Episode 43: Compound Misery

Hello podcast universe! Welcome to Episode 43 of the 100% Awesome Podcast. I'm April Price and I'm so happy that you're out there listening to this podcast. It is such a gorgeous day here in Phoenix. We're kind of in the glory days here where I live. And for those of you in colder climates yours is coming. It's 50/50 and they're coming.

It is so fun to have so many of you signing up for coaching. I have to say that I love coaching and I love seeing what can happen for all of us, as we start to unpack our thoughts and see what those thoughts are actually creating for us in our actions and our results. It's like watching a mini miracle every time one of my clients sees that they're thinking, and therefore their suffering, is optional.

And that doesn't mean that awareness is always easy, but it is the key to feeling better and getting more peace, and joy in any area of your life. And I encourage each of you to sign up, even if you're scared, even if you think it won't work for you. Just try me. You can sign up at aprilpricecoaching.com and I think I still have one or two spots available next week, so sign up for some coaching.

01:52
Today on the podcast we are going to talk about a concept that I have kind of made up, as I've been working with my clients recently. I call it "compound misery." Now to be fair, I did not make up the concept of pain, and misery, or even piling onto our pain.

That was invented with the fall, and I think it has gotten even worse as human history has gone on. Because we are miserable but, we kind of think we shouldn't be. We've eliminated so much misery from our lives that we think like we shouldn't be having all this negative emotion and this belief only adds to our misery.

So compound misery is what I like to call it when we add layers of suffering on to our misery and pain. It's when we notice the 50% negative parts of our life and then we compound that 50% negative part by adding additional negative emotion on top of that.

And just like with compound interest that allows our money to grow exponentially as we add to the principal, we are very good at growing our misery exponentially as we add additional negative emotions on to the primary or principal negative emotion that we've had. So I see this all the time with my clients.They have a thought, which causes a negative emotion, and then they compound and grow the pain of that negative emotion by adding additional negative emotion on top of it.

So, maybe we feel irritated, and then we add some judgment of ourselves, or maybe some blame, for someone else that's creating the irritation, or that we think is creating the irritation and then we compound the misery. Maybe we feel defeated, and then we feel irritated that we're creating this feeling of defeat in our lives, which only compounds our misery. Maybe we feel nervous, and then we're frustrated that we always get so nervous, and then we judge ourselves for getting nervous. We compound our misery by burying the original primary emotion under layers of other negative emotions.

04:00
So I want to give you an example of this that happened to me just last Saturday and let me just say that as you already know, I am a human. I often choose thoughts that create negative emotion for me, because I'm having a human experience and sometimes as you're going to see in this example, this may seem ridiculous. But I offer my own stories as examples so that you can see that no matter how much awareness we have there is always work to do on our human brains.

And so that you can see how the application of these principles can make such a difference in your own life. I share these stories at great risk of you thinking I'm a mess. Like I am a mess! It's not a problem!

So on Saturday as we were driving home from the gym David told me about a decision that he was struggling with. He's trying to figure out when to schedule the high adventure for the young men in our church congregation. And so he was running through the different options with me of when they could schedule this event and trying to get my advice on what he should do. So as we're talking this out, I notice an emotion, a negative emotion arrives inside my body.

And as crazy as it may sound to you the emotion was jealousy. So he's talking about all the weeks that he's going to spend with the youth in our congregation this summer. He's talking about this week with the young women, and this week the young men, and this week for our pioneer trek, and I notice that I am feeling jealous.

Now, obviously I am feeling jealous because I am thinking a thought, but I don't want to get there yet. Today we're talking about compound misery and I want to show you what happened to me in this moment. So I'm feeling jealous, and almost immediately after I noticed this tight, hot, negative, emotion of jealousy inside me, I became irritated with myself for feeling jealous. I did not want to feel jealous. I did not want to be the kind of Bishop's wife that gets jealous of the time he spends serving the Lord. That is not who I want to be.

And so I got irritated with myself, and I added a side of shame as well, because I was ashamed that I was jealous of teenage boys that get to spend time with my husband. Who gets jealous of teenage boys? I was ashamed that I was being petty and petulant, and then right after the shame there was anger. Hello anger! Welcome to the party!

Suddenly, I have this anger, this rage, kind of coursing through me because David brought this subject up. I'm thinking like "Solve your own problems! "Make your own decisions! Why are you even asking me if you already know what you want the answer to be? Why are you even bringing this up and ruining my Saturday and my after-gym high?"

07:00
So I want to just clarify what happened here. First I felt jealous, then I felt irritated, then I felt ashamed, and then I felt angry. And in this moment in the car David can sense that something has gone wrong. Over the years he's become finely tuned to my expression of emotion. First I get kind of snappy, then I get cold and quiet and then I get into blaming and yelling. It's like pretty awesome. So he says to me "Why are you upset?"

And literally in that moment I don't even know. I don't even know why I'm upset, because the feeling of jealousy is buried so far under all of these other negative emotions that I can't even access the thought that created it. In that moment I'm sitting in a pile of compound misery and I can't even trace the thoughts that created it.

I'm just lost, in the sea of negative emotion, and in that moment I only know one thing: it's his fault. I'm spinning in this pool of negative emotion and I'm certain that he is to blame. The more I try to get my bearing, and trace the thoughts, and own my emotions, the more frustrated and angry I become. And two hours later I'm still fuming and he's like, "Why are you so mad at me?"

And I finally just admit it."I don't know!" I don't know. So, now I want to go back and kind of do an instant replay of what happened there. There's a flag on the play and we need to look at the tape and find out where I went out of bounds.

So, notice first how I compounded my misery, how when I felt the principal, primary emotion, I didn't want to feel it and then that made me layer on additional negative emotion. I felt jealous and I didn't want to feel that, so then I felt irritated. I didn't want to feel that so that I felt ashamed. I didn't want to feel that so that I felt angry instead. And then all of my actions came from anger. And the result was I was not having the relationship that I really want to have with David.

And all of it, everything that happened, I want to point out was created because I was trying to avoid the primary, negative, emotion in the sequence.

I didn't like feeling jealous and I didn't think I should feel jealous. And then I began to compound my suffering. Now for a moment, I want you to imagine that there in the car, when I first felt jealous, I want you to imagine what would've happened if I was just willing to feel jealous. If I just felt my jealous emotion, without thinking I shouldn't, without thinking this isn't what good bishops wives feel, without thinking this is ridiculous, or embarrassing, or childish, or a problem. If instead I just feel that emotion, let it be inside of me, not want to run away from it, or judge it, or avoid it, or react to it. Then, I would just be a woman feeling jealous, but instead of that, instead of being a woman who was feeling jealous, I was a woman feeling jealous, and irritated, and ashamed, and angry, and then much later regretful

10:28
That is compounded misery. By being unwilling to feel my feelings I have compounded my misery. I have exponentially increased my suffering, and probably David's as well though I'm not going to get into his bottle. If he wants to be frustrated with me that's totally fine.

Now, let's just look at this one step further, because if I decide to feel my emotion, and breathe into it, and allow it to be there, not tell myself that it's wrong, but just allow jealousy. Then something else becomes available to me, because we know that every one of our emotions is created by our thoughts. But do you remember when David asked me why I was upset and I didn't know? I really didn't know why I was so upset. I didn't really know why a conversation about dates for the high adventure would make me upset.

But the truth is, it is always our thoughts creating that upset feeling. However, the problem was that when I layered negative emotion after negative emotion on top of the primary, negative emotion then I could no longer access or see the thought that created jealous in the first place. I have buried that thought. I didn't want to be jealous, and so then I was ashamed of the thought that created jealous, which made it so that I could no longer access it or see it.

If we are unwilling to feel our emotion, we make the thought that created it unavailable to us. When we hide from the primary emotion, we're hiding from the thought as well. Or rather we hide the thought from ourselves. We hide it under a pile of other negative emotions.

So imagine with me, that in that moment I just decided to feel jealous. I recognize that jealous is just one human emotion, and all human emotions are is information, my emotions are not a report card on how evolved I am, or how Christlike I am, or how like loving I am. My emotions are not an indictment of what kind of person I really am.

12:42
My emotions are simply information, they are information about what I am thinking and so if I want to access that information I have to be willing to feel the emotion in the first place.

So again, imagine I decide it's okay to feel jealous, I can just feel jealous, I allow it. When I allow it, it feels like burning in my chest, my hands are kind of tingly, and my chest then like hollows out in my chest and neck. This is jealous. It is a sensation. It's a vibration in my body caused by a thought, and if I breathe into that emotion, and feel it out trying to block it, or not feel it, or judge it, or push it away, or condemn myself for having it, then I can ask myself, "This is jealous. What are you thinking that made jealous?" Do you see? From a place of acceptance and allowance of my emotion, then I have immediate access to the thought, and the thought I was thinking was, he spending time with other people instead of us.

Now, here's the power of just allowing my primary, negative emotion. When I see the thought "He's spending time with other people instead of us," then I have the opportunity to keep thinking that thought if I want, or question the validity of the thought, decide whether or not it's serving me, and decide if it's what I want to keep thinking.

So in this case it would have looked like this. He's spending time with other people instead of us. Is that true? Yes, it's true.  But also it's not true, because I actually have a young man on that trip.  Our son Ethan will be on that trip with him. So he would be spending time with us.

Also I could ask myself is it actually threatening? My brain thinks this is very dangerous, he's spending time with other people, and not with us and I could ask myself, "Is that threatening?" No. My brain is lying about the threat. Nothing bad will happen if he spend some time with someone else instead of us. I can ask myself, is it a problem? Is it a problem that he's spending time with other people and not with us? No. It actually isn't, when I think about it. My brain is like HIGH ALERT! It's a problem! But the truth is I want him to spend time doing his calling, I want him actually to spend some time away, it means I'm not going to have to cook for a week and I can get a lot done.

So if I had found the thought he's spending time with other people and not with us, I would have been able to question it, and then I could have just let the jealousy go. It's totally fine. I could have recognized that that protective thought my brain was offering was not one I wanted to keep thinking, and then I could replace it with he's spending time with other people and it's totally fine. He's spending time with other people and it's perfect. He's spending time with other people and there is no danger here. And then the result do you see would have been completely different.

15:45
Now I can hear you. You're like, "April! Instant replay is one thing, but my life is happening in real time. People are saying stuff and they're doing stuff and I'm just reacting." And believe me I get it. I've been doing this work for some time and I still had the experience that I had on Saturday. But the more I have them, and the more than I look at them, the more than I back it up, and look at what happened.

The more awareness I bring to my life, and the better I get at interrupting my own model and my own brain and showing up the way I want. And, one of the best things you can do to interrupt your brain and get the result you want 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 won't know it created it, but you're just going to notice a tightening, you're going to notice your heart rate go up, you're going to notice heat or coldness. You'll notice that withdrawing, or a stiffening, or a change in your body. In that moment, stop and allow the emotion.  Breathe into it. Don't try to make it go away or judge it. Just feel it and name it. That is the first step. As soon as I felt my heart rate increase and my stomach start to burn I could have allowed it, breathed into it, and named it. "Hello jealousy, nice to see you. You are surprise, but, hello. Welcome."

And then if I don't get busy pushing it away, or layering a whole bunch of other negative emotions on it, compounding my misery, if I can just allow that emotion, and then I can get a good look at the thought that's creating it.

Now, admittedly sometimes the feeling is going to be so intense you won't be able to concentrate on the thought, but you don't need to. You can still avoid compounding your misery, by just being willing to feel the emotion and breathe into it. You can just be totally and completely present with the feeling, and know that any emotion is allowed. It's totally fine.

17:56
So I want to talk for just a minute about why we resist that primary, negative emotion and hopefully give you some things to think about that will really help you lean into these emotions and allow your negative emotion, rather than creating compound misery.

So number one, of course, one of the most obvious reasons that we resist negative emotion is that it doesn't feel good. Negative emotions create vibrations and sensations in our body that are uncomfortable and that we instinctively want to avoid.

Remember the brain prefers pleasure. I'm sure that will come as a shock, we like pleasure more than pain. So, it doesn't feel great and there's a part of our brain that thinks if we avoid that discomfort, like the discomfort of jealousy, our brain thinks if we avoid that discomfort by reacting to it or resisting it, choosing a different emotion, then that will be better in some way.

But the truth is that we never truly avoid the negative emotion. My jealousy was still there underneath all the irritation and shame, and anger, and regret. It was still there waiting to be felt. But instead of feeling that discomfort I have now added a whole lot more discomfort to my plate. It's like when we feel stressed and to avoid that feeling we eat something. But then we still feel stress, and now you feel disappointed, and discouraged that we eat of our vertical. We haven't actually alleviated the negative emotion.

Negative emotions are part of earth life. They need to be felt. So the first tool is to recognize you don't need to avoid the negative emotion. You can't change the 50/50 experience. We can only actually compound the amount of negative emotion we feel by trying to avoid that primary negative emotion.

Another reason, number two, that we avoid negative emotion is, because we think negative means bad. That there are somehow good emotions and there are bad emotions, and if you feel the bad emotions then maybe you're a bad person. Maybe you aren't evolved, or holy, or good, or righteous, or kind. I mean what kind of good person feels jealous of teenage boys? Maybe this means that you're wicked, and you're mean, and you're bad yourself.

So, I want to address this in a couple of different ways. First like I said, emotion is just information, information about what you are thinking. You are not your feelings. Feelings are just a clue to what you're thinking, and the fact that you have feelings, both negative and positive, means that you're a human having thoughts about your earth life experience.

20:39
Now of course our thoughts are choices that we make and you're like "But I only want to choose good thoughts. I only want to feel good things and then I'll be a good person." But remember you can't make a different choice, you can't make a good choice, when you don't know what the choice you made was in the first place. If you can't look at the thought you are choosing to think, you can't decide to choose something else. And so getting information is the first step to choosing something better.

So that starts with, "What am I feeling?What thought is creating that feeling?" And as you learn and grow, you get better and faster at making the choices that you want to make. But having the experience of your feelings to learn from and to glean information from is the whole point of earth life. It's the whole point of the fall—so that we can get information negative and positive. We didn't come to make the right choice every time, but to learn the difference between your choices, between good and bad, and then decide to choose the better part.

Our emotions are such an important part of that learning process. And yet we're constantly judging them before we can learn from them. We're judging ourselves and this doesn't give us the chance to learn, and grow, and become. Having negative emotions doesn't make you a bad person, it makes you human. The opposition, the contrast, is what is making all of your growth possible. And when we get good at feeling all of our feelings, then we can evaluate our thoughts and make different choices when we want to.

So just remember that tool, to stop judging yourself, or equating your emotions with your worthiness, or your goodness. The more that you can see your emotions as information, a chemical reaction that happens when you think of thought, the more you can have access to evaluate and choose other thoughts.

So ask yourself, "What if this doesn't mean anything about me and the person that I am? What if it's just information? How would I use it if it's just information about what's going on in my brain?" The very fact that you can observe your feelings and observe your thoughts, shows you that you are not your feeling, or your thoughts.

22:56
You are being outside of your feelings and thoughts, that gets to choose both of them, but you can only do that when you have the knowledge of what you are choosing. Your feelings are the mechanism of giving you that knowledge. They are the messenger. They are the information on which to base those choices.

Another reason that we want to avoid negative emotion, and I hear this all the time from my clients, is that we think if we feel our feelings and just go ahead and give in to feeling them, then we're gonna get lost in the emotion, that we're going to get overwhelmed by the emotion, and we're never going to recover from feeling that emotion. If we're sad, then there will be no way out and we'll be stuck in sad forever. But again, what is really drowning us, what is really keeping us overwhelmed and stuck is not the primary emotion, it's all the negative emotions we've piled on top of it.

If we go back to our example, if I had just felt jealous that would not have consumed me. But what consumed me and most of my Saturday was all this stuff after that: the irritation, the shame, anger, and the regret, all of that that came after.

What I want you to know is that your body was designed to process emotions, meaning emotions can't hurt you, they can't do permanent damage, they can't destroy you. The more you allow them just to be there, the more you will see that all emotions actually have a shelf-life. Left alone they run a course. If we're not resisting them, they kind of have a lifecycle. They intensify as we allow the emotion, then as we try to really feel it, and breathe into it, and get closer to it, they start to lessen. And then they'll intensify again, and we breathe into it, we name it, we describe it, and then they dissipate a bit. And there's like this 60 to 90 seconds where they kind of just cycle through almost like ocean waves, they build, they crest, and they dissipate. They build, they crest, and they dissipate.

Now sometimes, you're going to have a lot of cycles of that depending on how much emotion you're feeling. Like if you're sad you might cycle like that even days. But eventually the emotion runs its course. It's finished its shelf-life and it leaves. It's when we resist them that they stick around and get a stranglehold on us, and incapacitate us, and paralyze us.

Like I've told you before that one of my primary emotions is shame. When I resist it, it can stay around for days, and days, and days, I just get exhausted resisting all that shame. When I allow it, it processes through so quickly, so quickly. I can identify the thought and question them. And it just allows me to process through them, get through it, and go on to feeling something else.

25:35
Now this doesn't mean that you can be like, "Okay I'll feel it, when will it be over?" And you're like watching the clock for 60-90 seconds. Allowing it means, just letting it be there as long as it needs to be. You just ride the wave. It won't hurt you. You're just riding the wave of emotion as many times as your body, and your brain needs do it. We can just ride the top of that wave. Again, what drags us under, what takes us through the undertow, is the compound and emotion, not the primary emotion.

So I'll just give you one other little example. I have a daughter who feels anxiety pretty regularly. Probably as regularly as I feel shame, she's doing anxiety. Anyway, the other day I was talking to her and she was just saying how bad it has gotten, and how debilitating it can be sometimes, and how sometimes it just flares into a full on panic attack.

And so I talked to her. I could see that she was compounding her anxiety, which already felt bad, with judgment that she shouldn't be feeling it. She was like "There's no reason for it, my life is amazing. I have so much to be happy about and so I shouldn't be feeling so anxious." But that feeling of judgment was compounding her anxiety, then not only that she was compounding another emotion of fear on top of her anxiety, and when she started to realize she was anxious she'd be mad about it, just compounded it.

Then she would be scared that she wouldn't be able to control it, and she would have a panic attack, which only made her more scared, and more anxious, and it just grew, and grew. But it was never the original feeling of anxiety, which made it grow into this like unmanageable vortex. It was the not wanting to feel the primary emotion of anxiety. I told her the more she could just allow it when anxiety is there—not hate it, not be mad at it, not wish it would go away, not hate herself, not judge herself, not worry that it was going to escalate—just feel anxiety, then the less power it would have.

Anxiety, just like any other emotion has a shelf-life. And if you ride the wave, ride the anxiety, let it run, breathe into it, it will expire just like every other emotion as it's processed in your body. Your body knows what to do with emotion. You can just feel it and it won't hurt you or overwhelm you or drown you. It will just be there, available to be experienced as part of your earth life experience.

And the key here really is to trust yourself, to trust your body to trust that no emotion, even the worst emotions, can't 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 both positive and negative emotion.

28:20
Now before I sign off today I just want to give you one more example of compound misery that I think is just so instructive to each one of us. So like many of you, I've been studying the Book of Mormon this year, and when Nephi was describing his family's journey in the wilderness there is this amazing passage, which I think perfectly illustrates the powerful effect that compound misery can have on the results in our life.

So if you're unfamiliar with this part of the Book of Mormon, let me just give you a little background. There are two families that are traveling through the wilderness together: Lehi and his family and then their friends, Ishmael and his family. Well, as they're going through the wilderness Ishmael dies.

Now I want to read you what the passage says. It says: "It came to pass the daughters of Ishmael did morn 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. 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."

Now I want you to know I am not judging these daughters. Heaven knows I am an expert at compounding my own misery, but I do think it's instructive in that we can each learn from this experience.

So notice the compounding misery that's created, by layering on negative emotion. Now for these daughters the primary emotion was grief. They were sad. Their father had died and they were sad. It's totally understandable. But then what happens?  They have that primary emotion of grief and then they start to compound their misery by adding blame, and self-pity, and mistreatment, to their grief. And then on top of that they add regret for coming in the first place, and wistfulness, or yearning to return to the land of Jerusalem.

And what was sadness became sadness, and blame, and self-pity, and mistreatment, and regret, and wistful, and yearning. They have compounded the misery and the grief of losing their father, by rehearsing the past and worrying about the future, and then feeling all of these negative emotions on top of their grief.

30:47
And what I want you to see is that from this place, it is so easy to blame someone else. Just as I blamed David on Saturday for all the negative emotions I was feeling, these daughters blamed Lehi and Nephi for all of it. And I get it!  When we compound our misery we can't see the thought that we thought in the first place. We can't see the thought that we chose that created the negative emotion.

And actually in this case I think it's a negative emotion that they want to choose. They probably want to be sad their father died. They probably want to choose grief and feel grief. But notice how instead of just feeling it, and allowing sad, and choosing sad they then compound their pain with additional suffering that did not feel good. Self-pity, mistreatment, regret, yearning, none of that felt good. And what I want to point out is, it did not take away the sadness. It did not alleviate that primary emotion.  It just made the journey and the sadness that much harder. It compounded their misery, and what I want to say is that it is the same for each of us.

This life was designed to be 50/50. You are supposed to experience negative emotion 50% of the time, and we think we aren't. We think we aren't supposed to. We think we're supposed to be happy and positive and joyful, at least like 75-80% of the time.

32:15
But this isn't true. Opposition in all things is what the scriptures say. All things. 50/50. The better you can get at allowing negative emotion when it shows up in your life and in your body the more you will avoid compounding your misery. Instead of layering on more and more negative emotion, which only compounds your suffering, just allow the principal emotion to be there. Feel it. Label it. And then notice the thought that creates it.

And 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 that those emotions give you. And then choosing your thoughts on purpose. Which means the better you get at feeling negative emotion, the more learning, and experience, and growth, is available to you. And that my friends is 100% awesome!

I love you for listening and I'll see you next week!