How to be bothered less by difficult thoughts and feelings: Let yourself be bothered by them

One of the most common issues clients seek my help with is dealing with difficult thoughts and feelings. Some of the difficult thoughts they encounter are negative thoughts about themselves, negative thoughts about other people, negative thoughts about how other people feel about them along with negative thoughts about the future. The latter type of difficult thoughts involves worries that something bad will happen and/or that they will be unable to cope with an upcoming event or situation. Accompanying these difficult thoughts are difficult feelings such as sadness, anxiety, anger, frustration, guilt and embarrassment.

Not surprisingly, clients who experience these difficult thoughts and feelings typically are seeking strategies to decrease their negative effects. That is, they would like these difficult thoughts and feelings to bother them less. The advice I routinely give them is often viewed as counterintuitive at best and crazy at worst. This advice is that, in order to be less bothered by difficult thoughts and feelings, you should let yourself be bothered by them. In the following sections, I will discuss why this strategy of acceptance is effective in dealing with difficult thoughts and feelings.

The futility of trying not to accept difficult thoughts and feelings

The futility of trying not to accept difficult thoughts and feelings is summed up very well in the phrase, ‘That which you resist persists’.  Dr. Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap, described this exercise in futility as akin to struggling to get out of quicksand. Dr. Harris points out that such struggling only leads you to sink deeper into it. That is, when you use your ‘struggle switch’ as a way of dealing with these difficult thoughts and feelings they become more difficult to deal with.

Research on the phenomenon of thought suppression gives further credence to this notion. In a typical thought suppression experiment, participants are asked to not think about a white bear. Results show that this instruction leads participants to think about a white bear even more.

A similar phenomenon happens when difficult thoughts enter our minds. Trying not to think about them leads them to persist along with the accompanying difficult emotions. So if trying not to let difficult thoughts and feelings bother you makes them bother you more, what is a better alternative for dealing with these difficult thoughts and feelings? I will discuss this in the next section.

A better alternative: Accept difficult thoughts and feelings

A better alternative than trying not to let difficult thoughts and feelings bother you is to let them bother you by accepting them. Whereas struggling against such thoughts and feelings only makes them worse, accepting them keeps them at a manageable level.

Doing so not only allows you to continue engaging in meaningful activities in the areas of work/school, relationships, personal growth and leisure while you’re experiencing these difficult thoughts and feelings, acceptance also typically results in the difficult thoughts eventually leaving your mind and the difficult feelings decreasing in intensity.

In other words, if you turn off your struggle switch and resist the urge to resist, difficult thoughts and feelings tend to be less intense and temporary. In contrast, activating your struggle switch results in difficult thoughts and feelings being more intense and longer lasting. The latter scenario typically leads to these difficult thoughts and feelings having a significant negative effect on your mood and having a significant disruptive effect on your engagement in activities in the areas of work/school, relationships, personal growth and leisure.

Strategies to make it easier to accept difficult thoughts and feelings

You may validly point out that sometimes it is easier said than done to turn off your struggle switch and accept difficult thoughts and feelings. Such is the case when the thoughts are especially negative, worrisome or self-critical and when the accompanying difficult feelings are very intense, uncomfortable and at times even overwhelming.  How can you possibly not try to resist the experience of difficult thoughts and feelings at these times?

Fortunately, there are a number of strategies which you can use to reduce the intensity of your difficult thoughts and feelings to manageable levels which may still be bothersome and uncomfortable but not overwhelming. These including skills from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) such as thought records which help you change overly negative ‘hot thoughts’ to more accurate and less negative ‘balanced thoughts’. This change in thinking leads to a resulting reduction in the intensity of the difficult emotions accompanying the difficult thoughts to manageable levels.

Cognitive defusion, a technique from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) in which you detach yourself from the difficult thoughts you are experiencing, also makes it easier to accept these thoughts and the accompanying difficult feelings. For example, after making a mistake at work you might have the difficult thought, “I’m such a loser” enter your mind. Telling yourself “I’m having the thought ‘I’m such a loser’” would help you to realize that the thought is just a thought and not necessarily reality. In turn, using this cognitive defusion technique would make it easier to accept the difficult feelings accompanying this thought by lessening the intensity of these feelings.

Engaging in relaxed breathing is another technique which helps to make the experience of difficult thoughts and feelings manageable and therefore easier to accept. ‘Breathing into’ difficult emotions is an ACT technique which allows you to engage in ‘expansion’—making room for these emotions so that you can accept them rather than struggling against them.

Finally, taking action to address problems and stressors which are the source of your difficult thoughts and feelings also is often helpful in making it easier to accept these thoughts and feelings.

Getting help in learning how to accept difficult thoughts and feelings

The skills which you can use to make it easier to accept difficult thoughts and feelings are relatively straightforward and will get you positive results if you practice them. Having said that, learning these skills under the guidance of a therapist such as a psychologist is often helpful both in using the skills properly and with enough consistency until they become habits for maximum benefit.

In addition, if the difficult thoughts and feelings you are experiencing are very intense and stem from one or more traumatic events in your life, working with a professional therapist is not only recommended but essential to help you learn how to effectively turn off your struggle switch in these instances.

May you accept difficult thoughts and feelings so that they bother you less,

Dr. Pat