Latest / College Is Fine, Everything's Fine / #21 Microdose on Opposite Action: Learn How to Turn Down Emotions

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#21 Microdose on Opposite Action: Learn How to Turn Down Emotions · College Is Fine, Everything's Fine

We have a microdose episode, which we're bringing to you for two reasons. I would say. One is because sometimes you just need a quick hit. You don't need the whole shebang. And a lot of the skills we talk about don't need a full discussion. They're pretty easy to explain. And the other is, when we get really busy and we don't have time to do a full episode.What do you know, I'm just saying maybe those are correlated a little bit, but, but honestly, I do think that we appreciate microdose episodes for the, for the first reason more than anything else.and I think a second reason is Sarah and I talk ab a lot about skills and we don't have a lot of time in other episodes to kind of unpack what they are. And this skill is a fan favorite, wouldn't you say, Sarah?You know, it's one that I really love to talk to people about, but it's a son of a bitch to doI know it's so hard.Yeah.And should we tell them what it is? Sarahthey're probably just chomping at the bit to know the name of it. Go for it. D B T, queen.Okay. It's opposite action. Lemme tell you a little bit about what it is so essentially this skill comes from D B T. We've talked about that. Quick note, if you're a new listener, that's dialectical behavior therapy.It's a skills-based treatment for a lot of emotional disorders. And opposite action is this. Skill used to change unwanted emotions. I said it's a fan favorite cuz most people come to see me are feeling an emotion a lot of the time that they don't wanna feel. So this is the skill for you if you're one of those people.And I think all of us probably already use this skill a lot every day. We're not even fully aware of it. Um, and we know it works. And in short terms, it's essentially doing the opposite of what your emotion is telling you to do. I'll add that this really ties to something we've talked about a lot, which is so many people come to me and they're like, I wanna feel better, so let me just try tell you how about I think about things, and then I'll feel better. And I'm working with them a lot to say, Hey, you know what?Sometimes you change your actions first, and the feeling comes after it that they're related. You can change thoughts and feel better, and you can change actions and have calmer or happier thoughts. So I think this ties into a lot of the things we've been saying. episodes. What we just wanted to really hone in on this particular topic as a skill in and of itself.We didn't wanna like muddle it up with other discussions. I think to start it, this skill works best in three circumstances. So I'm gonna review that so the first is, Sometimes, even though we know our emotion doesn't make sense, like we're like, for example, I'm terrified to fly, for example, and we kind of check the facts.The probability or likelihood if something happened to you when you're flying is really low, but knowing something's dangerous doesn't really. Change the fact that we're really fearful and kind of panicky about it. So that's a good time to use opposite action. That we've kind of checked the facts of the situation, but our anxiety's still like really intense.That would be a good time to use the skill. Um, can you think of a second time, Sarah, maybe another opportunity that it would be important to use this skill? A lot of times the emotion is justified. And by the way we say justified, it means, like you said, does it fit the facts right? It's not to say no one understands why you're feeling that way. Sometimes you might feel sad about something and it doesn't necessarily fit the facts. You hadn't had a loss, but you're just having a down day. It's not to say, oh, that's crazy. It's, it's this idea that. Does the emotion fit? Sort of the reason we have it as a human, right? So we have fear to keep us safe.We have sadness to help us sort of withdraw and regroup. And so if our emotions don't fit those kind of strict facts, oftentimes, you know, it's helpful to create an opposite action to go with it. And then other times, our motions really. do fit the facts. You know, we, we might have a reason to feel a little guilty about something, but I always think that there's some emotions or there's like a hair trigger pull.Guilt is one of them. Shame is one of them where it's like, okay, maybe you might have done something. Maybe you should have called a friend and you didn't, and they, it hurt their feelings and you feel bad. Right? But if you're just like, Going on and lamenting with guilt and just like you can't get past it and you've apologized and you're apologizing again, and you're apologizing again.Sometimes the emotion itself might be justified at sort of a smaller level, but it feels big and it's higher in intensity than what you want. That's another time to use opposite action.great. And the last time, an example that we wanna use opposite action is when the emotions justified, but it's getting in the way of us reaching a goal. And my favorite example, and buckle up Sarah, this is a good example. , um, has to do with a client who, if you could imagine this, did not want to see me.WhatI know, and so she begrudgingly came and when I went to the waiting area, she had a pillowcase on her lap, but there was no pillow in it. There was some sort of object. She comes into my office and she whips out a five foot Albanian python. So if people aren't familiar, that's a yellow and white snake with red eyes.you hold at like one of the crazy circus fairs.Yeah, yeah. Now guys, I live in Connecticut. I don't really encounter this species on a regular basis. I did not think I had a fear of snakes, but little did I know that this snake hadn't gone to the bathroom in two months and was really agitated by that. Um, so the whole session, essentially in the beginning, it was just like hissing at me.And,Mm-hmm.basically I found out that I was taller than where the snake was and that it was threatened by me. So we had to sit on the.You are a toll drink of wateryeah. . So we had to sit on the floor now. Okay. My urge in this moment was to like, run the hell out of the office and avoid, like, cancel the session. Was that really my goal?My goal was like, oh my gosh, this client came who hates me. They made it here and I'm a therapist. I wanna like conduct this session. So this is a good example where my emotions justified, it's reasonable. Um, now it wasn't poisonous, but it could. Asphyxiated me. I think that's how they killed people or animals,Um, and it makes sense to wanna leave the situation, but it wasn't consistent with what my goals were. So I think like, keep those in mind when, when we've checked the facts, but we still kind of feel the emotion. Sarah mentioned when the emotion is not justified or the intensity doesn't fit the facts of the situation, or maybe your emotion's justified, but it's gonna acting on, it's gonna get in the way of what your goals are.In the situation, we're gonna practice the skill of opposite action. I'm laughing because I have a few thoughts. One is that snake was the biggest middle finger this girl could have senta hundred percentpound middle finger. I feel like I have to use opposite action a lot when I'm driving, if somebody cuts me off or if I feel like I'm in traffic. And it's very understandable to be frustrated by these things , if someone in a powerful position is just a jerk to you for no reason, you have every right to feel pissed off, but ultimately to scream at that person or to like try to run somebody off the road, these are not helpful. And so those are times where I'm fine that I'm using opposite action a lot. Okay. We've got seven steps for opposite action. We're gonna walk you through them and hopefully you can start practicing the skill. So this is the first step. Seems so simple, but it's really important.It's like, Identify what is the emotion you're experiencing and to name it. And the reason why this is important, Sarah alluded to this, is that every emotion has a different action urge. Our emotions telling us like naturally to do something. And I think maybe we'll go through three examples of like the most common ones.And Sarah already said it, anxiety, our urge is to avoid a situation. What's another one?So yeah, there's anxiety. So my sort of bread and butter is anxiety and ooc D work, right? So I'm constantly talking to people about, you've got anxiety, typically it's sort of a false alarm, and your approach is to escape or avoid it, and that's actually keeping your anxiety around. So how are we. Slowly with, with some help and support and some skills approaching situations at early dangerous.I think sadness is another one we mentioned where when people are sad, when they've had a loss in some way, that and, and Liz, you can sort of add on. any other ways that sadness might feel really justified, but definitely when you've had a loss in some way, loss of an experienced loss of a dream, loss of a relationship loss to other things like death where there's grief that it makes sense for the action urge to go with that, which is to withdraw sort of go inward and to be a bit self-protective, to not feel like you have to go out.I always say if someone is like a imagine. , you know, a cave dwelling mother back in the day who might have lost a child and she's going out and she's sad and she's marose and she's sad cuz she's missing this baby. And she goes out and she like gathers plants and berries and things like that in a, in that state, like the likelihood that she's able to do that and focus.No, no, she's gonna be completely distraught. She's likely to pick up something that could be maybe poisonous or not helpful. So like that's adaptive to when you've had a loss. Just kind of go inward, allow yourself some time and some space.So, you know, our emotions make sense a lot of the time, but sometimes they stay around too long or they become ineffective or they don't make sense. We're feeling them. We're not really sure why. So we're gonna identify the emotion, whether it's sadness, guilt, anxiety, shame. Fear, et cetera. The second step in which we talked about earlier is we're gonna check the facts.Does it make sense to kind of feel this emotion and the situation? And then what are we gonna do next, Sarah?We're gonna think about and identify the action urges that go with it. You know, I have a lot of people, I, I said this before, guilt is one that comes up a lot where someone has done nothing wrong. You know, guilt is there as a little ding, ding, ding. Do you have any cricket on her shoulder to say, Hey, maybe you could.Um, you need to do a little bit better, right? But sometimes people have done honestly nothing wrong whatsoever, but the guilt is extreme. Sometimes even with boundary setting, we might see this or they've set a really appropriate boundary. The person doesn't love it, and they feel guilty. It's like, no, you've done nothing wrong.There's no re, you know, that emotion is. Sort of, again, sort of trigger happy, but the action urge that goes with it is to apologize or to take something back. So it's really important to say, okay, I'm feeling guilty and I can notice that I wanna keep apologizing or taking back that boundary. I'm feeling anxious.I notice that I wanna take back, or I, I wanna avoid or not go to that party or not call that person. . Another thing I also think about is sometimes and why it's important to identify the emotion is so many people feel something like anger, but underneath it is an emotion that's a bit bigger, and I, that's a probably a whole nother microdose episode, but it's why when you think about the action urges sometimes that helps you identify what's really goingGoing on. Yep. Good. , and then you wanna ask yourself is expressing this emotion or acting on these urges effective? And, you know, we did another microdose episode on effectiveness. Really what this is about is thinking more about the long term, about your values, your goals in the situation, that it might make sense to feel that emotion.It might be justified, but it's not consistent with what your goals are in that situation to act on.  If all these things come together and you realize that your action urge isn't helpful or the emotion isn't justified, or the intensity is maybe a little bit too big, so now you wanna think, okay, what's literally flip the coin?What are some opposite actions that I could do in anxiety? This is essentially all the work I'm doing all the time. Instead of escape or avoid it's approach and all the different ways you can approach, right? Think about if you're escaping or avoiding. A situation that you're really afraid of, okay?How do you start to approach and do those more If it's guilt and you realize, you know, I don't really need to feel guilty. How can you act proud of your choices?And an important point, the next step is to do it a hundred percent. So you know, example of this is I work with a lot of people as social anxiety and college students and I'll get them to go to a party, let's say, and they'll come back and they're like, opposite action sucks. I was anxious the whole entire time.So then I kind of walk them through what they did at the party and then they tell me they're essentially in the corner on their phone and they didn't talk to anyone. They avoided eye contact and then they thought the whole time about how everyone thinks they're weird. That's not doing opposite action all the way.So when we think about it, it's not, Sarah and I are talking a lot about your behavior, but when you're practicing opposite action, you're doing it with your thoughts, you're doing it with your behavior, your facial expressions, your body posture. You're tackling your emotion kind of on all those components and you're doing it a hundred percent.So if it, the skill's not working, I always say people check in a little bit. Were you doing something with your body to communicate that you should still be anxious even though you put yourself in the situ. . Sometimes people will say, Well, I wanna have integrity, right? I don't wanna act a certain way. And we're saying like, look, the whole point is this is where you would be acting and how you'd be acting if you could take that emotion away. If I had a magic wand and I just took away your anxiety, I took away your sadness, your sort of guilt, your shame.If I had a magic wand and I took that away and it wasn't your emotion and guiding your behavior, how would you. And in that moment, if you felt proud, you as a person felt proud, how would you show proudness? So it's not about putting on a show, it's not about being cocky instead of being shy. It's about saying, how would I act if this emotion wasn't driving my behavior?And I think that sometimes helps people realize we're not, we're not asking you to like fake it till you make it so much. We're saying the emotion can't drive the behavior that you're, you're engaging in.That's a goodAnd then, The other thing is keep doing it cuz you're right, sometimes, even if you do act all the way, and remember at the beginning of this, I said it's a son of a bitch to practice.Even if you do it all the way, you're, there's not a guarantee. It, it most likely will make you feel the emotion that you're trying to act. It's the quickest way to make that. It's not always a guarantee. Sometimes it takes some practice. It takes a few trials before it feels. really genuine. So for instance, if someone is, oh, I mean, classic and anxiety, we talk about exposure or approaching things that you fear.Well we, we have a little role riding the wave, right? You sort of ride the wave of anxiety. You stick it out, you stick it out, and at the end you probably feel braver than if you'd never done it in the first place. Cuz you've seen success, but you do experience anxiety while you're trying to do that, right?You're acting brave by staying, but you're still feeling internally. Some of those emotions cuz it's almost like habit. And the likelihood that you're gonna feel bravery by doing that is higher than if you hadn't tried it in the begin, in the beginning. And the more you practice it, the less the anxiety is sort of churn underneath you.It's just a, it sort of starts a new habit in a way. So repetition is not a bad thing. And repeating skills doesn't mean they don't.All right, so I mean, a lot of times, listen, we ask you to give it a try. Please understand that what we're asking you to do is just to go out, give this a try, see how it works. If you have a problem with it, if you feel like it's hard, let us know. Tell us in the comments, get in touch with us individually.Send us a dm. We'd love to hear, and we can always follow up with a bit more of some examples that you're bringing to at the table where it felt like this was a little bit confusing. But we always ask everybody to have a beginner's mind, and if you're listening, try to give opposite action, at least a go.This.And we'll share some tips on social media, some visuals of videos so you can get more info on how to practice the skill.