seeing feelings like the weather

[This is day #29 of my 30-day microblogging challenge. You can and should still join!]

I believe the most productive way to deal with feelings is to view them as you would the weather.

You can be pretty certain that the sun will rise and set again, that it will rain, that it will get windy, and that the temperature will fluctuate (in most places!).

Learning to expect these changes helps you look forward to sunny (or rainy or cloudy, if you prefer) days and better tolerate the states you dread.

You quickly realize it’s pointless to dwell on negative emotions when the weather doesn’t align with your desires, because it’s inevitable. It’s a core part of being alive.

Each time bad weather comes and goes, it reinforces the idea in your mind that it is temporary and will pass. It also makes you more aware that it will happen again.

Eventually, you stop “caring” so much.

I think feelings should be treated similarly.

There’s this widespread notion that feelings are these urgent, important signals that demand interpretation and action (that if something feels intensely wrong, something must actually be wrong out there). But feelings are heavily state-dependent.

This becomes particularly obvious once you’ve seen how dramatically someone’s internal world/state/perception can change under the influence of hormones, medication, psychoactive substances, sleep deprivation, hunger, illness, or even just the time of day. Mood, sensitivity, energy, appetite, confidence, sociability, and the apparent importance of a problem can all shift, while the external world barely changes.

After experiencing this enough times, it becomes difficult to keep perceiving feelings as authoritative descriptions of reality, and easier to see them more like another turn of this merry-go-round.

Patterns of feelings over time can contain useful information, but reacting too strongly to moment-to-moment variability can send you into into an infinite and unproductive rabbit hole of introspection. (“Why do I feel this way? What does it say about myself, my work, my life, my relationships?…”)

(And this is my main gripe with introspection-heavy approaches in psychology, and the general therapeutic tendency to interrogate every feeling as if containing meaning signal. Sometimes the best skill to develop is to just learn to let the weather pass.)