Why We Feel Upset For Long Periods of Time

So what happens when you are upset? If you were to describe it as vividly as you can in a visual sense, what you would see?

For me, when I feel down, it is as if my whole world is filled up with a thick layer of smog. I can’t see anything clearly, everything is grayish, and nothing seems to matter as much as the smog I am in.

The smog is full of negative emotions, full of stress, disappointments, frustrations, confusion, sadness and anger.

Now, what do you usually do to get out of that smog of negative emotions? Is it even possible to get out of it right away? The answer is obviously yes; yes you can get out of it right away.

Before I go on talking about stuffs on how to get out of it quickly, I think it is best to learn why some people feel upset for a long time and why some people feel upset for a few minutes and they move on.

What are the differences?

So what is the difference between a person who sulks and a person who moves on?

Well, before we look at the differences we must have knowledge of each person’s traits and habits that contribute to their attitude in an upsetting situation. So let’s compare and contrast between Person A and Person B.

Let’s make person A the “sulker” and person B the person who moves on.

Person A characteristics:

• I often let other people and external situations define who I am as a person

• I usually rely heavily on particular things in the world to make me happy

• I don’t have a strong sense of reality and self-image (low confidence/esteem)
  

• I generally don’t like myself, and I deny that fact at the same time
  

• I live in denial, I don’t admit I have problems, and I don’t usually admit that I make mistakes
  

• I see people in a hierarchical sense, meaning that I will feel better if I am higher/better than others

• I let small incidents define the general pattern of my life (ex. If I do bad on a test, it must mean I will do bad later on and that I am dumb)

• I think a lot about the past, which makes me think more about the future because I am scared and I want be to sure what is going to happen; scared of the unknown

• I do things to please others and to promote my social image

• I deny

Person B characteristics:

• I have a strong sense of self, I know who I am and who I am not, I don’t act any more or less than what my identity holds

• I believe that my happiness is based on how I see the world and not what the world can give me

• I like myself and I accept mistakes as natural occurrences for improvement

• I have a strong sense of reality; therefore my philosophy of life is generally consistent

• I do things mostly out of sincerity, and I am myself sincerely to others

• I try to stay in the present, because I understand that the present is where life can only exist

• I am aligned with how life turns out; I am almost as one with life. No resistance is produced when something bad happens, because I am one with it and I don’t mind

• I accept

The last two points of each person is what I think the most important trait that they have. They are complete juxtapositions of each other, creating a strong contrast of end results depending which trait you are defined with.

So what makes you upset longer?

The key to elongating an upsetting situation is to deny it even being part of your problem. It is having complete resistance, as if you are trying to mentally push off the problem itself away from your mind as far as possible.

But by doing so, you create the friction of unhappiness and extra negativity. Because you are basically staying there in one place, combating against the problematic thought, when you could just easily stop the fight and move on.

But you can’t, because sometimes when you consider stop fighting against your problems in your mind, you feel reluctant because you think once you stop denying, the problem will get to you more, somehow.

You feel that If you stop pushing it back, it’ll just keep going deeper and deeper into your body and thoughts and cause even further damage to your well-being. In other words, in a twisted way, you might feel that you will “lose” to your thoughts.

That is the ultimate illusion you can be under if you have a problematic thought in your mind that likes play tug-of-war with you. Constantly pulling and pushing back and forth between you and the negative thought.

But while you are suffering from a “love/hate” relationship between your negative thoughts, have you ever just asked yourself…:”So what else is there in this moment?” or “what is the next step for me?”

Why is there denial?

So what is the real reason for denying a certain situation? Well, it might be because sometimes the situation is just too much for you to handle mentally, and that you don’t have the confidence you’ll make it through the reality.

Naturally, denial is a form of self-protective mechanism, but it makes you live in a lie that ultimately causes more damage than the original problem. You are more likely to be in denial of things if you have low confidence/self-esteem.

And low confidence/esteem is the major reason why denial is present, causing the upsetting emotions to elongate in any situations.

Person A’s low self-confidence/esteem

If you refer back to Person A’s traits again, you’ll notice that there is a common pattern going on in there.

The pattern is:

• Low self confidence and esteem is usually the main issue that causes them to dwell on matters for a long period of time.

Because when you don’t believe in yourself and don’t like yourself enough, you would start to operate in life only to try to either protect or promote your self-image/belief.

• When you promote your self-image, you might talk/do things in a way that you know that other people will like. Or you might even lie or exaggerate about your history or personality to make other people like you, so ultimately you would like yourself.

• When you protect your self-image, guess what happens? you deny. You would likely to deny your mistakes as your own, therefore you will blame others. You will also likely to deny problems as your own, therefore you try to fight and resist them within your mind.

However, having to either promote and protect, you are also in the risk of fact that your self-image is incredibly inconsistent, that it will change dramatically if something contradicts your “false” self image.

Therefore, your happiness and identity is strictly dependent on the outside events/people.

You’d lose complete control over your feelings, because your emotions are not your sincere emotions anymore, instead they are the emotions of your “falsely created identity”, therefore when that identity is threatened, the only thing that will react is of it’s “false” emotions.

Therefore, Person A with low confidence/esteem suffers from denial of problems/reality because they are ultimately afraid to acknowledge who they truly are (in which they believe is not worthy).

In summary, they fear things will get worse and that they will feel worse, therefore they protect and deny.

To sum it all up, you get upset longer because you deny/resist it, you deny it because you don’t want to admit that it is part of your life/identity, you don’t want to admit because you are afraid it will make you feel bad about yourself, you are afraid about feeling bad about yourself because…you already do feel bad about yourself inside.

So…what is next?

The illusion of further damage

Before you start to try to get out of your upsetting mentality right away, you need to have the awareness on the topic of being upset.

• Realize that your problematic and upsetting thoughts in your head isn’t going to do more damage than it already has. There is no point staying at one place to fight against it, because the only result is it fighting back.

You know deep down inside that you have a problem in your life and that you either deal with it or you accept it for what it is.

• Whenever you feel unhappy about something, try to avoid feeling even worse by just admitting to yourself that “I am unhappy, and that is all, nothing more”

• Try to accept the thoughts and situations, because once you do that, you open up a new road where you’d move down to more options.

• Like I said before, give your life a hug

You’d open up the door to a bigger world full of other things that you could focus on.

• Bear in mind though, that I’m not suggesting moving away from your problems, because that is the same as resisting your problems which creates more negativity.

• I am suggesting moving on from your problems, it means you have already finished the stage of immersing in your problems, and you’ve moved on.

Therefore, the simple answer to shortening your upsetting episodes/situations, is simply…accept them.

Do not try to protect yourself and fight your thoughts, you will be more protected and happier when you accept them as your mistakes and your problems.

Life itself is a lesson, if you always skip the classes, how would you ever learn to be happy? 

Don’t fight, simply because there isn’t anything for you to fight against.

Note: on the next painfully long post, I will be talking about some methods that could help you move on faster from problems in your life. Thank you for reading!

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