Ever found yourself staring off into the distance, when you 'snap out of it' you realise that you had 'drifted off' somewhere... have you noticed yourself staring with vacant eyes? Your ‘fire’, ‘passion’ and ‘joie de vivre’ (cheerful moments in life) may have been missing for ‘sometime’.
You can't quite put your finger on exactly when it happened though. You may find yourself slumping in your chair, sighing despondently and mutter ever now and then “I’m feeling emotionally drained”.
Many of my clients have sat across the clinic desk from me and expressed this notion, this feeling bubbling to the surface within them so strongly at some points in their life. At any point in your life, this can occur. Whether it is caused by:
- A relationship breakup
- The pressures of living
- Work dead-lines
- Challenges and pressure with financial security
- A social event
- High-pressure situations
Often it's more than just one of the above, whatever the cause, the combination, this feeling of being 'emotionally drained' is generally not an unfamiliar feeling or conversation we've most likely been through a few times already in our lives.
When the pressure is on, when expectations in our life are not met, or tensions are high, any time that your nerves on edge, when the going gets tough or you find that your emotions are all over the shop... usually the end result is exhaustion.
Exhaustion results from being drained of energy due to trying to control and process the rollercoaster of emotions that we are experiencing. Hello burnt-out!
Emotions can feel like a rollercoaster because emotions are not felt in isolation. Usually a predominating or primary emotion and a secondary emotion are occurring at the same time. It is completely normal to feel more than one emotion at the same time. When you go through emotional disturbances, such as:
- Loosing a loved one,
- Fighting with your lover,
- The extremes of parenting, or
- Coping with the expectations placed on yourself or perfectionism.
Whatever the disturbance is, you still have to deal with the emotional disturbance and still get everything else done; work, prep meals, take care of family, keep your routine… life doesn’t ‘cut you some slack’!
In the 21st Century lifestyle of go-go-GO is not conducive to taking time out in order to fully process your emotions. When was the last time you completely stoped and felt your emotional state and then consciously learned from them? Returning to my clients experience above, the answer was ‘way too long ago’. Tuning in to your emotions and actually feeling what is there can become one of the biggest challenges when you are on the go-go-GO merry-go-round.
Not only are you are dealing with multiple emotions at the same time, life is not giving you a break or cutting you some slack, you are also being required to generate emotional reactions or responses all the time. New scenarios occur that require your undivided attention… and that is where your system can become overloaded, your entire being says ‘enough’! Enter, ‘the straw that broke the camels back’ and I’m sure you may have witnessed this and probably even experienced it for yourself. It looks like a normal interaction but then something mundane and often trivial triggers a major emotional upheaval and perceived as an emotional outburst. For example Michael Douglas’s character William Foster in the movie Falling Down (1993).
In states of emotional overwhelm, it is quite often easier to just push these emotions away, ignore them and ‘keep on moving’. Sometimes our emotions are too difficult or too painful to face (for example losing a loved one) so the more comfortable solution is to deny them. Either of these short-term solutions is not ideal because in the long term they will rob you of your energy and leave you emotionally drained. It would take less effort and energy to process them on the spot, let them go, and be emotionally free, so that you can return to living in the moment.
Can you remember an interaction where your significant other was ending a relationship with you or possibly you with them? People normally say they felt sad, but at the time you could have also been feeling angry because they were not hearing what you are saying. You could have been feeling grief because you were at the beginning the mourning period of the relationship. All of these emotions were arising in the one interaction, however you could only focus on one of them because they were so overwhelming to process. You probably ended up carrying them around with you for days, trying to escape the discomfort whenever you could. Eventually you may have realised that you were having disproportionate reactions to life in everyday interactions. When you were playing with your kids and a simple question causes you to yell, when you were trying to do work and the slightest interruption caused you to become excessively frustrated, even becoming aware of the other repressed or ignored emotions that arose from the interaction then caused you difficulties trying to fall asleep and get some rest from it all! How emotionally exhausted did you feel?
The old ways of overcoming emotional disturbances can be quite a process. The good news is that there are new ways of overcoming emotional disturbances that are not a process, do not take days or hours to implement and are in fact fast, easy to use and robust. They are known as Rhett Ogston Applications (ROAs) and they are an array of tools to assist you to rise above emotional disturbances and to simply and easily process your emotions, let them go naturally, and get back to living your life optimally and purposefully.
Possibly the best benefit is that they are simple solutions and the more you utilise them, the stronger your emotional processing systems become, the more emotionally intelligent you become, therefore the more you use them the less you need them!
When you feel emotionally drained, manage this feeling natural with our 2 favourite suggestions.
1. The Universal Emotional Freedom Technique. Learn the technique here.
2. The Process My Emotions natural essences. Buy your set here.
