Tired of being bothered by everything? You can choose to feel otherwise.
Ok, sure. Mental health is complicated, what with various trauma histories, people’s entrenched, maladaptive coping strategies, their pesky underlying neural wiring determining whether they are optimistically or pessimistically disposed, the tsunami of interventions and approaches that might apply, AND the subjectivity surrounding the definition of “health” exacerbates things further.
BUT…. I’ve concluded that the ol’ Ockham’s razor–that the most direct or simplest answer is usually the right one–applies to the common, chronic issue of Being Upset.
Socio-culturally speaking, we seem pretty attached to getting Upset, and through that same collective we have also prostrated ourselves before the idea that Upsetness—being bothered by someone or something in a way that is dysregulating for our system—bears such a profound gravitational pull that we simply cannot—as anyone on TikTok or Instagram will aver—“help how we feel.”
What if that was incorrect? (Spoiler alert: it is.)
Has it occurred to you that you could just stop being bothered? By the weather, by inflation, by your options such-as-they-are for the 2024 election, by that thing your mother ALWAYS says or does, by the unhelpfulness of any customer service entity associated with time, money, or ease of yours that has been compromised, or by assholes wherever they be found?
Annoyances may seem ubiquitous and tenacious, but they truly exist only in the “eye of the beholder,” as YOU are the one that gave them the power to negatively affect you. As the conferrer of this power, you can also take it away. You can choose to feel otherwise.
Notice the use of choose? Yep. You did it. Chose, every time, to Be Upset rather than not. It matters less WHY you did, based on your own vulnerabilities and predilections and basic bad habits, and matters more that you recognize you could choose otherwise.
Choosing otherwise, however, requires you to do the work in the following key areas:
Affect Regulation:
THE most important skill to be cultivated, as dysregulated affect is the common core across the spectrum of diagnostic categories.
At its core, it’s an Over-Under problem, with Overs spending much of their time hyper-aroused, in the form of feelings of anxiety/panic, compulsion to manage anxiety/panic with maladaptive behaviors (OCD, eating disorders, substance use disorders), impulsive behavior, high reactivity, and sleep difficulties (from overproduction of cortisol and slow return to baseline once fired). The Unders are hypo-aroused—feeling depressed, lethargic, hopeless, lacking pleasure in things, lacking motivation, and having difficulty concentrating. And some toggle between the Over-Under (and frequently end up with an inaccurate diagnosis of “Bi-Polar 2,” which is not at all helpful).
Successful affect regulation requires a combination of “bottom up”—somatic strategies to calm the body down or light it up—and “top down” ones that require your thinking brain to challenge irrational narratives you’ve concocted–and then repeat on a loop endlessly–which in turn increase the somatic experiences of hyper- and hypoarousal.
When a person is either Over or Under, optimal capacity is compromised, and being able to choose how to feel is one of the hallmarks of optimal capacity.
“Managing Boundaries:”
Here’s a shocker: maintaining a boundary is not telling someone else how to behave or communicate so that you feel okay, although this erroneous idea has certainly hijacked the public imagination for at least the last decade.
An actual “boundary,” meaning one which protects YOU from something that causes you harm or distress, has nothing to do with what other people do. The line that can’t be crossed exists preeminently in your consciousness; it’s an unbreakable dome over the city that is you, and unwelcome missives from the outside bounce off it entirely.
A true boundary reflects a choice to not be affected by certain words, attitudes, circumstances, people. It requires the ability to calm yourself consistently so that the clear appraisal—that you do not wish to be bothered by THIS, —can be made, and the protective dome lowered over your city until the threat has passed.
Personal Agency:
I like to think of this quality as the result of “stacking wins.” Anytime a person successfully regulates affect (in circumstances that previously made a monkey of them), it’s a Win. “Stacking wins,” is what happens when regulating affect, and maintaining “boundaries” as we have here defined, become the rule and not the exception, and they start stacking up. With the stack as our fortification, we come to believe we are not powerless in the face of our feelings. WE are in charge, not they. We can Stop Being Bothered. We do not cease to feel, but we can think and feel at the same time.
The road to personal agency is one in which—while constructed on the bedrock of affect regulation and boundary maintenance—some experiments in “fake it till you make it” might apply. Just considering that it is possible to Stop Being Bothered, the next time you are confronted with what you are all ready to call a Triggering Situation, imagine that this time you could….just….not….care. And while people who know you might be a bit confounded by this other version of you, notice how not a damn thing that is actually “bad” happens when you stop participating in the Upset…and Upset does not miss you when you are gone.
Further Reading
“What is emotion regulation and how do we do it?” by the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injury and Recovery
This post is written by Elisabeth Ihlenfeld, LPC. Elisabeth owns Level Up and see clients virtually and in-person at Phoenix Therapists’ Hub.
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