The Most Useful Well-Being Hack I Know

How I Put My Negative Feelings to Good Use

Painting by my wife, Jennifer Stratton. Oil on canvas

This week I’m sharing with you the hands-down best well-being hack I’ve learned over all my years of practicing mindfulness and meditation. This is the one perspective change that most profoundly influences my day-to-day life. It has nothing to do with God or enlightenment or supreme consciousness or any of that esoteric stuff. It’s about how to work with feelings I don’t like and don’t want to have, like anxiety, loneliness, shame, or insecurity.

This is the unexpected lesson I learned:

Instead of resisting my unwanted feelings, hating them, running from them, judging them, or trying to change them, I let them BE.*

And that has made all the difference.

Here are some things I’ve learned about so-called negative feelings.

1. They’re not going to kill me and they always move along when they’re ready.

2. We all have negative feelings sometimes because we can, because feeling bad is a human capacity that needs to stretch and flex once in a while.

3. Just as one’s car will break down eventually, one will experience unwanted feelings. No feeling can ever be eradicated permanently.

4. Feelings have something to teach us if we treat them as guests, rather than trying to drive them away like enemies.

5. When I allow myself to be with my feelings without panicking or reacting, to float right in the middle of them, I find that they’re not nearly as bad or scary or harmful as I feared.

6. I like to use my unwanted feelings as a focus of my meditation, and when I’m not meditating, as an opportunity to understand myself better. (During meditation, the feeling I most often spend time with is restlessness, while off the mat, it’s usually anxiety or sometimes insecurity and defensiveness.)

7. Just as I might pursue my curiosity about, say, the habits of jellyfish, or the nature of gravity, I observe my feelings objectively, without taking them personally (of course, this is a work in progress!). I study their presence, their way of inhabiting my mind and body, and try to see them more clearly and learn a little about their true nature. I’m not trying to understand the alleged source of the feeling; I’m only studying my own body and how it carries and holds the feeling: What is happening right now? What is this feeling, really? Where in my body is this feeling located? Does it change or evolve?

8. I’m creating a habit, with the help of meditation, where I remember to practice this nonresistance when I’m having an unwanted feeling, rather than afterward.

9. Now is the only thing I’m interested in because that’s where the feeling resides, so I try not to think about what happened in the past or how I would like to change something in the future (I say try, but by observing the feeling itself as it is right now, thoughts of past and future tend to fall away naturally).

10. It’s important to meditate on feelings not with the goal of solving them, but rather only to be in a state of total acceptance of what is. After all, I know quite well by now that fighting my feelings doesn’t solve the problem, it only adds more unhappiness to my day.

Every day doesn’t have to be a good day

I think one reason we want every day to be a good day is because we’re so attached to ourselves and our lives. Studying the true, impermanent, constructed nature of self has helped me to let go of that attachment, and consequently, to not feel the need to resist negative feelings so much. Negative, positive, neutral; it’s all part of the human experience.

The act of welcoming an unwanted feeling as a guest who is here to teach us something, or as a natural human faculty that is only exercising its muscles in order to be limber and strong for the time when it is actually needed, or simply as what is at this moment in time; this act of nonresistance—which becomes stronger and more readily available with practice—often has the added bonus of causing the negative feeling to lose its power and go home early. But I don’t practice with that purpose in mind because I don’t want to fall back into the habit of hating my feelings and only working to eliminate them. I truly enjoy my happy discovery that the more present I am to what is, even if it’s negative, the more I feel a sense of equanimity, of peace and well-being right here, right now. And those nows add up to a more harmonious life.

Thanks for being here! If you enjoyed this post, would you consider dropping a small tip into my coffee mug? Thank you!

DB 🙏💚

*Please note that I am not a mental health professional and cannot diagnose or advise in regards to mental health. This approach may not be effective for those dealing with mental health issues, trauma recovery, or other health-related problems.