Have you ever tried to hold a ball underwater in the pool? The moment you stop devoting all your attention to keeping it submerged, it seems to find its way to the surface, sometimes hitting you in the face on the way out. Our emotions are a lot like that. We may have been conditioned to suppress anger, fear and sadness, been taught that we’re stronger or better or more acceptable if we don’t feel these things, and it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep them under the surface.
In today’s culture, the emphasis on positivity often overshadows the importance of experiencing the full range of human emotions. Steven Hayes’ insightful observation in Psychology Today highlights a critical issue: our tendency to view negative emotions as problems needing solutions, rather than integral parts of our human experience can hinder our emotional growth and well-being, leading to a fragmented experience of our lives.
At Integrative Mental Health, we champion the idea of embracing all emotions through a non-judgmental approach. This philosophy aligns with various holistic practices, including biofeedback and relaxation techniques, which we incorporate into our programs to promote overall mental and physical health.
Non-judgmentalism involves accepting our thoughts and feelings without trying to change or suppress them. This mindset allows us to fully experience our emotions and understand their roles in our lives. This is contrary to popular psychology’s idea of “think positively and your life will magically align with the positive.” By practicing non-judgment, we can navigate through our emotional landscape with greater ease and compassion, reducing the internal conflict that arises from resisting or rejecting our natural responses.
Biofeedback is a powerful tool that utilizes non-judgmentalism by grounding us in the present moment while providing concrete information about our internal processes, like heart rate, breath rate, muscle tension, blood vessel diameter and temperature changes. And most importantly, we can begin to understand how our thoughts and emotions are influencing our physiology, especially the thoughts and feelings we’re trying not to have. By becoming consciously aware of how we breathe, where we tighten in our bodies, and applying acceptance to the emotions that inform these processes, we can begin to both better process our feelings and influence our mental and physical states.
Techniques practiced in biofeedback such as low and slow diaphragmatic breathing, progressive muscle relaxation, and mindfulness can help regulate the nervous system, reduce blood pressure, reduce pain, reverse stress-related insulin resistance, improve sleep quality, and enhance overall mental clarity.
When we engage in breathwork, we create a space where we can observe our emotions without trying to fix them. Sometimes we get lost in the urge to fix emotions though, because we’re eager to feel calm and “let go of negativity.” But like your heart speeding up when faced with a scary situation, emotions are neither good nor bad. They just are. And if we don’t try to escape or repress them, they dissipate and leave space for us to experience the next moment. True acceptance means recognizing that there are no feelings we need to eliminate. The more we struggle to not feel a certain way, the more this feeling becomes imprinted, or put another way, our bodies experience our emotions as not safe and more stress to be avoided, and that rejected emotion shows up as blood vessels constricting, muscles tightening, or heart rate increasing.
Acceptance and commitment to the present moment, to all of life’s experiences, and to the transience of our emotional experiences can be very freeing. We can skip the guilt of not being as positive or as happy as we think we should be. All that muscle tension and concentration it took to keep the ball submerged under the water, or that negative emotion at bay? We can now devote that energy to other things and feel a greater connection to ourselves and others.
Whether through integrating non-judgmentalism with biofeedback training and relaxation techniques or finding a way to make dietary changes with full self compassion, we actively encourage clients to embrace their wholeness by welcoming all emotions and all stages of readiness for change as valuable aspects of their humanity. This empowers individuals to live more authentically and experience sustainable personal growth, fostering resilience and a deeper connection to themselves.
Let’s honor the entirety of our human experience, one breath at a time. By doing so, we can transform our relationship with ourselves and cultivate a life that is rich, meaningful, and whole.
