Weathering Emotional Storms: The Long and Short-Term Approaches to Emotional Well-being

How Meditation Can Help You Cope with Life's Emotional Extremes

In the week that I am writing this list, extreme weather prevails in Israel. There is much humanity can do to slow the deterioration of global warming, but there is nothing we can do at any given moment to affect the weather immediately. In the present time, we can only choose how we deal with the weather: drink lots of water, stay indoors, and be careful not to cause fires. In this sense, our relationship to the weather parallels the different axes in which we can deal with our emotional state.

Dealing with our emotions also has two timelines. The therapeutic process is long-term, and it is a metaphor for the deep changes we are making to increase the chance that in a few years we will not suffer from such extreme and dangerous situations. Similarly, in therapy, we work on healing the wounds of the past so that interactions that currently cause us pain and limit us will cause us less suffering in the future and, as a result, reduce us less.

The Beach in Tel Aviv, 2017. Practicing Meditation Affects My Perception of Reality in at Least Two Ways. Photo: Moti Milrod

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Along with the long-term axis, in emotional coping, we have the present—the weather we wake up to in the morning, the emotional situations we find ourselves in at the moment when we still bring with us the sensitivities of the past to the interactions of our lives. The fight with the partner, the anxiety for the girl, the paralyzing fear of failure, the broken heart—these are all the storms and emotional floods of our lives. And the point is that there is nothing we can do to change them immediately.

Meanwhile, in therapy, we learn how to deal with our feelings in the present, and what is the emotional equivalent of drinking too much, avoiding dangerous activities, or, if you want, equipping yourself with an umbrella. These tools are many, and they include cognitive reminders (about the difference between the concrete trigger and the historical source of the pain, for example), different behavioral tricks (who to avoid and who to share with), and basic ideas to improve our ability to cope (such as writing a diary or participating in physical activity). But in my eyes, above all shines one central option for reducing our suffering in life: do more meditation.

Meditation Day in London, 2019. Put Down Your Phone for Seven Minutes and Focus. Photo: Matt Dunham / AP

In the past year, I have written several times about the meaning of meditation for me, but it is never enough. The truth is that I would like not to reason and content myself with writing from this point to the end of the list: meditate. Do meditation. Do meditation. Do meditation. Do meditation. Do meditation. Do meditation. Do meditation. Do meditation. I know that once you start you will understand on your own, but nevertheless, I will contribute some reasons here that might help you put down your phone for seven minutes, breathe quietly, focus your attention on only one object (like your breathing circle, counting repeatedly to ten, some kind of mantra, or reviewing the organs of the body), and do nothing but be. And these are the reasons why meditation can help you suffer less because of your emotions:

Breathing Exercises Regulate the Nervous System

Let's try it together, right now. Close your mouth, breathe in through your nose. At the end of the inhalation, stop for a moment, without taking in any more air and without blowing it out. Now blow out the air through your nose slowly and count to five in your heart. Now repeat the exercise three more times. That's it, you did it. You have made an immediate positive effect on the level of tension in your body. We have centuries-old yogic instructions that teach us how to increase our concentration and vitality through breathing exercises, and that's even before we use the breath as the train tracks on which to drive our consciousness to Nirvana.

Meditation is, in many cases, based on breath control, and as in the case of psychedelia (and not coincidentally), breathing exercises are something whose virtues are obvious to users in the field, but science finds a way to bring it into the laboratory only recently. Indeed, if you need this kind of support, you should know that recent studies have found that breathing exercises reduce symptoms of attention deficit disorder, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and post-traumatic stress syndrome.

How does that happen? It seems that a voluntary change in the way we breathe affects the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the body's calming actions, and in threatening situations is also responsible for slowing down physical actions such as heart rate and the digestive system. When we ran naked in the savannah, the parasympathetic system worked to allow us to respond properly in stressful situations, increasing our chances of survival. Today, when we encounter a tiger in the savannah of the Internet (a scary headline, a stressful email, etc.), breathing exercises can be used to calm the second nervous system, the sympathetic, which is responsible for releasing stress hormones such as cortisol.

We Make Our Suffering Worse by Not Accepting the Situation. Photo: Grafner/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Meditation Helps Us Experience Life in a Less Personal Way

Meditation brings a mental benefit. The increase in mental well-being is due, in part, to the fact that meditation slightly weakens the projection that our prediction machine projects on our environment, and helps us process a little more of the information that comes to us from the environment.

For example, I (no names) am very alert to the other person's expectation that I will solve their current predicament (for that matter, because both of my parents—no names—consistently expected me as a child to take responsibility for their emotional state and help them regulate themselves). In this case, my brain has developed an "air conditioner" when it comes to the possibility that there is a person in need in front of me who wants me to save them.

The practice of meditation affects my perception of this reality in at least two ways: one, by quieting the fluctuations of consciousness I learn to better see my wounds and recognize my alertness to certain possibilities in the present. Second, the more I practice the ability to distinguish sensory information that reaches me from the environment without judging it, labeling it, or getting lost in it, the priority I give to certain information from the environment weakens (the expectation of an incriminating hanging in my case), and my ability to recognize that at the same time there are other data in our environment that I might notice, beyond those that jump out for historical reasons.

As Soon as You Start You Will Understand By Yourself. Photo: ma_rish / Getty Images/iStockphoto

Meditation Helps Us to Accept the Bassa and Stop Fighting with the Weather

One of the well-known lessons in Buddhism teaches us that it is hard enough, for example, to deal with the heavy rain on the day we planned to go on a trip. There is no need to make the situation worse by not agreeing to accept the situation. If we sit and cry about the trip we were going to take, or refuse to participate in any other activity until the weather improves and we can carry out our plans, if we blame others for scheduling the trip at that time or not checking the forecast, or not stopping us from planning the trip, if we search on Google "rain dance"—we are not in the right direction. And not only will it not improve the weather, it will also worsen our suffering from the change in our plans.

One of the main ways in which meditation helps us deal with our emotions is by improving our ability to accept our emotions: to notice them and acknowledge them without denying them and without drowning in them. Many times, the only benefit to our emotional state immediately available to us is based on agreeing to accept the fact that we are heartbroken, anxious, angry, or feeling any other uncomfortable emotion.

As I've written here before, negative loops between people are created precisely when we can no longer bear our painful emotions and struggle to feel better faster. The ways in which we struggle with these feelings are often the very triggers that cause our partners to get stressed. That is, the way to reduce the number of negative loops in our lives also goes through increasing our resistance to uncomfortable emotions. So in short, meditate. Do meditation. Do meditation. Do meditation. Do meditation. Do meditation. Do meditation. Do meditation. Do meditation.