Getting Out of Your Head
“Get out of your head and into your heart. Think less feel more.”
- Osho
Throughout my journey, I frequently heard people who I felt had high emotional intelligence say, “Get out of your head.” This statement confused me. I heard the same people say that the key to deeper healing is to head towards one’s emotions rather than away from them. That in order to heal we must “keep our wounds close.” That “we can’t heal what we can’t feel.” That we must remember and recognize our deepest inner thoughts and suffering. The same people who promoted the power of introspection were telling me to think less? How was I supposed to stop thinking so much while journeying inward? And then one day it clicked for me: the goal wasn’t to be distracted from my thoughts. The goal was to focus less on my thoughts and more on my feelings.
Obsession is a common way of avoiding our feelings. We can get stuck worrying, catastrophizing, or fixating on other people and their problems. As John Bradshaw put it in his book Healing the Shame That Binds You, “Obsessing on one’s alcoholic spouse or lover or children or parents is a way to stay in your head and out of your feelings.” However, I find that too many people who come to this realization then determine that the goal is to distract themselves from their thoughts. This approach rarely works in the long term. You might be able to temporarily distract your mind, but the brain is persistent and the thoughts will likely return and perhaps even intensify until they’re dealt with. Distraction may keep your mind off the symptoms, but you are not getting to the root of the problem. It is like trimming leaves on a tree that needs to be uprooted. If you really want to address the issue, get out of your thoughts and into your feelings.
Intellectualizing is itself a form of emotional avoidance. By hyper-analyzing, over-thinking, rationalizing, and/or over-worrying, one is using thinking as a way to avoid feeling. The prefrontal cortex of the brain handles rational thinking, while other areas of the brain handle emotion and intuition. In a sense, we can get addicted to using the prefrontal cortex in order to avoid other parts of our mind. Even examining problems intellectually can be an unconscious means of emotional distraction. Fantasizing, obsessing, intellectualizing, daydream, worrying, and controlling are just some mental gymnastics we commonly use to avoid feeling our feelings.
Think for a moment about what sort of common thought patterns (positive or negative) might you be using to avoid feeling your feelings. Then, consider freeing yourself by giving yourself permission to feel, even if it’s just for a few minutes. I now realize that when I am stuck in my thoughts, the goal is not to distract myself. The goal is to focus on my feelings, even if I never intellectually understand them.
Ask Yourself:
In what ways might I think to avoid feeling?
What would happen if I tried to focus on how I feel, even for just a few minutes at first?
How do I really feel right now at this very moment? How would I complete the sentence, “I feel ______?”
Next Letter: Self-Care