Free Stress: How to De-Stress without Doing Less by Kate Middleton

of instinctive suppression of emotions is very often at the root of a more serious problem. If we start habitually to suppress emotions that we do not know how to deal with, this pattern of suppressing them becomes less of a short-term solution and more of a habit. In effect, we start to treat emotions as if they are awkward things that we would rather not have. So, faced with a situation that leaves us feeling really upset or anxious, we take a deep breath, ‘pull ourselves together’ and carry on regardless. Whathappens to that emotion? If only it did what we wanted and just dwindled away to nothing! Remember, an emotion’s job is to get our attention! If we were given the job of getting someone’s attention and their first reaction was to ignore us, would we go away? No, we’d keep on catching them whenever we could and reminding them that we were there until they finally paid attention! Negative emotions do not generally go away until we have worked through whatever triggered them in the first place.
    Trying to suppress negative emotions is a bit like putting an angry cat in a box. We might manage to get it in and shut the lid, and there might be no outward signs that it is there, but it is there, and from time to time we will know it is as we hear angry yowls or maybe see the occasional paw break out. All that time it is in there it gets more and more angry, and at some point, eventually, we will have to open the box. This kind of delayed emotional attack is often both painful and overwhelming.
    This is exactly what happens when we are under long-term stress. We start automatically to suppress some emotions – often those that are painful, unpleasant, unwanted or inconvenient. We’re even more likely to do this if life is throwing a lot of us, so there are simply too many emotions for us to deal with in the time we have available. As we start habitually to suppress our emotions, we end up with a box full of these difficult, negative feelings that we have never processed or dealt with. They can become a bit like a bubbling pool of festering emotion that we carry around with us. Carrying this has various effects on us. Sometimes those feelings, which do emerge from time to time, can start to trigger worries that we have always had about who and what we are. Of course, this then triggers more emotionsand fears, and can very quickly result in a lot of pressure for us to carry each day as those doubts and worries build up. We may find that we start to change in ourselves, becoming more withdrawn, quiet or subdued as we have to try not to react to anything in case those other feelings come flooding out.
    Meanwhile, of course, all that effort is tiring, so we will find ourselves feeling more and more emotionally exhausted and worn out. Sometimes the effort of just talking to someone else can be too much, so we might start to avoid other people and become isolated. Being on our own then leaves us vulnerable to more emotions emerging. Bit by bit things can start to get really hard. On the surface we may look fine but gradually we will become all too aware of what we are carrying round underneath. As someone said to me once, ‘I‘ve just got to a stage where I don’t know what to say if someone asks me how I am. The answer isn’t “fine” because I am not. But I am still managing just about OK. The thing is there is so much under the surface that not even I know how I am any more – I just get on with being. So I have to avoid other people in case they ask me how I am because I guess the honest answer is that I am not sure that I want to know.’
    Emotional sparks and emotional fires
    So, something as simple as suppressing emotions can easily cause them to become a problem in their own right. The other common cause of problems with emotions is the way that they can grow. Remember, emotions as they are supposed to work are short-term triggers – like warning flags that