Anger, anxiety, frustration, guilt, sadness…

Why do these painful feelings keep tormenting us?

Well, the best explanation I’ve come across is that negative emotions evolved to keep us alive in a hostile pre-industrial world. As Russ Harris puts it: Our brains are “don’t get killed” devices. They developed our powerful negative emotions to help us instinctively flee from saber-toothed tigers and avoid getting kicked out of the tribe.

But that ancient world is long gone. In our complicated modern reality, most of these primitive emotions no longer serve to protect us. Quite the opposite: They drive us to all manner of self-sabotaging behavior.

Some negative emotions remain useful, though. Intelligent responses to such helpful emotional discomfort can genuinely better our lives.

This article shares a simple method for deciphering these complicated emotional cues and following them to a more fulfilling life.

A Week of Shameless Wallowing

For the next week, I invite you to be as negative as possible. Whenever you feel bad, allow yourself to fall deeply into that emotion. Ruminate, fret, and wallow as long as it takes to identify the main trigger behind this feeling. Then, make a quick note of it on your phone or a nearby notepad.

Here are some examples (be as raw as you feel like):

“I feel anxious because I’m drowning in a shitload of work I hate doing.”

“I feel angry because the ref screwed over my favorite team in the big match.”

“I feel frustrated because my partner is being an inconsiderate ass.”

When doing this simple exercise, you may notice something interesting: Putting a label and an explanation on your negative emotions often takes away much of their power. Although that’s not the end goal of this exercise, enjoy this welcome side effect when it decides to pop up.

Map Out Your Negative Emotions

Later, when you’re in your calmest and most rational frame of mind, take a couple of minutes to position the trigger behind each of the negative emotions you recorded on a canvas that looks something like this:

I use Microsoft OneNote for this exercise. It offers a simple blank canvas where I can just click at the desired location and start typing. There are many good alternatives, though.

It doesn’t need to be digital either. Post-it notes on a wall or window offer an excellent solution, allowing you to easily rearrange triggers as required.

Taking Action (Or Inaction)

Your week of negativity should leave you with a solid collection of negative triggers on your emotion canvas.

Now we get to the important bit: deciding what to do about each one. Let’s explore the four quadrants of the canvas one by one.

High Impact, High Influence

There’s no better place to start than with triggers of negative emotions that hold power to genuinely improve your life. These emotions are perfect cues for constructive action.

Take a look at each trigger in this area of your canvas, and write down something constructive you can do each time it elevates your emotions. For example, if you’re feeling overwhelmed by work, look for a task you can delegate, defer, or delete. Then make it happen.

After taking action, be sure to thank these useful emotions for their input. Let them know they’re welcome back anytime!

High Impact, Low Influence

This is the most troublesome category. These guys often sweep us away in an emotional whirlwind with no useful outcome, making us feel powerless and depressed. Worst of all, they’re potent self-sabotage triggers that often wreak havoc on our health and relationships.

Often, these high-impact-low-influence triggers are actually low-impact or high-influence triggers in disguise. That means our first job is to unmask these deceitful pretenders.

Take the endless supply of serious global problems we see in the media. Sure, you have no influence over these issues, but you have total control over the quality and quantity of news you consume. Similarly, the emotional distress caused by these problems often has a much greater impact on your life than the problems themselves. Limiting your exposure is all that’s needed to relegate them to the low-impact category.

Do you have any such masquerading triggers in your top-left quadrant? If so, decide what you need to do to move them to their proper place.

The remaining uncontrollable triggers are perfect candidates for practicing a little something called “defusion,” developed under Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

Defusion is the art of not getting caught up in unhelpful thoughts and feelings. And yes, debilitating emotions about things you have little or no control over are seriously unhelpful.

In defusion, the aim is not to suppress or eliminate these feelings — only to let them come and go without “fusing” with them. A great way to do this is to give each trigger a name and gradually turn it into a worn-out cliche.

For example, if Covid-19 locks you up with your bored 6-year-old again and triggers escalating anxiety, say something like: “Ah yes, it’s the good old lockdown-trigger,” and get on with making the best of it.

Low Impact, High Influence

Triggers in this quadrant provide excellent training in prioritization. Often, we get all worked up about things that don’t have much of an impact on our lives. Identifying these mountains-out-of-molehills triggers is one of the most valuable outcomes of this exercise.

Once you recognize the low impact of these triggers, the negative emotions they bring become much easier to defuse. You can also just tell your mind something like: “Thanks for the reminder, but let’s first handle [insert your most pressing high-impact trigger here].”

Low Impact, Low Influence

I like to think of this category of triggers as the jesters of my emotional court. They serve no useful purpose and can be seriously annoying, but if you view them from the right angle, they’re actually pretty funny.

So, when these emotions pop up next time, sit back and watch them fumble about for a bit. Observe the humorously clumsy thought processes behind your reaction to these inconsequential triggers, almost like you would observe the antics of a silly court jester. Aside from being quite entertaining, this is also a highly effective defusion technique.

Going Forward

Life is ever-changing, and your emotion canvas should change with it. Whenever you get swept away by a painful emotional response to a trigger that’s not yet on your canvas, be sure to add it. Also, when a previously painful trigger has been thoroughly defused, feel free to remove it (and to treat your upgraded brain to a well-deserved reward).

It also pays to ensure your emotion canvas is easily accessible whenever you need it. In my experience, it’s at its most powerful whenever you’re about to get lost in a self-defeating emotional spiral. Whipping out your canvas at just the right moment can nip this painful process in the bud.

Such accessibility comes easy when you select an app like OneNote that syncs seamlessly between your devices. If you use a physical solution, take a picture so that it’s always conveniently available on your phone.

I hope you give this a try! It’s an awesome (and sorely needed) upgrade to the primitive emotions that cause so much needless strife in our modern world.

Develop the courage to solve those problems that can be solved, the serenity to accept those problems that cannot be solved, and the wisdom to know the difference. — The Russ Harris Serenity Challenge