Exploring The Emotional Pain: First Aid And Long-Term Solutions
Have you ever experienced severe emotional pain when you cannot think, you cannot move and all you care about is the way you can stop it? I have been there and I didn't like it. At some point I got so tired of suffering that I decided to find the way to reduce the level of pain without external help by using my brain. And today I want to share my findings which helped me to decrease the amount of emotional pain significantly. But let's first take a look at physical pain.
Most of us know how to avoid danger; our brains have specific tools created by evolution and natural selection to keep ourselves safe. We know that we shouldn't put our hands in fire or put on warm clothes when it's cold. But sometimes unexpected things happen. They can cause minor damage or serious injury. And usually people take the proper actions when they have physical pain but not so much if the pain is emotional. But I think that if you look at emotional pain from biological point of view it can really help you to go through the difficulties and cure yourself.
So let’s figure out what pain is? Pain is the signal that is transmitted from damaged areas to the cortex, where it activates neurons so they can monitor the body and come up with the solution. Brain decides how much attention should be paid to the pain stimulus, how fast the action should be taken, etc. It is proven that people can tone down attention away from physical pain and create analgesic effect. For example burns victims experience pain relief when immersed in a cooling virtual environment. Their brain activity related to pain gets reduced. So as you can see by some visualization we can affect physical pain.
But this is not the only tool our system has. Your body has a natural opioid system which works like morphine (endorphins for example). So your brain can create chemicals which dampen the pain signals in nerve endings. All these chemicals can work as a placebo.
About one person in 125 million has no ability to feel pain (Congenital Insensibility to Pain). These people live at risk because they cannot get signals if something goes wrong within their body. So I would say that life without pain can be quite dangerous. It is very important to understand that pain itself serves us, the other thing is how we react. We have been created the way we can work with pain signals, so don't be afraid of them and listen to them.
Now when we understand that we have an ability to reduce physical pain, it's time to get back to our emotions. This type of pain sends you the signals which are crucial for your health too. Why is it so important to take actions when you are in emotional pain? Because if you live in stress for a long period of time, you keep releasing stress hormones which can have negative impact on the different organs of your body, including heart for example.
Every time you have a thought you create chemicals associated with this thought. These chemicals travel from brain cells to your body cells. Body gets used to the particular chemicals, cells create receptors for them, get adjusted to your emotions. At some point your thoughts and actions become dictated by your body, not your brain. As a result, you become addicted to the chemicals created by your emotions. Only 5% of our decisions are based on conscious part of the brain and the rest 95% you can define as habits, when decisions are made fast, based on initial setup and your past experiences without deep thinking. So if you don’t learn how to become conscious and fully aware of your thoughts, you can become a prisoner of negative emotions and end up getting some serious disease caused by stress. That is why emotional pain can be so uncomfortable and unpleasant, so you won’t ignore it and will try to fix the situation. It's very simple: if it hurts, it means something.
Finally I am getting to the part where I will share my tips on how to act!
First thing you need to do is to stop negative thinking. It’s like if you cut your finger, the first thing you need to do is to stop the bleeding. How can you stop your "Emotional Bleeding"? I heard that one of the options is to use the word “Change” every time you have the unwanted feeling. It should help you to change the route of your thoughts. It never worked for me. So I came up with my own trick which I find very effective! When you have the thought you want to get rid of, I recommend you to start looking at colors around you instead. And if you are just by yourself and can talk it would be better to list the colors out loud. And if you are already in bed, trying to sleep, and your eyes are closed, you can just picture different colors in your head. This way you give your brain a simple task. If you do it for 15-20 seconds it should be enough to become more conscious. It gives you a break from negativity and helps to switch the focus.
The thing is that the more conscious you are with your thoughts, the more opportunity you have to build your new body which won’t send pain signals too often. Your thoughts are like the seeds that you plant. Let’s say you put something in your head and start watering it, taking care of it, giving it attention. At some point the whole tree will grow from this seed and will give you fruits with even more seeds. So you need to be very careful with the emotions that you grow, as each of them creates bio-chemical reactions and addictions. Sometimes your body sends you wrong signals. If you learn how to identify which ones need your actions and which ones need to be ignored or shut down, you will be able to lower your emotional pain in most of the cases. You will still have it, but for 5 minutes instead of days, weeks, months and years.
The other thing you need to know is the real reason of chronic emotional pain. Most of the times it is caused by taking the actions which put you against your values. You can also say that you feel pain when you become someone you don’t want to be. You can have "Ideal You" in your head but because of body’s cravings you make mistakes, you do something that is opposite of what this "Ideal You" suppose to do. It is important to be very careful with your pain signals and review them by keeping in mind your values. Let’s say you believe in monogamous relationships, pure love and commitment. But your body is addicted to the person who doesn’t want anything serious. If you don’t see this person you experience pain of not having chemicals that he can give you, but if you spend time with this person you will go against your values and still will be in pain which is more like chronic pain and in long-term can cause you real physical sickness. When we run after shirt-term pleasures we actually ruin our happiness. Imagine that you are having tooth ache, but you are afraid of dental procedures, so you just take pain killer drugs. And eventually your pain becomes so bad that drugs can help you anymore and you can even lose your tooth. The same thing can happen with the emotional pain. So when you have to choose between small pain caused by addiction, and serious chronic pain caused by betraying your values, I would strongly recommend to take care of the chronic pain.
Short-term solutions can be very dangerous. There are hormones like dopamine and serotonin. And dopamine drives down serotonin. The more dopamine you have the less serotonin your brain will develop. And dopamine is the hormone related to short term pleasures which became so accessible nowadays. It is so easy to find distraction and pretend that there is no conflict between your actions and your values. We don’t have to use our internal resources; we can just have fun and numb the pain. But in the end of the day we become slaves of our own body. Serotonin is the hormone of contentment. It helps you to enjoy your life. But instead of cultivating it we increase level of dopamine and torturing ourselves.
The great news is that brain can be changed; even your genes can be changed! You can find more if you are interested by investigating such subjects as neuroplasticity and epigenetics. From what I learned so far I understood that if you want to cure yourself from this emotional disease you need to clean up your body from the consequences of negative emotions.
Start with writing down your values and the qualities which "Ideal You" should have. After you listed your potential great qualities, create the list of your weaknesses which form the gap between your perfect version and current version. It is very important to understand yourself and be extremely honest with yourself. Don’t judge yourself; just accept the truth as it is, knowing that you can change it. If you don’t recognize your flaws how would you be able to get rid of them?
Once you listed all the information, start working on it. I recommend to spend time each day and check if you acted as "Ideal You" or as usual you just followed the signals coming from your addicted body. Maybe it is better to start with one emotion at a time. For example, if you suffer from fear try to work on your fears the whole day for 4 weeks. If you feel like anger is your main problem, start with eliminating your anger. To do so you just need to become very conscious of all your thoughts. When you get your negative thoughts think of colors as a first aid and then focus on the things related to your values.
The other very useful exercise is to feel like you are already there, like you already achieved this perfect version. Try to imagine how it feels to be the person you are proud of, this super human, who can do everything. Train your body to get used to this new personality.
Meditations help a lot to become more conscious but I know they are not for everyone. But if you really want to become happy and successful person with great emotional health, you need to examine yourself and one by one add great qualities of a strong person and get rid of qualities you don’t like. It’s a long process, the same as if all of a sudden you decided to switch from junk food to healthy diet. Sometimes you would want to eat chips or candies but it can ruin your progress. Sometimes you would want to think about something sad only because your body got used to this type of thoughts. In such cases you need to stop it the same way you tell yourself stop eating sweets.
If you want to be healthy you need to feed your brain with healthy thoughts.
To sum up:
Use colors as first aid when you have negative thoughts.
Know your values, review them every day.
Know your flaws, review them every day.
Work on daily progress reports on how close are you to your perfect version and which steps toward "Ideal You" you need to take tomorrow.
Picture your ideal version in the morning and in the evening and feel this image within your body
If you follow these steps you will be able to make changes and emotional pain won’t be bothering you too much anymore. You will just treat it as a signal and will know what to do consciously instead of just following commands from your body. This way you will become healthy, creative and kind!
Be Strong And Love Yourself!