Shut Up and Stop Crying.

I’m a crier. Cute advert shilling nappies? Cry. Charity appeal with starving donkeys? Cry. Someone so much as raises their voice? Cry. Sat in a one to one, feeling like an imposter, fingernails carving red half moons into my palms in an effort to just not cry.

Yeah, it’s not always funny to laugh at the crier.

In fact, the utter hypocrisy of the world of work espousing their commitment to ‘mental health in the workplace’ while also stigmatising emotion is bullshit.

Oops. Naughty word there. Must have let my emotions get the better of me.

But that’s what the workplace is. A place where the professional veneer must mask any outbursts. Where the facade of a smile should hide sadness, because that’s just what we do in the workplace. Professional means logical and measured, not haphazard and emotional. Impassive is the right way to do business, get results… right?

Well, not really.

You see, when we repress our true, authentic selves at work, we harbour resentment. And that doesn’t just go away. It bubbles under the surface until it either bursts forth into grounds for dismissal as you gleefully carve profanities into the paintwork of your bosses car, or you quit. Just think of it in terms of a meeting. You’ve probably been there. Hand poised, great idea bubbling away. You share with the group and get shot down immediately. The humiliation burns. Attention span toward the meeting drops to zero. You go from ‘engaged employee’ to ‘disengaged human with emotions’. And it doesn’t just stay there. You repress the emotion and carry it out of the meeting with you – after all, that’s the professional thing to do. The resentment lingers, carried through the day. The brain connects this feeling with the act of ‘being at work’, it remains unresolved and you remain pissed off.

After all, that bottle you keep shoving feelings into only has so much capacity.

So, what do you do?

First, you acknowledge that these feelings exist.

Take a deep breath. Some studies have shown that when we take a minute to consider our emotions, and to label them, it actually lessens the impact of these emotions.

Emotions such as anger, frustration, sadness, go through two distinct stages. first, we have the blossoming and strengthening of the emotion, where the overall intensity increases. Then we have the second stage where the emotion fades – in direct correlation to the duration of the original emotion. What that means, in layman's terms, is that if you’re angry for an hour it will take at least that long to ‘get over it’.

In that same study, it showed that how we react to a negative emotion impacts the long-term effect of that feeling. Rumination, stewing and bearing a grudge all increase emotion intensity whereas reappraisal of that emotion, considering it and its impact actually dampens the negative feelings.

So, what does that mean?

It means that emotions are OK, as long as they are considered and dealt with. If you have a negative response to an event, deal with it head on. Consider the emotion. Talk about it and most of all, don’t stew – or you’ll be feeling the effects long after the event has passed.

Someone far more intelligent than me goes into more detail here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3966809/

Second, and this is especially true if those emotions are triggered by a certain person, speak, talk and communicate.

Once you get an idea of one another’s feelings, it’s much easier to balance and regulate those emotions. It’s unlikely that one single event will trigger emotion, but if you don’t address things head on, when things finally boil over the outburst becomes about all those other times added up, rather than just this one incident.

Third, get back in the present.

Something you won’t realise until you release your negativity is that, for all of this time, you’ve been living in the past. You’ve been tied to this single, unpleasant, emotive event and you haven’t been able to live in the present since then. Your mind has been obsessed with it, and while your mind is obsessed, you’ll never pull yourself out.

So do what you have to do pull yourself into the present. Treat yourself to an unpronounceable coffee. Go for a walk. Read a book. Distract your mind from this event, and ground your mind in the here and now.

Conversely, don’t then make the mistake of living in the future. Those ‘what if’s’ will eat you up. You’ll tie that specific event to all future actions, and that can bias the outcome. For example, think of that time above. The time you bought up a proposal and it got shot down. The next time you have an idea, you don’t share because your mind is focused on the ‘what if’. ‘What if’ the outcome is the same as last time. ‘What if’ I have to feel that emotion again. By grounding yourself in the present, you’re not haunted by the past and neither are you scared of the future, you only control your actions in the present, whatever the outcome may be.

Fourth, learn and move on.

The last step, but the longest step. The one that contributes to your life-long learning of the self. Just because you’ve recognised and dealt with an emotion doesn’t mean your work is over.

Take time, now, to look back. See yourself in retrospect. The event that triggered a negative response, what your response was, and then how you dealt with it and got to the place you are now. Ask yourself, can I prepare better next time? Was my emotional response equivalent to the trigger? How can I prepare myself to deal with a similar situation? Your emotions effect you most of all, so it makes sense to learn how you can control the negative impact they have on you.

Finally, emotions are there for a reason.

They enable our complex thinking, our empathy.

They allow us to handle, and learn from pain.

They make us better.

But learn how to regulate them, and you’ll come out stronger and wiser because of it.

Oh, and if you want to cry at a pampers advert, go ahead and cry.