Don’t Do Anything, Just Listen To What Your Discomfort Wants To Tell You

Sometimes doing nothing is the hardest thing they can ask you or you can try when you feel unwell. We believe that listening to what we feel, even if it is unpleasant, without the intention of looking for a solution, is a useless task.  On the other hand, we behave as if the discomfort instead of being heard, recognized and accepted had to be hidden or pushed aside because the emotions that hurt or harm us are unacceptable.

We forget to take into account that there are emotions that occupy spaces in a stealthy way, with hardly any noise, that are full of information and their listening will make us recognize them and get to know each other better. Remember that there are no good or bad emotions, but that each and every one of them is necessary to be able to appreciate our world and show ourselves as we are.

But learning to listen to our emotions requires having the ability to unconditionally accept what comes to us, not to judge anyone or anything and, ultimately, to be able to live in the present. All this is not easy at all, therefore, in this article we will teach you to accept discomfort and use mindfulness as a tool to live in the present.

Listen and validate your emotions, they are part of you

Listening, accepting and validating our emotions does not imply resigning ourselves to reality. To resign or surrender is to allow oneself to be defeated and to convince oneself that nothing can be done in the face of what happens to us. On the other hand, accepting and validating what we feel helps us to understand what is happening to us, to feel it and assimilate it as another part of our emotional universe.

This will make us aware of the power of our thoughts, emotions and our own internal language. Remember that what we say or think to ourselves (without the need to tell anyone) can do us more harm than what actually happens.  In addition, this damage is multiplied when you refuse to accept what you feel.

You’d be surprised how beneficial it is often to listen to discomfort. In the consultation, when we ask our patients to pay attention to their emotions, important changes usually occur.  For example, I remember a patient stopped trying to eliminate anxiety attacks when he felt them and in doing so he realized that anxiety was born of the pain that was produced by the death of his son. Once the cause was known, the crises decreased in intensity until they disappeared.

The same thing that we apply to anxiety serves us for other emotions of negative valence, such as sadness or anger. Letting them be with you is difficult, but it is the beginning to let them speak and you can hear their message. That’s why I lend you a simple idea : allow your painful emotions to be with you, listen to their message without trying to eliminate them ahead of time, and if you find yourself overwhelmed by them, seek professional help.

Mindfulness as a tool for acceptance and listening

One of the easiest ways to begin to listen to ourselves and accept our discomfort is to practice mindfulness. Keep in mind that listening to our emotions is easier if we observe our mind.  Thus, realizing what we think in each moment allows us to capture details of our emotional life that we would otherwise ignore.

This is the power of observation: we only notice the nuances of our experience when we observe carefully, if we use our ability to listen. For this reason, observing what we think, what we feel and what we notice in our body is so important.  In addition, to get the most out of this observation, we must do it without being carried away by the experiences that appear before us. To do this, you can follow the following strategies:

• Breathing as a starting point and meeting point:  breathing is one of the easiest ways to update ourselves to the moment in which we live. Focusing on it is essential to start practicing mindfulness. In addition, the moment you lose your attention focus and become based on your thoughts, returning to it will bring you to the present moment.
• Everything gets worse before it gets better:  when we begin to practice listening to what we feel, to accept what happens to us, many times our discomfort worsens. However, remember that this descent is short and if we do it well it will take very little time to start improving.
• Scan your body to really know it:  Our body stores a multitude of information. Being aware of their sensations, their tensions, will make you know yourself more and release your emotions.
• Be nice to yourself and experience: We are often our worst judges. We condemn all our negative experiences and multiply our feelings by making a value judgment about them. What happens is neither good nor bad, it just happens and most of the time we cannot change it. Accept and let it go as just another part of the experience, as judging it will not help you with it.

Now you have weapons to avoid avoiding the thoughts, feelings and emotions that disturb you. Now you can live without feeding the discomfort trying to avoid it . Just listen to what your discomfort wants to tell you and learn from it because it will give you the necessary clues to overcome it.