EI for Young Adults: Discussion 33

Finding exciting activity for partners

I want to offer my partner to do something together but I am afraid one of us may not like the activity, so I never offer anything.

By role playing this situation we can see the following feelings and needs:

Person 1:  feels: pressured, resigned, needs: reassurance (that their partner will be okay and won't put it against them)

Person 2: feels: excluded, needs: connection, novelty, fun.

Once these feelings and needs are clear it becomes easy to come up with something to do together and not feel pressure that one of the people may not enjoy it.

Dealing with failures

I failed my class and I feel terrible about it.

We tend to consider failures as something bad, but we don't have to. Failures are great because they may help us learn. If one is not happy about the chosen career path and they fail fast, they have many years ahead of them to choose a different path. However if they are not failing they may waste years of their lives before they realize they need to pursue something else.

Failures are great because you can learn from them, much more than from your successes, it's an opportunity to grow

Fail fast and celebrate your failures!

Inner voice

When one is confused or ungrounded it helps to find your inner voice. This allows us to be authentic, rather being influenced by external demands or voices.

How do we find our inner voice? By staying in the space between thoughts. Each thought has emotional charge and if we go with them we end up inside "an emotional bubble" created by this thought. By focusing on the space between the thoughts we can recognize what's coming, perceive it and let it go, without engaging with it, without identifying with these thoughts and desires.

If an emotional charge is too high and it really wants to carry us, it's okay to give yourself some limited time to be engaged with it. Give yourself 5 minutes, experience and feel whatever you want or need to feel, then let go off it.

When we are in a bubble we lose the sight of space between them.

Making friends

Maing new friends requires courage. There is doubt, what if they are not the right person, what if I am not the right person, there is a fear of getting hurt, there is a fear of rejection. It takes courage to go past these barriers, to approach a person and invite them to be friends, it takes getting outside of our comfort zone.

Pain and happiness

How is pain related to happiness?

Someone said "the existence of broccoli doesn't affect the taste of chocolate", but is it really true? Isn't the existence of broccoli making the chocolate much more desired? 

Is our pain making our happiness brighter and stronger?

Is our happiness making our pain darker and stronger?

Or these are unrelated things?

Is happiness the joy we experience because of lack of pain?

Is pain a result of us no longer feeling happy?

There are several things to consider.

1. The biology of happiness is different from the biology of pain.

Happiness (biologically) is releasing some hormones: dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, and oxytocin. Pain is a result of our neurons firing. There are means to neutralize pain (by inhibiting these neurons firing), but this may not necessarily result in releasing the happiness hormones. Also, it's possible to release these hormones and still be in pain, that is, to be both happy and in pain.

2. Our body normalizes for stimulus. 

When we are exposed to stimulus for a prolonged time (be it pain or happiness), our body start adjusting and no longer respond the same way as originally. In terms of pain, our neurons no longer fire with the same intensity, or our brain no longer attributes so much intensity to what's happening in the body. In terms of happiness, our bodies no longer feel happiness with so much intensity. This is important for our survival. Stimulus is a signal for attention. Paying attention to the same thing happening for prolonged time is not an efficient way to deal with the environment, because we will not pay attention to new things as much.

As a result, we adjust "the default", and our pain and our happiness no longer has so much effect on us. That's why we have addictions - we stop getting as much kick from things that bring us happiness and we want more and more.  That's why we get used to chronic pain and sometimes stop paying attention to it.

How do we experience happiness?

While pain usually has a physical trigger, it's harder to identify the trigger for happiness. Here are some ways we experience happiness:

• Feeling energetically happy, wanting to move, and body is vibrating

• Having fun, laughing with other people.

• Engaging with friends, laughing.

• Challenging myself.

• Quieter form of happy. Being content with whatever is happening. 

• Pleasant sensations. Realizing that pain is just the way I interpret my sensations and I can see painful sensations as pleasant. 

• Seeing pain as beautiful and enjoying it (Example: movie "Call me by your name")

• Feeling intensily, in my body, energetically. Experiencing being uplifted, not just me but everything around me.

Happiness can be its own thing and sadness can be its own thing, and they both can exist. 

Having control over our interpretations of our pain or our negative emotions is tricky. On the one hand it's empowering, on the other hand, If you are in control of everything you feel, is it still an emotion? Aren't you suppressing what's truly there?

How do we experience pain?

Two types of emotional pain:

1. active pain, anxious. Eveyrhing is moving very fast, frustration, overstimulation, anxiety, spiraling out of control, feeling like there is nothing I can do to stop it.

2. Grief, sorrow, deep, intense, but not related to anxiety. Calm sadness.

Panic

The worst that we can experience is panic. Panic a state that we can't tolerate, we want to run away, we would give anything to get away from it. Consider that there may be another way of dealing with panic - being with it. Consider that panic is a meaning we attribute to our sensations, that meaning comes with fear. If we strip our sensations (e.g. breathing fast, heart beat, etc) from its meaning, we may be able to be with the sensation of panic and it should subside and step away.