Excerpt from ‘Feel Better’ by Dr. Shahana Alibhai
SUSAN’S CHALLENGE
For more than a decade, I’ve practiced family medicine with an emphasis on mental health care. I’ve seen the impact that working to change our cognitive patterns can have on people young and old. One patient, I’ll call Susan, was looking for ways to mitigate the emotional freefall she was feeling and to ensure she was better prepared the next time such feelings invaded her mind.
Susan was a 38-year-old working mother, feeling the pressure of raising a family while balancing other demanding aspects of her professional and personal life. The pressure began to feel like too much. Instead of making time to go for walks or go to her local fitness class, exercise started to drop out of her daily life.
Eating on the go became more of the norm, as did working until late at night. All of these fractures of her regular life didn’t seem like much in isolation, but in combination led to the reason she eventually saw me: insomnia. After countless nights of poor sleep and trying multiple over-the-counter agents, Susan knew she needed help.
This is not an uncommon story. After sharing her experience with me, the analogy I gave Susan was of a piece of artwork on a computer. The picture displayed is a representation of how we feel overall, and it’s what I, as a physician, see. It is often at the root of a patient’s complaint, as it was in Susan’s case. The pixels that make up the picture are the patient’s emotional health, comprising thousands if not hundreds of thousands of emotional reactions that represent our interaction with the world.
Susan began sharing with me a common emotion she had been dealing a lot with: self-doubt. Like many in such a demanding position of juggling work and home, her mind had been plunging into a spiral of self-defeating thoughts. She was ensnared in the mental sand traps of “I should be,” “I can’t,” or “I always.” And when she tried to steer her thoughts away from those mental sand traps, something would happen that would confirm all of these beliefs.
Whether it was turning in a work project past its deadline or forgetting to buy a gift for a friend’s birthday party, the negative thoughts about her worth and abilities seemed impossible to tune out. She felt that regardless of the situation, she was destined for failure. This was taking a big toll on her emotional and physical well-being.
I assured her that she wasn’t alone. One of the first steps here is knowing that what you are feeling is not uncommon. Normalizing our feelings is half the battle. I often say anxiety and depression breed in the shadows and fester in silence. Many people who come to me describe a lack of confidence and associated negative self-talk.
I suggested that Susan use the power of anticipation to regain some of her lost self-confidence. All this means is I asked her to start consciously preparing to encounter these negative thoughts and the emotions they would bring up—before they happened. The funny thing about the power of anticipation is that if you anticipate feeling overwhelmed, or anxious, or even flustered, when it actually happens it somehow doesn’t feel as strong or scary.
I asked her to try to notice when uncomfortable emotions started brewing under the surface, then to identify how those emotions would lead to negative self-talk. I explained that she had likely, without realizing it, been telling herself a story that reinforced the uncomfortable emotions. I told her the brain needs to make sense of the world around it, and sometimes the easiest way to do this is to create a story. In Susan’s case her internal story was one of feeling worthless or insecure.
A comment by her boss that she could improve on her leadership skills threw her into ruminating for hours about how she wasn’t a valued member of the team. This was her way of trying to make sense of her feelings, which were rooted in the story she was telling herself. I explained that the emotions she was feeling were probably based on this negative story, and that she hadn’t just told herself, but sold herself on this narrative.
I was hopeful that Susan could become aware of this cycle of triggering uncomfortable emotion to negative self-talk for herself, because once we recognize where and when we have a tendency to tell ourselves something negative (i.e., the trigger) then we can start changing the story to something new. This can be extremely effective in creating new associations between whatever is upsetting us and why we’re upset about it.
If we can accept that the narrative we are telling ourselves doesn’t serve us well (something like, “I mess everything up”), we can then start to think of an alternative narrative, and even with time, try to replace it with something that we believe and that serves us (i.e., “I’m upset I messed up, and I know it’s part of learning”) The first step of this is acknowledging the story in our heads.
Sounds easy, right? But actually doing it can be a real challenge. Emotions frequently trump logic. Not only are emotions and logic processed in separate areas of the brain; the center relating to emotions is much more closely linked to that of memory and our stories are often born from the way we have interpreted our memories.
For example, to someone who says, “I mess everything up,” it may feel true even though reality would suggest otherwise. There must be a lot in that person’s life that they do get right, every day and every week. But getting the emotional self to understand and accept that—well, that’s another story. This is where the help of a trusted partner, friend or professional can be extremely useful as we all need help pointing out our blind spots.
Susan accepted my advice. She approached this challenge with vigor. After a few more visits, she told me she was beginning to feel a little more like she was at the steering wheel instead of getting swept away by her emotions. Anticipating the emotion, recognizing the story in her head, and trying to distill fact from feeling were just some of the tools she applied. Instead of constantly worrying about situations, she approached each stressful event like a detective would: with curiosity instead of criticism.
She asked, “What are the facts and what are my emotions? Do the two really match up, or are my emotions amplifying a negative narrative I’ve sold myself?” She said that situations that would have previously led to serious emotional health crises were more bearable because of this awareness. She put on emotional “safety gear” before she encountered uncomfortable emotions.
The goal of safety gear isn’t the same thing as bubble wrap; it’s not designed to protect you from every bump that comes along— and would you even want that in the first place? The analogy of safety gear illustrates that we all need tools, techniques, and training at various stages of life. Some you acquire along the way; some you are taught, and some you simply have to learn the hard way.
In “Feel Better,” you will find some tools that will be helpful and others that you might save for later use. The goal is not to change your life immediately but to insulate your emotional health from the bumps and bruises along the way. Of course, each person is unique and may need multiple types of safety gear to handle a fall. But with enough practice, using the methods in this book, anyone can bounce back faster and, more importantly, begin to avoid mental health slips in the first place.
ABOUT THE BOOK
We all deserve to feel better. When you do, you can show up—as a professional, parent and partner—the way you have always wanted. But how do you get there, and why is the simple act of “feeling better” so hard to sustain? Could the answers lay within our ability (or inability) to process our emotions?
In ‘Feel Better’, Dr. Shahana Alibhai—professional speaker, family physician and mental health expert, and mom to three—offers a fresh perspective, full of actionable insights, on how we can process our emotions in healthier, more productive ways. She provides a step-by-step strategy to understanding the three clues your emotions tell you every single day. What if your emotions weren’t there to trip you up but to actually teach you something? Imagine knowing that the emotions you feel could actually play a role in understanding what you value. Imagine being able to tune into the story in your head and understand that the story you are telling yourself is more than that, it is the story you sell yourself every single day.
As a physician, Dr. Shahana often sees the larger picture behind a patient’s complaint, whether it be anxiety, depression, insomnia or just chronic stress. What if every single pixel in this picture was the patient’s emotional health—the tens of hundreds of thousands of opportunities this patient has had to understand, accept and regulate their emotions? Could understanding our emotional health be a gateway into not only bettering our mental and physical condition but a possible tool to help mitigate the mental health crisis we are facing? Dr. Shahana thinks so.
Written in a relatable, practical and approachable style, with anecdotes from patients and Dr. Shahana’s own humorous life stories, ‘Feel Better’ will give you the tools you need to gain clarity and control of your emotions so you can live the life you deserve. Follow Dr. Shahana on Instagram and Facebook.
