Category: The Science of Finding Flow

Flow Class Activity: Let Yourself Feel What You Feel

People often ask me what they should do instead of numbing their uncomfortable emotions with busyness, or social media, or work.

Most of us need to practice not-numbing but just letting ourselves feel however it is that we are feeling. Here’s how:

Take a moment to identify an emotion that you are experiencing. Where in your body does it live? Is it in the pit of your stomach? In your throat? What does it really feel like? Does it have a shape, or a texture, or a color?

The key is not to deny what we are feeling, but rather to lean into our feelings, even if they are painful. Take a moment to be mindful and narrate: I’m feeling anxious right now, or this situation is making me tense. Hang in there with unpleasant feelings at least long enough to acknowledge them.

The way to super-charge this exercise is to move from labeling your emotions to truly accepting them, to surrendering all resistance to them. This is tricky because you may really, really, really not want to feel what you’re feeling, and you might be doing this just because I said earlier that emotions that are processed tend to dissipate.

It can be scary to expose ourselves to our strongest emotions. Period. Take comfort from neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, who teaches us that most emotions don’t last longer than 90 seconds. What you’ll probably find is that if you can sit still with a strong emotion and let yourself feel it, even the worst emotional pain rises, crests, breaks, and recedes like a wave on the surf.

Can you let yourself feel your strong emotions? If so, you are allowing yourself to truly feel what you are feeling. Now, can you surrender your resistance to your emotions?

Here’s one way to do that using a two-minute meditation I’ve adapted from Martha Beck’s outstanding online Integrity Cleanse:

Click here to download the Integrity Cleanse MeditationLetting yourself feel what you feel is essential to this work.

This can be a really hard process, I know. I was just trying to do it with my daughter, who was feeling depressed and anxious about a social situation in her middle school. The idea that she would allow herself to feel depressed—that she would not try not to feel sad—was outrageous to her. “But I DON’T WANT TO FEEL SAD!!! I DON’T WANT TO FEEL ANXIOUS!!! I DO NOT ACCEPT THESE FEELINGS!!!” she raged at me.

Clearly, not everyone is ready for a radical process like this one.

But if you are ready, go for it. This process is the foundation of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which is clinically proven to improve quality of life and mental health. I feel certain that no matter how busy and important you are, you can find two extra minutes to improve your life and your health!

Once you are able to let yourself feel what you feel, give yourself a pat on the back for demonstrating what Peter Bregman calls “emotional courage” and for doing what Martha Beck calls “turning up the dial on your willingness to suffer.”

Beck explains, drawing on the work of the founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Steven Hayes, and his book Get Out of Your Mind & into Your Life:

“[Hayes] suggests that we picture our minds as electronic gadgets with dials, like old-fashioned radios. One dial is labeled Willingness to Suffer. It’s safe to assume that we start life with that dial set at zero, and we rarely see any reason to change it. Increasing our availability to pain, we think, is just a recipe for anguish soufflé.

Well, yes…except life [will] upset you every few minutes or so, sometimes mildly, sometimes apocalyptically.”

The basis of ACT is that we try something a little crazy: abandon all attempts to avoid or rush through unpleasant emotions—and focus completely on turning up the dial on our Willingness to Suffer. Back to Beck:

“What this means, in real-world terms, is that we stop avoiding experiences because we’re afraid of the unpleasant feelings that might come with them. We don’t seek suffering or take pride in it; we just stop letting it dictate any of our choices. People who’ve been through hell are often forced to learn this, which is why activist, cancer patient, and poet Audre Lorde wrote, “When I dare to be powerful—to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

There are LOADS of benefits to having this sort of emotional courage — to being willing to feel whatever it is that we are feeling. You can now have that difficult (but necessary!) conversation with your boss or your mother that you’ve been avoiding for months because you were worried about the emotional fallout. You can now stop pretending to be something you aren’t — instead of hiding yourself out of fear of what people will think. You can take calculated risks. You may still be afraid, but at least you aren’t making decisions based on your fear. You can do the right thing, even when the right thing is hard.

You can handle whatever uncomfortable, difficult, or painful emotions may come from the choices you make. Knowing that, what will you do differently?

Please don’t forget that having emotional courage — turning up the dial on our willingness to suffer — is about developing happiness, love, and wisdom.

Our emotions—the good, the bad, and the ugly—carry with them important information. Your emotions are how your heart talks to you, how it tells you what choices to make.

As Omid Kordestani, a senior advisor to Google, reminds us, “In life you make the small decisions with your head and the big decisions with your heart.” If we want to be happy, we need to practice feeling, to practice listening to our heart. This is the way to know who we are and what we want.

This post is from a series about authenticity from the “Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. Want to go on to the next class or start the course from the beginning? It’s free! Just go to The Science of Finding Flow course page. Enjoy!

by Christine Carter

The Benefits of Letting Ourselves Feel What We Feel

Enough about all the negative consequences of inauthenticity; let’s take a look at the benefits of letting ourselves feel what we feel!

#1: Happiness

Research shows that when we accept and let ourselves feel (and even express) what is going on emotionally for us, our overall happiness increases and depression decreases. Ironically, research shows that people who regularly suppress difficult emotions tend to experience more negative emotions overall.

Why might this be? Suppressing an emotion tends to increase the body’s physiological response to that emotion, essentially making it bigger (rather than making it go away). This increases our experience of negativity.

But when we don’t numb or deny our difficult emotions, they tend to dissipate, and our experience of them lessens. Moreover, when we let ourselves feel what we feel, we are able to access the full range of our emotions, including positive ones, like gratitude and compassion and inspiration and awe. Needless to say, these emotions make us feel happier and more satisfied with our lives.

#2: Love

Another consistent benefit of letting ourselves feel what we feel is that our relationships tend to improve, sometimes dramatically.

For example, the less often that people report suppressing their emotions over a two-week period, the better they tend to feel about their relationships over the course of three months.

This sort of authenticity—defined by psychologists as “the sense of empowerment and freedom to act in a way that is an expression of deeply held values, goals, and feelings, rather than the product of external pressures and expectations”—predicts the tendency to avoid destructive behavior in intimate relationships. More than that, it predicts greater relationship quality overall.

Why?

Because authenticity creates intimacy. Research shows that young adults in romantic relationships are most intimate with and most committed to dating partners who see them as they see themselves; connection and intimacy in our relationships depend on our feelings of being understood. In other words, when our romantic partners see us the way that we see ourselves—which they can only do if we don’t hide our feelings—our relationships last longer and are more fulfilling.

#3: Wisdom

Last but certainly not least, when we let ourselves feel what we feel we gain access to the most powerful part of our brain and nervous system: our intuitive, unconscious, and visceral knowledge.

Our unconscious knowledge is shockingly powerful—and far more extensive than our conscious knowledge. Consider that our conscious brain processes information at a rate of about fifty bits per second, while our unconscious, intuitive nervous system processes information at a rate of 11 million bits per second. Fifty versus 11 million. That’s not a small differential, and it means that our unconscious minds are constantly cluing us into our experience, both internal and external, if only we pay attention.

Here’s the catch: our intuitive knowledge system does not speak in words. It speaks to us through our bodies and through our feelings. Where our conscious critical thinking is very verbal, analytical, and linear, our unconscious and intuitive knowledge is emotional, embodied, automatic, and instinctual.

The unconscious power of our brain is the difference between being intelligent and being truly wise. According to social psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Lee Ross, authors of The Wisest One in the Room:

The difference between wisdom and intelligence is noteworthy. Intelligence involves taking the information available and processing it effectively—thinking about it logically and drawing sound conclusions. That is certainly an important component of wisdom. But a wise person does something else–a wise person goes beyond the information that is immediately available. Wisdom involves knowing when the information available is insufficient for the problem at hand. It involves the recognition that how things are right now might seem very different down the road.

by Christine Carter

The Happiness Tipping Point

Over time, our broadened vision and the other positive effects of happiness grow. There is, as doctors say, a dosage effect or, more accurately, a tipping point. All our accumulated moments of being able to see the forest and the trees—and of increased learning and creativity and connection with others—change who we are as people. Our better social skills over time build our relationships with others in ways that bring us new opportunities. Our increased motivation and self-discipline make us more productive, which can build greater mastery and success in our efforts. Fredrickson calls this the “broaden and build” effect of positive emotions. Happiness broadens our perception in the moment and builds our resources over time. It becomes an upward spiral of productivity and positivity.

This positive emotion tipping point is a psychological law just as the temperature tipping point at which ice melts into water is determined by a physical law. People whose ratios of positive to negative emotions are lower than 3:1 often “languish,” as researchers call it. Their performance at work suffers, they are more likely to be depressed (and not recover), their marriages are more likely to fail— and they aren’t happy. Their behavior becomes predictable to psychologists, and not in a good way. Languishing people become rigid. They tend to feel burdened by life.

“Happiness broadens our perception in the moment and builds our resources over time.” Share on X

Fortunately, something remarkable often happens when our ratio of positive to negative feelings hits or passes that 3:1 mark. We flourish. These flourishing people, who make up only 17 percent of the American adult population, are happier and more resilient. They are high-functioning individuals who score well on things such as self-acceptance, purpose in life, environmental mastery, positive relationships with others, personal growth, creativity, and openness. They feel good and they do good. They are highly engaged with their friends, their work, their families, and their communities.

We want to be happy both at home and at work, of course. But, at risk of being repetitive, happiness is key to how well we do at work. Happier people are 31% more productive. They have, on average, 37% better sales figures. They tend to hold higher paying and more secure jobs, and they are less likely to experience burn-out or lose their jobs.

This post is from a series about flourishing from the “Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. Want to go on to the next class or start the course from the beginning? It’s free! Just go to The Science of Finding Flow course page. Enjoy!

by Christine Carter

Here’s What Happens When We Aren’t Authentic

We live in a world where it’s totally socially acceptable to pretend, to “fake it ’til we make it,” and even to tell white lies. In some ways this works for us. As Martha Beck wisely says, “Duplicity can make it easier to get what you want, unless what you want is health and happiness. Duplicity sucks at that.”

Here’s why, in the end, pretending isn’t as effective as authenticity, not just for our health and happiness, but for helping us accomplish our goals:

#1: Pretending doesn’t fool people. Say you don’t want to reveal to your co-workers that you and your significant other had a major fight over the weekend, and you’re feeling really blue. Research shows that if you pretend that you had a great weekend and you’re feeling great–and you’re not–you’ll probably make the people around you feel worse, too. Why?

We humans aren’t actually very good at hiding how we are feeling. We exhibit microexpressions that the people we are with might not know they are registering but that trigger mirror neurons—so a little part of their brain thinks that they are feeling our negative feelings. So trying to suppress negative emotions when we are talking with someone—like when we don’t want to trouble someone else with our own distress—actually increases stress levels of both people more than if we had shared our distress in the first place. (It also reduces rapport and inhibits the connection between two people.)

#2: You’ll find it harder to focus. Pretending takes a huge conscious effort—it’s an act of self-control that drains your brain of its power to focus and do deep work. That’s because performing or pretending to be or feel something you’re not requires tremendous self-control.

Tons of research suggests that our ability to repeatedly exert our self-control is actually quite limited. Like a muscle that tires and can no longer perform at its peak strength after a workout, our self-control is diminished by previous efforts at control, even if those efforts take place in a totally different realm. So that little fib at the water cooler you told in order to make yourself seem better than you are is going to make it hard for you to focus later in the afternoon. A performance or any attempt to hide who you really are or pretend to be something you aren’t is going to make it harder later to control your attention, your thoughts, and to regulate your emotions. It’ll increase the odds that you react more aggressively to a provocation, eat more tempting snacks, engage in riskier behaviors, and—this one is pretty compelling to me—you’ll perform more poorly on tasks that require executive function, like managing your time, planning, or organizing.

#3: You’ll become more stressed and anxious. Let’s just call it like it is: pretending to be or feel something that you don’t is a lie.

And lying, even if we do it a lot, or are good at it, is very stressful to our brains and our body. The polygraph test depends on this: “Lie Detectors” don’t actually detect lies, but rather they detect the subconscious stress and fear that lying causes. These tests sense changes in our skin electricity, pulse rate, and breathing. They also detect when someone’s vocal pitch has changed in a nearly imperceptible way, a consequence of tension in the body that tightens vocal chords.

The physiological changes that lie detectors sense are caused by glucocorticoids, hormones that are released during a stress response. And as I’m sure you well know, stress hormones are bad news for your health and happiness over the long run.

Research shows that people who are given instructions for how to lie less in their day-to-day lives actually are able to lie less, and when they do, their physical health improves. For example, they report less trouble sleeping, less tension, fewer headaches, and fewer sore throats. These improvements in health are likely caused by a lessened stress response.

And that’s not all: When the people in the above study lied less, they also reported improvements in their relationships and less anxiety.

We don’t lie or pretend or perform all the time, of course. But when we do, it’s important to see the consequences: increased stress, decreased willpower, impaired relationships.

These tactics to feel better—lying, pretending, and numbing our emotions—always backfire in the end. They make life hard, eliminating any possibility that we will find our flow, or that we will be able to operate from our sweet spot, that place where we have both EASE and POWER.

Numbing, pretending, or fibbing in any way is an act of not feeling what you really feel. It’s a denial of your own authenticity, of who you really are.

by Christine Carter

Why Happiness Makes Us More Intelligent

When we are happy, we are more creative and motivated, more productive and skilled socially. This means that when we are joyful—or experiencing even a mild positive emotion—we are far more attuned to context. This broadened perception opens up our sweet spot: that place where we experience the least stress, the greatest intellectual power, and the most sophisticated social skills.

This short video is from a series about flourishing from the “Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. Want to go on to the next class or start the course from the beginning? It’s free! Just go to The Science of Finding Flow course page. Enjoy!

by Christine Carter

The Perils of Pretending

One of the great things about smartphones and social media, we often think, is that they keep us from ever feeling bored. Or feeling anything we don’t actually want to feel, for that matter. Feeling guilty that you aren’t working? Check your email, perhaps, to reassure yourself that you actually are engaged at work. Feeling anxious? Distract yourself with a youtube video. There are an infinite number of ways that our devices make it so that we don’t really have to feel uncomfortable emotions. . . .Which you might think is kinda a good thing. Because who wants to be uncomfortable, right?

But a little bummer about the human brain is that we can’t selectively numb our emotions. So when we dull our difficult emotions (like shame or panic or fear), we also numb the pleasant and positive emotions (like joy and gratitude and inspiration).

This might be painfully obvious, but we can only really experience the emotions that we want to feel when we are conscious of what we are feeling, when we are in touch with all of our emotions, like ’em or not.

Numbing our unpleasant emotions is just one tactic for not accepting what we are feeling, for not feeling what we feel. Our devices and networking tools make it increasingly easy for us to not-feel by providing us with such effective ways to blunt our emotions, but numbing isn’t the only way that smartphones and social media allow us to deny our emotions.

Questions for your reflection:

1. How are you feeling right now? How satisfied are you with your life — with your work, your family, your relationships? Who are you — what kind of person are you? What and who do you love and value? Jot down answers to these questions in a journal or on a blank piece of paper, knowing no one else will ever see them. Just write down a few adjectives about who you are, how you are feeling right now, and your overall life satisfaction.

2. Now answer those questions again, but this time for an audience. How would you describe yourself and how you are feeling to co-workers? At a reunion? To a close friend you haven’t seen or spoken to in a long time? On social media?

Are your answers different depending on the audience?

by Christine Carter

Welcome To Unit 6 – Feel!

“When was the last time you were completely honest with yourself about what you were feeling? When did you last really let yourself feel something difficult or uncomfortable?”

by Christine Carter

The Power of Positive Emotions

All of our emotions, both positive and negative, can have a profound physiological effect on our bodies and our brains. We feel this the most when something makes us feel threatened—or physically stressed, such as when we deprive ourselves of sleep or catch a cold—and our body releases stress hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline.

Anger, fear, and negative emotions increase activity in the part of our nervous system that increases our heart rate. Gratitude, compassion, awe, love, and other positive emotions, on the other hand, decrease our heart rate, among other healthy things. This is why Barbara Fredrickson, a positive psychology pioneer, has famously shown that positive emotions put the brakes on the part of our nervous system that creates the deleterious stress response—what she calls the “undoing effect” of positive emotions.

When we’ve experienced stress, positive emotions return us to our natural state. #flow #powerofpostivity Share on X

Consider this study where Fredrickson and her colleagues deliberately stressed out their research subjects.

Applying considerable time pressure, we asked [the research volunteers] to prepare a speech on “Why you are a good friend.” To build the psychological pressure even further, we told them that we’d videotape their speech and have it evaluated by their peers. As you can imagine, this surprise public-speaking assignment made people anxious. Indeed, that was our goal—to make everyone who participated in this study anxious. And we thoroughly succeeded!

Understandably, everyone’s blood pressure went way up. Fredrickson’s team could then measure what might “undo” this stress response most quickly. After being told that they were actually going to watch a film clip instead of give the speech, the volunteers began to relax. Some subjects saw a video that evoked sadness by “showing a young boy crying at the death of someone he loved.”

Others got to watch clips that evoked serenity (by showing ocean waves) or mild amusement (by showing a puppy playing with a flower).

It was the volunteers in the last two groups—those who saw the ocean or the puppy videos—who recovered from the stressful event the most quickly physiologically. Their heart rate, blood pressure, and the constriction within their blood vessels returned to their baseline levels much faster than those who weren’t primed with a mild positive emotion.

The takeaway: When we’ve experienced stress, positive emotions return us to our natural state, unwinding the damage that stress does, and brings us back to ease.

by Christine Carter

Wrapping Up Unit 7

“The most powerful emotions of all (are) love, empathy and compassion.”

This post is taken from “The Science of Finding Flow,” an online course I created as a companion to my book The Sweet Spot: How to Accomplish More by Doing Less. I’m sharing “lessons” from this online class here, on my blog. Want to see previous posts? Just click this The Science of Finding Flow tag. Enjoy!