 On episode 228 of The Anxious Truth, we're talking about demanding specific emotional states at specific times and why that really never works. Hello everybody, welcome back to The Anxious Truth. This is podcast episode number 228 recording in October of 2022. I am Drew Lincellotta, creator and host of The Anxious Truth. This is the podcast that covers all things anxiety, anxiety disorders and anxiety recovery. If you are a new listener to the podcast or have just stumbled onto the YouTube channel, welcome. I hope you find the content here helpful, useful in some way. If you are a returning viewer or listener, welcome back. Thank you for your continued support. Today's topic on the podcast is demanding specific emotions or emotional states at specific times. This is a bit of a follow-up from a podcast that I did with Joshua Fletcher. I was on his podcast, The Panic Pod. If you go to theanxiastruth.com slash 228, I will link that episode in my show notes where Josh and I talked about fearing emotions. And there is an element of fearing emotions in this topic for sure. But this is a bit of the flip side as opposed to trying to run from emotions, which again is a little bit in here, but trying to achieve specific emotional states at specific times because you just sort of think you're supposed to be able to for various reasons. I'm going to go through those reasons before we get into the episode. Just a quick reminder that The Anxious Truth is more than just this podcast episode. If you go to my website at theanxiastruth.com, you will find three books that I have written on anxiety and anxiety recovery that are being read by tens of thousands of people around the world. You should check those out. You will find all the other podcast episodes, 227 other episodes as of this recording. You will find all of the links to my social media. You'll find the free anxiety recovery 101 video webinar training thing that I did on my YouTube channel. That's linked on the homepage of my website and Joanna Hardis and I. Joanna is an anxiety and OCD specialist in Ohio. We do a webinar every month in the middle of the month about distress tolerance and how to get better at that and practice that because a big part of recovery. So all of those things are on my website at theanxiastruth.com. Go check them all out. And if you are enjoying my work and I am helping you in some way and you'd like to find a way to support it and help keep it free of sponsors and advertisers, you can go to theanxiastruth.com slash support and find all the ways you can do that. Again, never required, always appreciated and however way you support this work, whether it's just showing up on YouTube, listening to the podcast, writing a review or hitting a thumbs up. I appreciate you guys. Thank you so much. So let's get into demanding specific emotions or emotional states and specific conditions. This is a thing. It's a thing for a lot of people actually. And I think it is a thing almost all through the recovery process. And to be honest with you, in my opinion, I think this goes beyond anxiety and recovery. I think a lot of people struggle with this that do not necessarily have an anxiety disorder. So what am I talking about here? I'm talking about the idea that you should be able to conjure specific emotions or emotional states on demand given the context that you are in. And I'll give you a few examples here. You are at the playground with your kids watching them play and you think that you should automatically be able to experience extreme feelings of joy or like a state of contentment or joy or Nirvana because you are watching your children play in the sunshine at the playground. You are whatever you're having dinner with your partner, your life partner, your romantic partner and you think that you should be feeling extreme feelings of attachment and love and soul maintenance or, you know, in that moment because that's what you're supposed to do. The other thing would be, you may have a memory of a loved one or a friend that we have lost who has passed on and you feel that when you have that memory, you should go into some specific emotional state because you had that memory and you want to achieve a specific emotional state. So those are three examples of what that might look like. And here's a bit of bad news. It doesn't work that way. Like if it worked that way, life might be a little bit easier for us in general as humans universally, but it just sort of doesn't work that way. And just as a personal observation here, one thing that I find kind of fascinating is that we can almost create sadness when we want it. There are sad songs, there are poems, there are sad movies. We can intentionally go and watch those things, watch those movies. If you're a dude and you don't know Brian's song, you're going to have to watch Brian's song and just get the tissues. It's a really sad story. There's a zillion movies out there that will make you cry. There are songs that will make you cry. We can almost conjure up sadness on demand, but it's really difficult to conjure up happiness on demand. So we seem to have the ability to go directly into what we would think were negative emotions when we want to, to a certain extent. We don't get to control our emotional state completely. It seems easier though to go toward the negative emotions than it is to go toward the air quotes positive emotions. Now that's just a personal observation that I want to throw in here while it popped into my head because I believe that to be true. I could probably get sad if I work at it. It's really hard to get happy if I work at it because as crazy as it sounds, the harder I work at being happy, the less likely I'm going to be happy in that moment. So there's a few things going on here that I want to address. The first one in the context of anxiety and anxiety recovery is that sometimes we are trying to achieve a specific emotional state because we are trying desperately to replace anxiety with something more desirable or less painful, if you will, less disastrous. So if you're walking around worried because you're anxious all the time, you can't figure out why you're completely focused on your bodily sensations. You're completely focused on your thoughts. You're caught up in a cycle of thinking and ruminating and it, and it feels bad because that thing, those things do feel bad. That's not a nice state to be in. Because we think that we can simply replace anxiety with something else. And unfortunately that doesn't really work. So one of the more common reasons why people will try to conjure up specific emotions or emotional states, especially in the context of anxiety disorders and recovery, is to try to replace a state of being anxious, afraid, vulnerable or uncertain with a positive state. And, you know, we even have lexicon in our language about that sort of thing and we joke about it. I have to go to your happy place. I have to go to my happy place now. We hear that all the time and there's a reason why we hear it all the time because people really want to be able to go to their happy place. But unfortunately, remember that you are dealing in an anxious state. You're dealing with the part of your brain that is designed to keep you alive. There is no part of your brain that's designed to keep you happy. There is no part that's designed to keep you content or joyful. Your brain is there to operate you and to keep you safe and keep you intact. It's not there to specifically give you the emotions that you want on demand. Now it's understandable that if you are in an anxious state and that's distressing to you, you might try to go to your happy place. I'm sure that you have probably been told, think positive thoughts, put out positive vibes. You have to vibrate, you know, positive energy into the universe so it comes back to you. Like a lot of people will probably try to tell you that you need to become more positive. But it's really difficult to just be positive. That doesn't really work that way. And if you've been trying and you're frustrated, it's okay. It doesn't mean that you're broken. There's nothing wrong with you. It just doesn't work that way. Like we really have a very difficult time doing that. So remember that if you're trying to replace an anxious state with a happy state or a joyful state or a calm state, you're going to fail most of not all of the time. That anxious state is hardwired in and it's there for a reason, even though right now it's there in error, but that reason is still valid. The reason why your brain is wired that way is still valid. We need that. Whereas we don't necessarily need to be able to conjure up feelings of nirvana on demand. So it's one of the most common reasons why people try to conjure specific emotions is to try to replace anxiety, the thing they fear, with something that they will not fear. But again, I just, I can't say this enough. It just doesn't work that way. So you can stop doing that because you're probably making yourself really frustrated and you might be thinking that something is really wrong because even though everybody tells you to embrace happiness and be positive, you can't seem to do it, it's okay. You're never going to be able to do that. Now, I don't mean to say that you're just going to be anxious for the rest of your life, but I did a podcast episode on this about finding happiness again. If you go to my website at the anxioustruth.com and just search for the word happiness, you'll find that one where I talked about the fact that when you form that new relationship with anxiety and you don't fear it anymore, and then as a happy side effect, it begins to fade and take up less space. Well, now there's room in your life for happiness to appear, but it's going to appear organically. You can't just decide that it needs to be there today to knock out the anxiety. So if you've been trying to do that, you can stop trying to do that, give yourself a break. It's not going to work. Let's just stay focused on what will work, which is building that new relationship with anxiety and making some room for those positive emotions to show up organically. So now let's move on to the next reason why people try to demand or conjure up specific emotions or emotional states in specific context. And that is because they think that they are supposed to replace negative emotions, air quotes, negative emotions with positive emotions like that has to be standard operating procedure. If I feel sadness or I feel anger or I feel loss or grief or resentment, then I need to be able to replace that with something happy right away. So I need to replace the negative emotion with a positive emotion. Isn't that what I'm supposed to do, right? So one of the cornerstones upon which acceptance and commitment therapy is based, and I'm a huge fan of that, is the idea that we have swung so far to an extreme, at least in the West, where we pathologize negative emotions. And we actually think that we're supposed to immediately fix it when we feel sad or we feel low or we have a bad day or we're angry or we're disappointed that somehow or other that's not correct because it's not pleasant. So therefore, we will pathologize it and find a way to repair and fix that, which is patently absurd when you think about it that way. Like human beings have the capability to experience a very wide range of emotions for a reason. And many, many people would argue, I would be one of them, that life is going to throw so many different things at you that the idea that you will never ever be anxious or never ever be mad or never be sad or never have a bad day or a low mood would seem crazy. That would be a huge burden to place on yourself to think that somehow or other, you should never feel those things, you are going to feel those things. That's just the way life is, and I would argue that feeling all of our emotions is healthy and it's a way to help us cope with the whole world and all of life and know that we can. Right, so there are lessons in capability there and confidence there and being able to move through all emotional states. Now, why do people try to replace negative emotions with positive emotions by default? Well, I think there's two branches here. For us in the community surrounding the podcast, the most common reason is that you're afraid of negative emotions. I cannot tell you the number of times that people roll into my Facebook group and want to know I've been sad for two days, now I'm convinced I'm depressed. Am I depressed? Does that mean I'm depressed? Am I getting depressed? So people fear negative emotions because they think they will lead to some additional mental illness or pathology or horrible plight that they will never be able to get out of. Or they feel that they cannot handle negative emotions, right? So you can't handle anxiety. It'll be too much. Well, I can't handle sadness. I can't handle anger. It would be too much. So that's the most common reason why people try to instantly replace negative emotions with positive emotions, which doesn't really work. And the second reason why people will automatically try to replace negative emotions with positive emotions is because somehow or other they are caught up in this whole pop culture idea that we could just choose happiness, radiate positivity, vibrate in a positive frequency, attract positivity and happiness. Now, those are great things to aspire to. We all want to be happy. There's nothing wrong with that. And I'm not saying that you're supposed to wallow in your negative emotions forever or instantly be consumed by anger and go around breaking things and punching people. However, the assertion that it is somehow a form of evolution, enlightenment or elevation to be able to somehow erase all of the human programming that creates a negative emotional states and just instantaneously choose positivity is absurd. That is absurd. And I'll be frankly honest with you, a little mini rant for a minute. People who are insistent that that's the way life should be and you should be able to do that also wind up developing in many cases, many cases not all, but in many cases when you look at those people, they also develop the really nasty habit of calling everybody else toxic or narcissists. Everybody is gaslighting them. So people who have decided I need to just choose happiness, choose gratitude, vibrate positively and just pretend that they can wipe away all negative emotions when confronted with the reality that there is negativity and there are negative emotional states will often resort to like punching out in that situation. I'm not gonna navigate that. I'm just gonna cut all of y'all out of my life cause y'all are toxic. Sound familiar? All right, that was a little off topic and a little bit of a rant but it is a little bit germane here. Like be careful about getting caught up in that. Again, I'm not telling you to join the church of negativity, but the idea that you should be following that sort of advice that says just be happy all the time you can choose to be that way is a little bit out there. And for people who are struggling with their emotional states, like people in our community who are afraid of them who are constantly in tune with them and who have the bad habit right now of judging them and trying to find meaning in every emotion that thought you have because you're afraid of that, the idea that you should be able to control your emotions and just be happy on demand can really send you down a bad path. So just be careful of that. The third thing I wanna talk about today in terms of demanding specific emotions at specific times is that this often happens because anxious people get caught up in the habit of trying to analyze their emotional state and find meaning in them and draw conclusions from them, right? So I might have a crappy day today where I'm just in a bad mood and I'm grumpy and I don't talk to me. That can happen like I'm a human being that can happen. But to me, the bad mood exists on its own. I mean, I guess if I was having a bad mood for seven days in a row, I'd probably wanna look at my life and say, okay, what's eating at me? That's fine, that's a healthy way to do that. But if I get in a bad mood or I feel sad or I'm angry for some reason, I'm not looking for what that means in terms of what will the outcome of this be. See the difference there? And anxious people will often try to find a meaning in their emotional state, analyze it because they're trying to predict a future state or future occurrences based on how they feel now. And that's a problem. And again, in the beginning of the podcast, they gave you a couple of examples. This appears most often in my community, at least, in the context of parenting and romantic relationships, sometimes in the context of loss and grief. So for example, like I said, I don't feel joyful watching my kids play. Something must be wrong with me. Like here I am in the sunshine and watching my kids play or it's my daughter's third birthday party and her cousins are here and her friends and they're playing pentatonic donkey and they're having a great time. How come I don't feel joy? I can't feel what I'm supposed to feel here. Now, don't get me wrong. It's okay to want to enjoy that experience. Everybody wants to enjoy that experience. I get that. And if you're in an anxious state, you may be having a really hard time enjoying that experience. So I understand that. I get where this comes from. But it's okay to say, I'm not enjoying this and I really wish I was. I miss enjoying these things. I'm out to dinner with my partner. I love this person, but I'm struggling so much. I can't seem to enjoy it. Okay, that's fair. Talk about that. Express that frustration, get it out. It's okay to vent about that sort of stuff. You just don't have to take it to the next level, which is then this must mean that something is wrong with me. Is this what anhedonia is? Does this mean I am depressed? Could I possibly be bipolar? I've heard people start to worry about things like borderline personality disorder because they couldn't feel nirvana when they were looking at their kids at the dinner table. And an anxious mind will start to ruminate and draw all kinds of crazy conclusions like, does this mean I have borderline personality disorder? I'm so anxious, all I can worry about right now is that my heart feels like it's bursting out of my chest. Am I a narcissist? Because I can't be focused on my kids. You see how anxiety and fear will drive you to draw erroneous and irrational conclusions and sometimes to make predictions of the future based on an analysis of your current emotional state. And that's a trap, that happens all the time in our community and that's one of the reasons why people will then when they get into that state will instantly try to conjure up the feeling that they think they're supposed to be having at that time. Then they can't and then they get even more worked up like something is seriously wrong here. Something is wrong with me because I cannot feel the emotion that I think I'm supposed to feel. And I can be disappointed at that and I can be a little bit sad because I would really like to enjoy this, that's okay. But now I'm gonna take it to the next level and I'm gonna self-diagnose myself as being bipolar or having borderline personality disorder or being a narcissist or all kinds of stuff. Does this mean that I'm going to be depressed, clinically depressed and beyond help for the rest of my days? No, it doesn't mean any of those. It means that right now the state that you're in is the state that you are in and you will do your best to navigate through that. I'll come back to a thing I said a few minutes ago which is as things begin to get better for you and anxiety and fear take up less space in your life, you'll see like those other feelings will come back organically. But just remember that the state that you're in right now is causing you to have a really distorted view of what that's supposed to look like. I'm a hundred percent, I'm a thousand percent recovered. Ain't nobody more recovered than me. I say that all the time. And I don't automatically feel like joy and love and bursting with love every time I look at my kids. Like I love them, clearly. And sometimes I feel that, but not all the time. So be careful about thinking that just because you're sort of suffering in a dark place now that the opposite of that is going to be just sunshine and rainbows all the time. That's not the way life works. Say it all the time. The opposite of anxious is neutral, content, right? So be careful about this particular trap. You may be trying to conjure up specific emotional states on demand because you're worried about what your current emotional state either means about you now or is predicting for your future, right? That's just a nasty habit that anxiety will cause you to get into. Just remain aware of it. And when you find yourself in a situation where you are trying your damnedest to feel happy or feel something because you think you're supposed to because if you don't, something is seriously wrong. Just remember, this is probably why you're doing that. It's okay. You're going to be okay. I promise. So that's kind of what I have to say at about the 20 minute mark on the idea of demanding specific emotions. It's a little bit the flip side of being afraid to feel emotions. That is the flip side of that. But as you can see, there's also some fear woven in that too. So none of this stuff is ever necessarily black and white. It's very nuanced. There's subtleties. All the things are sort of woven into each other. And sometimes it feels like a big old ball of yarn that you're never going to untangle. I get that. But you will, I promise. It sort of untangles itself as you go. So that is episode 228. I think we are done with this particular topic. I'm sure that it will come up again at some point and we'll talk about this stuff again. But for now, you know, it's over because music, that as always is After Glow by Ben Drake. You can find Ben in his music and his website, BenDrakeMusic.com. It's a song you hear at the beginning and end of every one of these podcast episodes. Most of them anyway. Thank you, Ben, for letting me use it. What am I going to ask you to do? If you are listening to this podcast on Apple Podcast or Spotify or some platform that lets you rate a review, leave a five star rating if you dig it. Maybe take a minute or two and write a review because it helps other people find the podcast. If you're watching or listening on YouTube, hit the like button, subscribe to my channel, hit the notification bell, leave a comment. You know this stuff. Like we have to appease the YouTube algorithm gods. So I'm doing my best, but sometimes they don't like me. And I think that is it. I hope this has been a useful discussion for you. We will return to what I'm sure from time to time in social media and maybe here on the podcast or the morning newsletter. And I'm happy to listen to any questions or comments that you have about this, especially if you're in my Facebook group, pop on in and let me know. Pop on over to YouTube and ask your question, whatever. And we'll talk about it. So that's episode 228. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I will be back next week with another podcast episode. Don't know what I'm going to talk about, but as you know, I will be here and remember this is the way. You're living fast. No looking back or sweating on the past. You know, you'll never get another chance. So you're going to.