Written by Stacey Squires, MSW, RSW & Angela Dore, MSW, RSW

How We Avoid Sitting With Emotions

Scroll. Clean the kitchen. Stay busy. Call a friend. Work late. Eat. Spend. Research. Solve the problem. Most of us would rather do almost anything other than sit with our emotions, especially the uncomfortable ones.

Maybe you’ve noticed yourself reaching for your phone the second something uncomfortable comes up. Perhaps you have a difficult conversation, and suddenly you’re reorganizing a closet at 10pm. Or you get bad news and spend the next three hours researching solutions instead of letting yourself react to it.

Most of the time these things look productive, responsible, or practical. Sometimes they are. Life doesn’t always give us the luxury of falling apart the second something painful happens, but eventually there comes a moment when the distraction runs out, and there it is again – whatever you’ve been trying not to feel.

Why We Avoid Emotions

One thing I notice with clients is that sometimes people are afraid that if they really let themselves feel something, they’ll get stuck there.

If they start crying, they’ll never stop.

If they acknowledge the anger, it will take over.

If they let themselves grieve, they’ll drown in it.

Sometimes there are understandable reasons for that fear to exist. It may not have been safe or accepted for you to express your emotions growing up, maybe appearing neutral was easier than letting others know you were struggling, or it could be that your emotions feel too overwhelming to look at in the moment. Whatever the reasons underlying the fear are, suppressing or ignoring parts of your experience likely gave you some measure of comfort or protection. Although this may feel better than the alternative in the moment, denying an important aspect of how we interact with the world can result in unintended consequences for our well-being, our relationships, and how we understand ourselves.

Why Avoiding Emotions Doesn’t Really Work

Imagine standing in the ocean trying to stop a wave with your hands. Most of us can recognize that it wouldn’t work, but that’s often how we approach emotions; we brace ourselves against them, hoping they won’t knock us over, then we’re exhausted before they’ve even arrived.

The thing about emotions is that they don’t stop showing up because we’ve decided they’re inconvenient. Grief still shows up. Disappointment still hurts. Anger still asks for our attention.

This might be familiar if you’ve told yourself you don’t care about a situation and then spent three days thinking about it or a song comes on six months later, and suddenly you’re crying in the grocery store, realizing grief has been patiently waiting for your attention.

The harder we work to push an emotion away, the more space it often seems to take up and the less prepared we are when it does.

What Sitting with Emotions Actually Looks Like

I think a lot of people assume sitting with emotions means sitting cross-legged in a sunbeam having a profound moment with yourself. In reality, sitting with your emotions is far broader. It does not mean suffering with no end or endlessly analyzing our emotions. It may look like taking the time to notice a feeling instead of rushing to distraction, rationalization, or solving.

If you’re someone who tends to stay busy, distract yourself, rationalize everything, or immediately jump into problem-solving mode, next time maybe start by noticing that. Not trying to change it. Just noticing it.

It may come with acknowledgement, which can look like admitting you’re more disappointed than you wanted to be, that something hurt your feelings instead of pretending it didn’t, or resisting the urge to immediately see a feeling as a problem to be solved.

Sometimes, it can mean treating the emotion as information, asking ourselves why the emotion exists and what the emotion itself is asking of us. For example, grief may tell us that we really cared about someone, and. whether or not we can do anything about missing them, we can create the space for ourselves to honor the experience.

For some people, ‘sitting with it’ means journaling or going for a walk without headphones. For others it could mean talking and sharing with someone you trust. Sometimes it looks like crying in your car at the end of a long day.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. The goal isn’t to have the perfect response to an emotion. It’s to spend some time noticing it, acknowledging it, and allowing it.

How to Start Making Space for Emotions 

If you’re finding it hard to begin, here are some simple ways to start practicing:

• First notice the feeling when it comes up.
• Try to name it.
• Get curious about how it feels in your body (Where is it? Is it a feeling of tightness? Fatigue?)
• Visualize yourself ‘making space’ for it instead of pushing it away.
• Remind yourself that you can tolerate it.
• Ask yourself some questions around the emotion (without judgment or evaluating whether you should be having the emotion) to work towards understanding:
  • How comfortable is this feeling?
  • Did it happen gradually or suddenly?
  • What was it in response to?
  • Is it familiar?
  • If it had a message, what would it be?
• Stay with the feelings for just 30 to 60 seconds without distracting yourself or acting on it. Over time this may help you build tolerance and allow for more freedom within emotionally difficult experiences.

What can Happen When we Stop Avoiding

The irony is that many of us spend so much energy trying not to feel something that we end up thinking about it more, worrying about it more, and carrying it around for longer.

While learning to sit with their emotions, I often see people discover that what looked like anger was actually resentment that had been building for months. Or that what felt like overwhelming sadness was grief that never really got a chance to be acknowledged. Or that the anxiety they’d been fighting was connected to impossible expectations they were carrying every day.

It’s hard to know what we need, what matters to us, or what’s not working when we’re constantly trying to push our feelings aside.

Sitting with emotions doesn’t always make them disappear. Sometimes what changes is our understanding of them and the confidence we have in ourselves to respond to them.

When we understand ourselves a little better and feel that we have the agency to choose how we move through them, it becomes easier to recognize what needs our attention, what needs our care, and what comes next.