Episode 43: Compound Misery

Life was meant to be 50/50, meaning we are supposed to experience negative emotion 50% of the time. But when we believe that we shouldn’t be feeling negative emotion, we add on additional negative emotion, compounding our misery and increasing our pain.

And just like with compound interest allows our money to grow exponentially, adding more negative emotion to our principal negative emotion makes our suffering increase exponentially.

The answer to this is to get really good at feeling our negative emotion when it arises, instead of trying to resist it or push it away or think it shouldn’t be there. The more we can feel and allow our negative emotions the more we can avoid compounding our misery and the more access we have to the thoughts that created it in the first place.

In this episode of the podcast, I’ll show you how resisting our negative emotion only compounds our misery and what we can do to alleviate this escalation of our own suffering.

What is Compound Misery?

Compound misery is a concept I created to describe what happens when we add layers of negative emotion and suffering onto our human experience, because we believe we shouldn’t be feeling negative emotion.

Life was meant to be 50/50, meaning we are supposed to experience negative emotion 50% of the time. But over time we have been conditioned to believe that we should be happy all of the time, that we shouldn’t be having any negative emotion. The problem with this is that when we believe that we shouldn’t be feeling negative emotion, we add on additional negative emotion to our experience, compounding our misery and increasing our pain.

And just like with compound interest allows our money to grow exponentially, adding more negative emotion to our principal negative emotion makes our suffering increase exponentially.

We have a thought which causes a negative emotion…we don’t like how this feels and in an effort to resist this negative emotion we actually add more negative emotions on top of the original emotion, compounding our misery and pain

For example, maybe we feel irritated and then we add some judgement about the fact that we got irritated. This doesn’t remove the irritation, it just compounds our misery. Maybe we feel defeated and then we feel frustrated that we are creating the feeling of defeated, and beat ourselves up about it, compounding the negative emotion even further. Or perhaps nwe feel nervous and then we feel ashamed that we always get nervous and then we judge ourselves on top of all that.

We compound our misery by burying the original, primary emotion under a layer (or layers) of other negative emotion. Not only does this increase our suffering, it also makes it very hard to access the thought that created the principal negative emotion for us.

An Example of Compound Misery

In the episode, I share an experience I had with the emotion of jealousy. As you can see from the chart below, when I am unwilling to feel jealous or think I shouldn’t feel jealous, then I ended up compounding my misery.  See the table below.

And, not only have I compounded the amount of negative emotion I am feelings, notice that it is almost impossible to recognize the thought that the primary negative emotion of jealousy. When we layer negative emotion after negative emotion on top of the principal negative emotion, we are hiding the thought from ourselves.

If we are unwilling to feel the emotion, we make the thought unavailable to look at, hiding it under a pile of other negative emotions.

The Solution

As simple as it sounds, the solution is to feel our feelings and to accept our negative emotions when they arise. One of the best things you can do to interrupt your brain and prevent it from compounding your misery is to just be willing to feel your primary, principal negative emotion. As soon as you feel it.

You won’t know the thought. You will just notice a tightening. You might notice your heart rate increase or heat in your body or coldness. You’ll feel a withdrawing. In that moment, just stop and allow the emotion. Don’t judge it. Don’t try to make it go away. Don’t tell yourself you shouldn’t be feeling this way. Stop and allow it, breathe into it. Find it in your body and name it.

Once you do that, you can gently ask yourself, “What thought am I thinking that is creating this feeling?” And then you can decide whether or not you want to keep thinking it by asking these questions:

• Is it true?
• Is it actually dangerous?
• Is it a problem?
• What would I think if I didn’t think this was a problem?

Why We Resist the Principal Negative Emotion & Tools to Help Us Allow It

Our instinct is to avoid the principal negative emotion that arises. There are some very good reasons for this.

1. Negative Emotion Is Uncomfortable - Negative emotions create vibrations and sensations in our body that are uncomfortable, that we instinctively want to avoid. Remember, the brain prefers pleasure.

But the truth is that we never truly avoid negative emotion. By resisting it, we only add to it.

So, the first tool is to recognize that you can’t avoid negative emotion. You can’t change the 50/50. We can only compound the amount we feel by trying to avoid negative emotion.

2. We Think Having Negative Emotion Means We’re Bad - Another reason we avoid negative emotion is because we think negative means bad. We believe there are good emotions and there are bad emotions and if you feel “bad emotions” then maybe you are a bad person.

Our emotions are just information. They are information on what we are thinking. They aren’t a verdict on what kind of person we are.

So the next tool is to stop juding yourself or equating your emotion with your worthiness or goodness. The more you can see your emotion as information—a chemical reaction that happens when you think a thought—the more you can have access to evaluate and choose your thoughts on purpose.

Ask yourself, “What if this doesn’t mean anything about me and the person I am? What if this is just information about what is going on in my brain?”

3. We Are Afraid of Being Overwhelmed by Our Emotions – We sometimes think if we feel our feelings we will get lost in that emotion, that well never recover from the emotion. But again, what is really drowning us, is not the primary emotion. It is all the negative emotions we have piled on top of it.

Your body was designed to process emotions, meaning they can’t hurt you. They can’t do permanent damage or destroy you or incapacitate you. The more you allow your negative emotions to be there, the more you will see that all emotions have a shelf life.

The key here is to trust yourself. Trust your body. Trust that no emotion, even the worst emotions, cannot harm you. You were built to be able to feel and process the full spectrum of human emotion and it is one of the privileges of human life…to feel all emotions, both negative and positive.

The better you can get at allowing negative emotion when it shows up in your body, the more you will avoid compounding your misery. Instead of layering on more and more negative emotion, which only compounds your pain, just allow that principal, primary emotion to be there.

Feel it. Label it. And then notice the thought creating it.

More importantly, the better you can get at allowing the 50% negative emotion that is supposed to be there, the better chance you have of learning from the information those emotions can give you, so that you can get better and better at choosing thoughts on purpose.

Mentioned on the podcast:

• Sign up for a free coaching call 

• The Book of Mormon

• Brooke Castillo

• Story of Ishmael’s death, 1 Nephi 16:34-36

   “And it came to pass that the daughters of Ishmael did mourn exceedingly, because of the loss of their father, and because of their afflictions in the wilderness; and they did murmur against my father, because he had brought them out of the land of Jerusalem, saying: Our father is dead; yea, and we have wandered much in the wilderness, and we have suffered much affliction, hunger, thirst, and fatigue; and after all these sufferings we must perish in the wilderness with hunger.  And thus they did murmur against my father, and also against me; and they were desirous to return again to Jerusalem.”

                                 

To read or download a written transcript of the entire episode, simply click the link below.