Feeling Like Crap About Life? Run With It.

There’s a common belief in today’s world that tells us we’re supposed to be happy…a lot. Stay positive, keep your chin up, just smile your way through it. Okay, it’s true that more often than not people don’t want to talk to someone who spends 80% of their time bemoaning their lot in life, but, we all have our days/weeks/months, right? And sometimes, it’s just not possible to keep it to ourselves. Are we worse off for venting our frustrations, or is it okay to sink into our misery every now and then?

I say, sink in, and I’ll give you three reasons why.

1. Bad moods can give way to great ideas. Many of us have fallen into funks that freeze us up and keep us from moving forward, but often, if we just sit with them for awhile, our minds begin to churn in an effort to get us out of the mire. I’m thinking when you stop fighting the feelings, you open up your frame of mind. Stop fighting, start fixing. Our minds just want to fix things. They want to come up with solutions to our problems. Get your mind involved in the business of your bad emotions and you’ll probably come up with a way to climb out of the hole of negativity you dug yourself into.

2. Ignoring negative feelings gives them reason to bite you in the ass. You know this is true. Maybe the psychobabble about repressing feelings isn’t up your alley, but there’s truth in those theories that you should pay attention to. Frequent bad moods and unhappy feelings are signs bigger issues are looming. And if you ignore it all, tell yourself it’ll be okay if you just shove your feelings to the side, there’s a good chance all of that will come out in the way you handle your workload, your relationships, and your health. Dissect your crap feelings to figure out the real reasons your so unhappy, then do something to change them. Ignorance is anything but bliss when it comes to your emotions.

3. Crap feelings necessitate spending time with yourself. I am a firm believer that we all need a little more time to ourselves. Alone. ALL. ALONE. We’re so connected today with email, Facebook, Twitter, etc., that even when we’re “alone” we’re not really alone. But, feeling less than thrilled with life tends to make us not want to say much to people, which means we’re best served disconnecting from things for a little bit. Just giving yourself that break from interacting with the world can be energizing enough to move you through your bad juju.

Now, before I stop I have to put in a disclaimer of sorts. There is definitely a limit to how much sinking you should do. Draw a line for yourself. If you pay attention to your feelings from an objective viewpoint, you’ll see that there’s a limit to how long your body and mind want to be unhappy. Often, we force ourselves to be unhappier longer than is healthy because we fixate. We find comfort in commiserating with people, but we can easily commiserate so much that it keeps us feeling miserable and unfulfilled.

Find that boundary line within yourself that separates healthy rumination from overbearing negativity and figure out the best ways for you to chop away at your beef with the world. But don’t ignore it. And don’t think you have to pretend you’re happy when you’re not — you’re human and you’re entitled to be a little bit of a mess every now and then.