The Importance of Facing Your Feelings

What's going on at HealthyPlace this week?

• The Importance of Facing Your Feelings
• From the HealthyPlace Mental Health Blogs
• Can We Talk About the Holidays' Impact on Mental Health?
• Most Popular HealthyPlace Articles Shared by Facebook Fans
• Positive, Inspirational Quote for People with Depression

Everyone experiences a wide range of emotions every single day. For those living with any mental illness, personality disorder, or general mental health challenge, emotions can make daily life feel overwhelming and exhausting. It’s easy to feel at the mercy of rampant emotions, many of which are incredibly strong and downright unpleasant.

It’s natural to resist such life-disrupting emotions. If you find yourself hating your feelings—or, worse, being hard on yourself for having them, though, you might find that changing your relationship with yourself and your feelings is less exhausting and more liberating.

Concepts from mindfulness and acceptance and commitment therapy can help guide you in facing your feelings.

• Notice your feelings and name them to begin to tame them. When you’re aware, they are no longer bouncing around like wild but are now tangible concepts you can identify and deal with.
• Accept them. This doesn’t mean you have to like them. Instead, acceptance means you acknowledge that they exist and allow yourself to feel how you feel without judging them or yourself.
• Decide how you want to face them right now, in this moment. Maybe you want to take action to deal with their cause, or maybe you want to let them be and just feel them. Either way, you are in charge of your response to them.

Facing your feelings doesn’t automatically erase them. It gives you back your power over them so they no longer control you or have you on the run from them.

Recommended Video

Living with bipolar 2 disorder, I feel things very deeply. I’m a very emotionally driven person. Let me give you an example of what I mean by that. Some people make decisions based on what they know, their knowledge. I make a lot of decisions based on how I feel. While I realize that can lead to problems and that not everyone reacts based on their emotions, that’s me. However, I am working on finding balance.

Articles Related to Feelings and Emotions

• What Is Emotional Health? And How to Improve It?
• Masking Your Feelings Lowers Your Self-Esteem
• The Feelings Chart
• Manage Overwhelming Emotions with Healthy Perspectives
• Get Control of Your Emotions and Respond Wisely
• Transforming Your PTSD Emotions
• Understanding Your Negative Emotions
• The Music of My Emotions

Today's Question: When has facing difficult feelings been helpful for you? We invite you to participate by sharing your thoughts, experiences, and knowledge on the HealthyPlace Facebook page.

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From the HealthyPlace Mental Health Blogs

On all our blogs, your comments and observations are welcomed.

• Make Your Own Self-Harm Tracker
• Box Breathing Can Help You Deal with Symptoms of Verbal Abuse
• Pain Destroys My Ability to Think
• Surviving Mental Health Stigma Is a Literal Act of Survival
• How to Reduce Holiday Shopping Anxiety
• Knowing the Difference Between Anxiety and Fear
• Prioritizing Eating Disorder Recovery During Life Transitions
• Tips for Keeping a Self-Harm Diary
• I Haven't Heard Schizoaffective Voices in Over 4 Months
• Dealing with Survivor Burnout
• Surviving the Holidays with Postpartum Depression
• Fear of Bipolar Symptoms Coming Back
• Does Relatability Decrease Mental Health Stigma?
• Self-Harm Reduction Strategies to Begin Healing
• I Use the Verbal Abuse I Suffered to Better My Relationships

Feel free to share your thoughts and comments at the bottom of any blog post. And visit the mental health blogs homepage for the latest posts.

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From the HealthyPlace YouTube Channel

Wouldn't it be great to have a safe space to talk about the negative mental impacts of the holidays? Why can't we do that anywhere? Find out how not talking about the low parts of the holidays can affect you. Watch.

Subscribe to the HealthyPlace YouTube channel

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Most Popular HealthyPlace Articles Shared by Facebook Fans

Here are the top 3 mental health articles HealthyPlace Facebook fans are recommending you read:

1. The Holidays Negatively Impact My Mental Health
2. Learn to Spot Cognitive Distortions in Eating Disorder Recovery
3. Should You Bother Taking a Vacation When You Are Depressed?

If you haven't already, I hope you'll like us on Facebook too. There are a lot of wonderful, supportive people there.

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Positive, Inspirational Quote

“There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.” ~ John Green

Read more positive, inspirational quotes for people with depression.

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That's it for now. If you know of anyone who can benefit from this newsletter or the HealthyPlace.com site, I hope you'll pass this onto them. Please share the newsletter on any social network you belong to. For updates throughout the week, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, subscribe to our YouTube channel, or follow us on Instagram.

Thank you,
Deborah

Community Partner Team
HealthyPlace.com - America's Mental Health Channel
"When you're at HealthyPlace.com, you're never alone."
http://www.healthyplace.com