Trying to Stop Emotions is Slowing Down Your Anxiety Recovery | Ep. 403

Emotions are part of the human experience, and yet, many of us spend a significant amount of time trying to avoid or control them. In this article, I’ll explain why trying to stop your strong emotions can actually slow down your recovery and how embracing these emotions instead can lead to a more fulfilled and resilient life.

The Trap of Avoiding Strong Emotions

In a recent Q&A on Instagram, I was struck by how many people asked questions like, “How can I not feel this emotion?” or “How can I stop feeling guilty?” These are skilled questions, but they reveal a common misunderstanding: the idea that emotions, especially uncomfortable ones, are something to be avoided or eliminated. The truth is, trying to stop your strong emotions is a major barrier to recovery.

Here’s why: when you avoid emotions like guilt, shame, sadness, or anxiety, you miss the opportunity to build mastery over them. Emotions aren’t problems that need solving; they are experiences to navigate. Avoiding them only reinforces the fear and discomfort associated with them, creating a cycle of avoidance and further distress.

Build Mastery Over Your Emotions

Let’s talk about mastery. Mastery doesn’t mean never feeling uncomfortable emotions again—it means learning how to navigate them skillfully. Emotions like anxiety, guilt, or sadness are normal human experiences. Instead of trying to prevent them, your goal should be to build resilience in the face of these emotions.

For example, if you experience guilt and avoid it by performing compulsions, you’re not actually getting better at handling guilt—you’re just avoiding it. The same goes for anxiety or any other emotion. Instead, commit to having the emotion and practicing feeling it without letting it dictate your actions.

Common Misconceptions About Emotions

Here are some examples of common questions I received and how we can shift our thinking around them:

1. “How can I not fear depersonalization?”
   • The answer isn’t to eliminate fear. Instead, we need to embrace the fear and bring it along with us. The more you face these emotions without trying to avoid them, the more mastery you’ll build.
2. “How do I stop being sad after a bad date?”
   • What’s wrong with being sad? Sadness is a natural response to disappointment. Instead of avoiding sadness, practice self-compassion. Learn to feel the sadness without falling into depression.
3. “How do I stop solving intrusive thoughts without feeling guilty?”
   • Let guilt be there. Don’t try to solve or rationalize it—just observe it. By doing this, you stop reinforcing the belief that guilt is something to be avoided.

Practice Accepting Emotions

Avoiding emotions doesn’t work because it prevents you from developing the skills to handle them in the future. Instead of running from emotions, commit to practicing feeling them. This means allowing emotions to rise and fall, like bubbles in a soda can. Over time, the intensity will fade.

When you stop trying to control emotions, you’ll notice that they become less overwhelming. You build resilience by observing them and continuing with your day, rather than trying to fix or escape them.

How to Manage Strong Emotions in Public

A common concern I hear is, “How can I do exposures in public without feeling like a loser?” The answer: let yourself feel like a loser. Yes, the thought might be judgmental and untrue, but the feeling itself isn’t dangerous. Practice feeling embarrassed or humiliated without acting on those emotions.

Humiliation, embarrassment, and anxiety won’t harm you. The more you practice facing them head-on, the more you’ll learn that they don’t control your life.

Emotions Are Not Facts

One of the key skills in managing emotions is recognizing that they are not facts. Just because you feel sad or anxious doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. Emotions don’t always reflect reality, but avoiding them prevents you from learning this.

Instead of letting emotions dictate your behavior, commit to acting based on your values, not your feelings. Your emotions will come and go, but your commitment to your recovery, your family, or your career should stay steady.

Put in the Reps: Practice Makes Progress

Just like building strength in the gym, building emotional resilience takes practice. You won’t master it overnight, but with consistent effort, you’ll start to notice a difference. Keep putting in the reps—allow yourself to feel every emotion without judgment, and trust that self-compassion will catch you when you fall.

Final Thoughts: Embrace the Hard Emotions

Strong emotions are part of life, and learning to embrace them will strengthen your recovery. Instead of avoiding emotions like guilt, shame, or anxiety, let them be part of your experience. The more you practice this, the more resilient you’ll become.

Remember, it’s a beautiful day to do hard things, and that includes feeling all of your emotions. Keep practicing, keep building your emotional muscles, and soon enough, you’ll notice that these emotions no longer slow you down.

Have a wonderful day, and I’ll see you next week!

This article is based on the podcast episode “Trying to Stop Your Strong Emotions Is Slowing Down Your Recovery” by Kimberley Quinlan.

Transcript

Trying to stop your strong emotions is slowing down your recovery. Today I want to teach you exactly what we can do differently so that you’re not getting in the way of your own recovery. 

My name is Kimberley Quinlan. I’m an anxiety specialist. I help people all over the world manage their anxiety, not in the quick-fix cue, you get rid of your anxiety way. I tend to work more on long-term sustainable shifts in mindset, changes in behaviors, and engaging in the most effective skills and strategies so you can get back to your big, wonderful life that you’ve been dreaming about. 

Let’s get going. Today we’re going to talk about why you need to stop trying to stop your strong emotions. Let’s go.

The reason that this recently came up is that I was doing a Q&A on Instagram, and this is where I just say, “Ask me anything. Let me know how I can help.” I was blown away in one day by how many people asked a question in a way that basically alluded to the facts of how can I stop having this strong emotion, or how can I get rid of it? How can I make it not be there? This blew me away because this is a massive problem. This is getting in the way of their recovery. The questions were skilled questions; it’s just that there was a core component, an idea, and an understanding that we needed to get to. Let me give you a couple of examples of these questions, and then I’m actually going to go into them. 

One of the questions was how to not fear depersonalization. Another one was, do you have a good tip for not being sad about a recent date that I had that went terribly? Another question was, how do I not solve an intrusive thought without feeling guilt? Another question was, do you have any tips for doing exposure in public without feeling like a complete loser? 

Now, these are skilled, excellent questions. They’re all talking about how can I get better, how can I get good strategies. But the problem is they’re all basically saying, “What can I do about this big emotion that I have? How can I do X without the emotion?” And this is where I was like, “Oh, time out. We have to address this because if you are trying to do something so that you don’t have an emotion, we are really getting in the way.” 

Let me explain. If there is a specific emotion that is very triggering for you and you’re doing everything you can not to feel that feeling, the problem with that mechanism is that you’re basically not building mastery around this very normal human emotion. If you have a normal emotion like guilt, shame, sadness, anger, absolute disgust, anxiety, or panic, these are what we could consider uncomfortable emotions. If they’re uncomfortable for you and you’re doing your best not to feel them, you’re not building any mastery over those normal human emotions. We all have them. There’s nothing wrong with them. They’re not even particularly a problem. They’re not here for us to “solve.” What they’re here for us to do is to learn how to navigate them. If you are trying to do any behavior to avoid them, instead of navigating them, you’re going the wrong way. 

Now, I get it. Sometimes when we have these strong emotions, the emotion propels us to doing behaviors we don’t want to do or that impact our recovery. Let’s say if you have a lot of guilt, you might then find yourself doing more compulsions, and you’re trying not to do compulsions, right? Or let’s say you have a feeling like anxiety and you tend to catastrophize when you’re having anxiety. You’re trying to avoid the anxiety so you don’t catastrophize. Again, they’re skilled questions for that reason except, again, you’re trying to bypass having an emotion so that you don’t act a certain way, so you don’t engage in behaviors a certain way. And that’s always going to fail you. 

What we want to do is be able to commit to having every single one of the emotions. We are going to commit to having them. We’re going to be disciplined in saying, yes, we want to have them all, and then we are going to practice having them over and over, and we’re going to put in a ton of reps to be able to manage them well. We are not going to avoid the emotion so that we don’t have this other uncomfortable sensation or we don’t do these behaviors. It’s not going to work. Maybe you don’t do the behaviors, but you’ve built no mastery over the emotion that you’re going to continue to have for the rest of your life. 

Let’s talk about some examples of this. The first question was, how can I not fear depersonalization or this other sensation, whatever the sensation? It could be, how could I not fear having a panic attack? How could I not fear uncertainty? How could I not fear going into a test or an interview? 

Again, the answer here is you have the fear and you take the fear with you. You have the anxiety, and you move into the action. You move into the event or the circumstance that you have to do, and you allow the anxiety to be there. With each time, you will do some action skillfully and some not. And then your job is to go, “Okay, I just went and had this depersonalization. What went well and what didn’t go well? How willing was I to have the fear? How willing was I to have the depersonalization? What compulsions did I do?” and scale back from there. But if you are starting to do this practice while committing to not having the emotion, again, it’s not going to work. 

Here is another example: a good tip for not being sad about a recent date. My immediate response was, “What’s wrong with being sad?” Sad sounds like the appropriate emotion if you’ve had a date that didn’t go well or you didn’t do as well at something that you thought, or you’re struggling or somebody’s suffering that you love. Feeling sad is the appropriate emotion. We actually want to work on being gentle with ourselves while we feel sad.

Now, some people say, “No, but when I feel sad, I often slip into depression.” I’ll say, “Okay, makes complete sense.” But again, if you’re avoiding feeling your feelings so that you don’t feel depressed, you’re going to have this avoidance to a normal feeling. Our real work is, how can we navigate sadness effectively without falling into depression? Or even if you do, again, not beating yourself up, not being guilty, not shaming yourself, but instead going, “Okay, where can I direct myself into this chain reaction so that when I have sadness, I don’t move into depression?” 

Again, let me be really clear here. The goal isn’t to avoid emotion; it’s to practice having the emotion without hyperresponding in effective ways. To be honest, regulating yourself during an emotion is a piece of this, and I’ll be talking more about this in future episodes. This is where we really want to catch, again, our commitment to stopping normal human emotions. This is again, where I said, there’s nothing wrong with being sad. Go be sad. Do what you do when you feel sad. But then be careful and aware of how that might start to turn into rumination and then depression or hopelessness and so forth. That’s where you need to put the work in, not avoiding sadness. 

The next question was how not to solve an intrusive thought without feeling guilt. I said to them, the goal to not solve an intrusive thought is so spectacular. It’s so spectacular. But if you’re trying not to solve something and you’re trying to practice being uncertain, but you’re not letting yourself feel the feelings about it, well, again, you’re going to be doing some kind of like thought-stopping or emotion-stopping, which is again going to create a whole mental and cognitive mess in your mind because we know the more we try to stop something, the more it comes. 

I would once again say, let the guilt be there and do nothing about it. Don’t try and solve the guilt. Don’t try and fix the guilt. Don’t try and rationalize the guilt. Don’t try and do anything except being an observer to it, noticing it. Maybe even laughing and being like, “Huh, okay, guilt’s back.” It’s showing up. Maybe it’s appropriate, maybe it’s not. We’re not here to solve that either. We’re just going to let it be there. But come back to the present moment. Be engaged in the thing that we want to be engaging in. Be very laser-focused at really tending with curiosity and openness to this exact present moment. Not about the past, not about the future, just this present moment. 

We’re going to let those strong emotions burn off in our bodies. Sort of like I always think of a soda can, or if you’ve poured soda into a can or a glass, you would see the bubbles go up and up and up and up and up, and over several hours, eventually, the bubbles run out. There’s no more bubbles to come up. All of a sudden, what was carbonated water is now pretty still water. In that case, it’s burnt off. We want to do that with emotions too. We don’t want to try and push the emotions down. If you get a glass of carbonated water and you’re pushing the bubbles up, they’re going to find ways to show up around the hand and the fingers and all the things and emotions that are the same. 

We don’t want to try and stop them. We don’t want to try and get rid of them. There’s nothing wrong with you for having them, whether they’re appropriate or not. Whether they’re rational or irrational, it doesn’t matter. What we want to do is be able to observe them rising and falling, be able to know, “Oh, okay, guilt’s here. Shame’s here. Anxiety’s here. Depression’s here. Sadness is here,” and allow it to be there warmly and compassionately and respectfully and tenderly, while you reengage with what is effective and what is value-based for you, what lines up with your values and beliefs, what matters to you, what pushes the needle forward. 

I’m constantly thinking about, what pushes the needle forward for me? Is it trying to stop this emotion? Or is it me doing this thing that is beneficial to me and my well-being or my family or my marriage or my recovery? What pushes the needle forward? It’s definitely not avoiding a feeling because, again, then you’re afraid of a feeling and you’ve built no mastery. 

My goal in life is to be able to have any emotion known to humanity and ride them wisely and kindly. I want there to be no emotion that I’m not willing to have. That’s my goal for my mental health. Where in my mental health am I trying to avoid or remove discomfort? Where am I trying to not feel and let myself feel it? Again, being very clear. That doesn’t mean we perseverate on all the negativity. It doesn’t mean we ruminate about negative, hopeless, helpless topics. We just observe them. 

The next question was tips for doing exposure in public without feeling like a complete loser. Here I would say, let yourself feel that way. We know it’s not true. Complete loser is pretty judgmental, so that’s not true. But the feeling—the feeling of humiliation, the feeling of embarrassment—not a problem. Let’s practice being embarrassed. Let’s practice being humiliated. Again, they won’t hurt you. They won’t kill you. They won’t impact you. Just because you feel these feelings doesn’t make them true, doesn’t make them facts. What we want to be able to do again is navigate these emotions and really regulate this emotion from the wisest place, from the most wise, rational, really logical, and kind perspective. 

I have some friends that I know, and this is another way I think about it, is I think about like, they tend to navigate. They stay really steady when things are really hard. I have watched them. I’ve studied them, and I’m like, “What are they doing that I’m not doing? How are they able to do really hard things, conquer really difficult things, get through really hard things without having a lot of emotional turmoil or without burning out?” 

I used to tend to be like, “I’m doing well, I’m doing well, crash. I’m doing well, I’m doing well, crash.” That’s okay. It’s okay if you’re doing that. Again, I’m gentle. That may be my process, but why are they seeming to be able to maintain themselves? These are people I know very well, and I’ve seen them, their internal process. A lot of the time is they don’t take their emotions as fact. They don’t let their emotions stop them from doing what they’re doing. They do what they said they were going to do. They do what’s on their schedule. They don’t do what their emotions are telling them to do, and they definitely don’t run away from emotions. They don’t run away from doing things the way they plan because of an emotion. 

With this, the reason that this is so important for your recovery is let’s say you have an exposure and response prevention plan, or you have a homework plan for your mental health, or you have a workout plan, or you have a nutritional plan or a business plan or a career plan, whatever it might be, you have it and you’re committed to sticking with it and you’re committed to feeling whatever feeling shows up radically. You’re radically saying, “I’m committing to not avoiding any of these emotions. I want to get skilled at having them all.” That is the true sign of strength. 

Strength is not having these emotions. It’s not avoiding them. It’s not living a life where you don’t have them because every human being has them. Every human being has sadness and guilt and shame and anxiety and anger and all the feelings. These are humans. Then what we want to do is how have we built out a system where we say, and we do what we say we’re going to do, and we don’t run away from emotions, that we commit to kindness every step of the way. 

That’s the piece I want you to remember here. Trying to stop your strong emotions is slowing down your recovery. What we want to do, even if you have an anxiety disorder and we’re targeting willingly having anxiety, and we’re always saying, “Bring it on, it’s a beautiful day to do hard things,” that’s not just anxiety; that’s all the emotions. It’s a beautiful day to have anxiety. It’s a beautiful day to have sadness. It’s a beautiful day to have guilt. It’s a beautiful day to experience shame. It’s a beautiful day to have anger. 

None of them are off-limits. None of them make you bad. None of them are wrong. We really want to practice, put in the reps of having these emotions just like you would at the gym or just like you would if you were learning to skateboard. My son is learning to skateboard. The coach said, “You’re going to fall a gazillion times during this one before you get it right. You better just be ready and keep your elbow guards on.” That’s true for us as well. Be prepared to have the feelings. But your metaphorical elbow guard is self-compassion. They will catch you when you fall, and that’s all I have to say about that. I hope that you are committed to this. Practice it, put in the reps. I promise you, you will not be sorry. 

Have a wonderful day, and again, today is a beautiful day to do hard things. I’ll see you next week.