready-to-process mode? When can you reap the benefits of sitting with your feelings if you always have to be ready to sit with your feelings?

2. There is no sure-shot way of redeeming a good mood: Sometimes, an unexpected call from a friend can cheer you up. Sometimes, when you smell your favourite meal cooking in the kitchen, your spirits are lifted. Other times, watching drama unfold (in some TV character’s life other than your own) provides some relief and space to bounce back. Sometimes journaling helps. A session or two with a therapist can help. An impulsive purchase can occasionally help you feel-good. You can feel good after an intense screaming match. Working can help sometimes. Crying can feel great too. 

PPP Implication: Only you can figure out what and how much processing you need to do to feel better when you’re feeling down-in-the-dumps and at times, even you can’t. Why do the PPP guys then tell us to go off into the wilderness everytime something goes wrong? Why can’t I channel my low mood into work, get some stuff done and feel better? Why can’t I feel better because I remembered to water my plant? Why am I being asked to take 8 hours off work when it’s possible that 5 minutes of work is what might help me feel better? 

The PPP guys tell us to process our negative feelings in ways that they think is best. In order to feel better, you must talk about it, you must take a day off work, you must get upset at anybody who tells you to move on with life. As a result, when you’re having a shitty day and you’re not able to verbalise why you’re feeling shitty or when your boss asks you to compile notes after a meeting or when a colleague tells you, “It happens man, forget it!”, you’re naturally livid. You feel like you’re getting the raw end of every deal. You’re stuck at a workplace that does not prioritise your mental health, you think that you suck at communication and feel like a loser, and you feel that all of your colleagues are gaslighting-idiots. Nobody lets you sit with your feelings and so you can’t feel better. The world is such a horrible place to live.

What do psychologists actually mean when they ask you to process your feelings? 

Processing your feelings refers to the act of allowing yourself to feel what you’re feeling.

If you’re happy, allowing yourself to smile. If you’re sad, allowing yourself to cry. If you’re excited, allowing yourself to jump around. If you’re disgusted, allowing yourself to puke. If you’re scared, allowing yourself to hide. Basically, when you’re asked to process your feelings, you’re being asked to do 2 things in the following order:

STEP 1: Recognise how you’re feeling

STEP 2: Allow yourself to feel that feeling

How long does this usually take?

The 90-second Unpopular way to process negative feelings (aka UPP, Unpopular Psychology Processing):

Do you know how much time you really need to let a negative feeling fully download into your system and then let it disappear? 90 seconds. That’s right, a minute and a half is all that your brain needs to flush out all the chemicals that caused you to experience an undesirable feeling. In 90-seconds, our brains can perform both the critical steps of processing a feeling i.e., recognise the feeling + allow yourself to feel the feeling. If you’re feeling shitty, you can stop feeling shitty in less than 2 minutes. How can this happen? Here’s what our amazing brains are capable of doing in 90 seconds:

Here’s an unpopular set of thoughts: You do not need to take a day off work every time you feel bad. You do not need to wallow in cheese and fries if you lose a client. You do not need to pack your bags and go trekking if your application gets rejected. What you usually need is 90 seconds of space and time. Do you have 90 seconds? If the life you lead does not allow you 90 seconds to cope with a negative feeling, then your circumstances need intervening. My sense, though, is that most of us are leading lives where we have at least 90 seconds to take out whenever we feel a little blah or low or stressed.

Tip: Next time you’re feeling low, put a 90-120 seconds timer and try going through the above 5 steps. See if it helps you shift out of your emotional state.

Why does this matter? Let me take a few days off from work to process my feelings dammit!

If you’re spending a lot of time  to cope with every negative feeling that you feel, then you could actually be doing your mental health more harm than good:

1. You could be overthinking: Psychologists call this rumination, which in mental health terms, is the act of repeatedly dwelling on a specific set of thoughts with no end. Ruminating is not a healthy habit to develop mostly because you set off a continuous loop of unhelpful and probably untrue stories of self in your mind. If the wallowing you’re doing is of this kind, then you’re better off switching to another way to cope or if possible, accept what happened and move on.

2. You’re losing out on compartmentalising benefits: Popular psychology has more or less successfully managed to make compartmentalising a bad word. It is not one. Compartmentalising in simple terms means to put something away to be dealt with later. If you’ve a work deadline but are not feeling great because of what your husband told you in the morning, you can postpone your plan to give him grief for later in the evening. What is important to remember (and this is what most people don’t remember) is that you must bring it up with him after work. The point of compartmentalising something is to revisit it later so that you can give it the time and attention it needs, UPP style.

3. You could be managing your cognitive bandwidth inefficiently: PPP is cognitively heavy work to do. If you’re going to spend hours analysing every negative feeling that you experience, you could be taking away time and energy that your brain could have spent on doing things that could have helped you feel good and move away from the negative feeling anyway. 

4. You may be moving backwards in time: Millions of years of evolution have gotten our brains to the point where we are able to shift out of an undesirable emotional state in 90 seconds. The point of processing your emotions is to gain mastery over it so that over time, you’ll be inhibited only by how you’re thinking about something and not by how you’re feeling about anything. If I need 5 minutes today to shift out of an unpleasant state, the goal is to get to do it in 4 minutes the next time and eventually at the least reach the 90-second benchmark set by evolution.

Okay now that I’ve listed down all of the reasons why I think PPP is over-hyped and attempted to make a case for the lesser known, 90-second UPP, this seems like a great time to muddy up the waters and acknowledge that there are indeed a few times when PPP is not just helpful but most likely critical to deal with the difficult emotion that you may be experiencing. 

When do I need to spend more than 90 seconds on my feelings? When is PPP justified?

1. When negative feelings are unusually frequent or long: If you’re experiencing negative feelings several times a day for several days in a row (and if you’re not PMSing), then there could be something more serious going on. You might want to try taking a break from your usual activities to address what’s going on. You can also consider seeking support from a friend or consulting a therapist.

2. When negative feelings are unusually intense: If un-intense stimuli are invoking intense responses, then that is a sign that a snowballing effect is in motion. You didn’t recognise the initial signs that called out for the 90-second UPP and now there’s emotional trouble brewing. The signs that you missed recognising or deliberately ignored earlier are now compounding. There is no shortcut to a situation like this. One must traverse the long road of processing emotions, PPP style.

3. When seemingly disconnected events become triggers: If you launch into a screaming session because your partner forgot to call the milk guy or start crying when your kid offers you some fruit, then you may need more than 90 seconds to figure out what’s going on in the insides of your brain. Strong reactions to ordinary situations could be a sign that you’ve been stifling distress for a while and it may be helpful to bring forth what you’ve been trying to numb.

4. When you’ve had a history of trauma: If you’ve been subject to any kind of acute or chronic traumatic experience, you most definitely need to process what happened there. If you choose to go to therapy for your trauma, the therapist and you will work together on reducing your reactivity to the trauma-inducing stimuli. There are different techniques such as flooding, EMDR and systematic desensitisation that are commonly used in such cases.

5. When you have phobia(s): If you’re scared of lifts, you have to understand what’s underlying the fear. If claustrophobia is what’s underlying it, you need to understand how you developed this fear of closed spaces. Was there a childhood incident? Are you afraid that you’ll die of suffocation? Working through the fear and PPP-ing the feelings involved is critical to tackle any kind of phobia. You will definitely need more than 90 seconds for this.

6. When you’re diagnosed with a mental health illness: Emotional processing was initially introduced as a treatment method for anxiety and later extended to also treat illnesses such as depression. If you’re suffering from a mental health illness, doing lots of PPP and keeping track of your daily mood might be a necessary todo to beat your illness or at the least manage it well.

Conclusion

There was a time when the only mental health advice available to everybody was “Toughen up, suck it up and move on”. While this advice may have worked for some people back then, it did not work for many others, especially for people who were suffering from trauma or struggling with a mental health illness. Today the pendulum has swung too far to the other side. It’s 2023 and today the only mental health advice available to people is “Sit with your feelings, go to a therapist, quit your job”. Once again, we are leaving out a large section of society. People who need to hear that they’re just having a bad day, people who need to be encouraged to focus on what is in their control, people who don’t identify with a lived experience of a mental health illness and yet have shitty days. At any point of time in civilisation, we deal with people with varying mental health needs and abilities. And for this reason, mental health advice is a dish best served balanced. For everyone out there who needs to hear it - it’s okay to not process your feelings.

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