I recently ran across a question on Reddit r/selfhelp about how to pick yourself up when emotions are weighing you down. This past year has taken a toll on our mental health. If you’ve found yourself feeling sluggish, heavy, lethargic, or flat-out depressed, you’re most certainly not alone. Here are a couple things that work for me (I am not a doctor, so don’t take this as medical advice).

10 exercises to help yourself feel better

Most of these are based on the idea that we tend to renew negative emotions by revisiting the images and sounds that caused them in the first place. That's not to say you should ignore the initial cause, but rather, many of these techniques are ways to get around that sinking feeling of swirling deeper and deeper into those emotions in non-productive ways.

1. Mindfulness

Feel where you are sensing negative emotions in your body. Note them. Ask questions like - are the bodily feelings getting more intense, staying the same, or decreasing? Or you can ask if they are moving, etc. The key is to stay with those clinical notes every half a second or second consistently for a while. In shifting your mind towards the body and what's going on at that specific moment, the emotional content will ebb. I sometimes use a numbering system to stay more clinical - 1-10 where 10 is feeling the worst.

2. Gratitude

This is one of many methods to counter the "down-ness" by replacement. Think of things you are grateful for. It could be people, or it could be situations or experiences you've had. I try to group them in tiers - large things, like being alive during the internet, to more specific things about me. Writing them down helps, as does just having a general list of tiers as a guide.

3. Compassion

I like to go from easy to less easy. I find it's easiest to start with my old kitty cat, then move on to people I really care about, then neutral people. Like with gratitude, you're simply trying to generate the feeling of compassion, so don't get too caught up on the details. An easy way to kickstart the process is looking at cute pics of animals on r/aww and focusing on the positive emotions that come up. Another tip is thinking of fictional characters, who are often deliberately designed to be sympathetic.

4. Laughter

I always like to have a playlist of hilarious SHORT videos to go to on YouTube. The key is “short” - you don’t want to end up bingeing on stand up comics all day, which is pretty easy to do.

5. Affirmations

This is dicey. There are some studies on this, and it can go either way - it works on some people, but for some people it can backfire. One study suggested that posing questions to yourself really helped make a difference. That really works for me, so I'll take very specific things I'm proud of, and pose them as a question - like ...How many people do you know who have...X. Or I'll just straight up read a list of accomplishments that I keep in an easy to access file.

6. Stoicism

The Stoics had some cool visualizations and exercises - like the "view from above". You can ask. yourself - is this going to matter in 5 years? Does this matter from the perspective of the universe?

7. Shifting memory. 

There are a few NLP tactics that involve taking a memory of a situation and altering it. For example, if a boss was an asshole to you, and that made you feel down, you can play that memory back in your head, but with a Goofy voice. It's kind've hard to take someone who sounds like that seriously.

8. Mental realty

This is a short little exercise - sometimes your inner voice just keeps going on and on - a useful trick is to think of your two big toes and the corners of the room you're in - at the same time. Our minds have limited space, and when you stretch it out a bit, you'll find that your inner voice just goes silent. It's not as useful as other practices, but it can act as a good first step before stacking it with other exercises.

9. Changing associations.

This is a fun one - take the guy who caused the negative situation, pretend he's in front of you, notice all the negativity, then flick him off into space. Then imagine the blandest thing ever - for me that's a bowl of plain white rice. Imagine that in front of you, then bring the guy's face back right in the middle of the rice, landing splat in the middle of it. Do it a couple times. Then try to merge his image in the same way in something ridiculous, like a baboon's colorful red ass. You're starting to mix around associations in a progressive way that introduces blandness, then ludicrousness. When I do this several times I'll notice the initial memory just doesn't have the same emotional weight and content as it first did.

10. Optimism games 

One study out of McGill University found that playing certain games messed with identity and caused people to become temporarily optimistic. The research is HERE, but I just use an app called Upbeat Mind, which I find does work to make me feel better about the situation.

In conclusion

There's a lot more, and maybe I’ll share in another post. The point is that in many ways our emotions are like weather. Someone will say something and it'll make us feel really bad, and after a the feelings will eventually dissipate, and we’ll wonder why we had such a drastic reaction. And once we're through the front, we can not only respond in a more mature way that's practical, but we can also move on with the rest of our day without it weighing on us so much.

These techniques help get through that weather front faster. Give these a try as soon as you feel the emotion hit, note which ones work best, and stack them. A last tip - make your go-tos easy to do. For example, I've made a Gratitude Powerpoint so I don't have to think of things - I have pictures, and all I have to do is hit a button and it auto plays. Hope some of that helps!