Just ride it out… OK, easy to say, harder to do at 3 AM. I’m wide awake. Sweating. My mind is on high alert – looking for the ‘danger’ that awoke me.
Then I notice my stomach feels acidic. The kind of bitterness you usually feel in your mouth. The problem is my stomach has neurological reception in it. That means that gut feeling you get is actually a hot line up to your brain. So, when your stomach is off, it can feel like your brain is as well.
First thing that happens: you start to settle on all the reasons that you could be feeling uncomfortable, anger or fear. You feel that your mind is going to be able to get you out of this, but it’s not. It starts to look for all the reasons, people, or situations in your life that you can blame your discomfort. The more you go down this rabbit hole the deeper and more entrenched these negative emotions get. You have to give up the storyline.
Emotional resilience isn’t about how long you can just stay happy and how little time you can spend being uncomfortable. It’s about how well you rebound from your emotions, uncomfortable or otherwise. Resilience refers to elasticity, meaning how well we bounce back from anger or marshal from our grief, our fear, even our anxiety. There are many tools you can use to ease the negative emotions in your life, but you will never be able to get rid of them completely. It’s part of being human. So, what do we do when the night comes for us? The only answers that I’ve ever come up with:
One: drop the storyline.
Basically, stop feeding the bear. The more fuel you give your emotion the longer it will stay. Acknowledge to yourself that you are going to have to feel your fear, your anger, your disappointment, because its yours. When you stop blaming yourself, other people, or and situations for your feelings, your emotions will have nothing to feed on.
And, the second thing:
Acknowledge that your feelings have an expiration date. In the next minute, next hour, or even the next day when you wake up you will feel differently because no emotion lasts forever.
Once you acknowledge your feeling, take responsibility for that feeling (drop the story-line), and own that it’s only a feeling and it will pass, you will have an easier time staying with the fact that your stomach may just be off. Take some deep breathes, maybe an antacid, and salvage whatever few hours of sleep you can. The night can only last so long and there’s no doubt you’ll feel differently when the sun comes up.
