We may know how to take care of ourselves physically, but when it comes to doing our emotional housekeeping we’re mostly in the dark. And because we don’t know how to work with our emotions, we end up ignoring them, when they are crucial functions that ultimately serve to guide us. Here are a few steps to keeping up with your #feels, because they won’t kill you – but running from ‘em will.
1. Choose to consciously feel emotions that erupt spontaneously and interrupt your life. If you find yourself being regularly triggered by some small annoyance, sit down and let yourself consciously bring up the feeling, and experience it in its entirety. You gotta feel it to heal it – but more on that later.
2. Identify the root of the “shifting” problems. A “shifting problem” is basically when you have the same problem over and over again, just with different people, or in different circumstances. You may call this, you know, a pattern.
3. Take your passive aggressiveness seriously. When people are “snarky,” even if it’s low-key, it’s a major sign of repressed insecurity or unhealed social hangups, and if left unaddressed, it can actually spiral far out of your conscious control (you end up the bully that doesn’t realize they’re a bully – you lose friends and don’t know why and so on).
4. Pay a lot of attention to what angers you. Anger is recognition. To put it in the simplest way possible: we cannot become infuriated over what we don’t either identify with or know/fear to be true. That said: what angers you is a signal that there is a space in which you need to offer a new way of thinking, or some reconciliation – love, basically.
5. Pay attention to your daily moods, and don’t get intimidated if you realize there’s a negative pattern emerging. Usually people ignore their consistent unhappiness because it almost feels too scary to bear – you know something needs to change, yet you don’t know how or what, so ignoring it seems like the best option.
6. Practice placing emotions on the “backburner,” and see if they’re still there when you return to them. If you have a feeling that you’re in an inappropriate place or time to deal with, tell it that you’re not ignoring it, you’re just going to revisit it completely tonight when you have the chance.
7. Make sure you’re not just bored. Too often, we simply don’t have enough to occupy our minds, or we entertain drama or anxiety as a means of entertaining ourselves, giving ourselves something noble to do and “overcome.” (If we continually induce anxiety, not having it suddenly feels like an accomplishment.) A lot of the time, getting over something is just finding something more important to focus on.
8. Give yourself room to feel for no reason. You need to allow for passing, random feelings, and down days that have no cause, and a general flux that doesn’t necessary have a cause. The idea is just not to judge emotions the second you begin to experience them. If they have something to tell you – they will persist.
9. Change the way you think by learning about why you think the way you do. You’ll realize how much of how you see the world is a construct if only you take the time to trace back when you started thinking and feeling the way you do. In this, you’ll realize you’re also capable of constructing it on your own. 
