When your hands are caught in the Chinese finger trap, your first instinct is to tug your way out of it to get loose, but the more you pull the more the ends tighten around your fingers. Making it impossible to get loose. 

The harder you pull, the harder it tightens around your fingers. 

It’s the same way when dealing with painful emotions like stress and anxiety. The harder you try to pull away the tighter the hold they have on your life becomes. 

When you feel overwhelmed or stressed, you have the urge to avoid the emotion, fill up your time by working, eating, sleeping, or just doing anything to avoid the painful emotion. When you indulge in these distracting activities, at the moment it may feel like the right thing to do. 

Because no one ever wants to sit down and deal with their emotions, but in the long run the feelings’ grip on your life intensifies. 

It’s the same way in life we make decisions based on what we don’t want to feel in life. We tend to look for easy routes and the quickest solutions to things. It’s why when learning you are advised to learn, relearn, unlearn and learn again. 

Over time when you become very skilled at carrying out a task, you tend to lose sight of the basics, because you know it so well you implement all the shortcuts and you can get away with things because you’ve mastered them. 

This goes on until the shortcuts fail you and you have to begin learning the basics all over again. 

However, when we turn towards those feelings, sit with them, and make sense of them rather than hide them, we get more sense of freedom. 

The same when you resist tugging the Chinese finger trap but pull your fingers inward in contrast to pulling them outward, the trap widens and you have more room to wiggle your fingers around. 

When you adopt this approach with your emotion you get to choose when you feel that emotion and when to step away from it without having to claw your way out. 

Closing remarks 

I learnt a way of getting through painful emotions recently.

It’s viewing emotions as passing waves over your head, not things that you own or acquire. 

When you feel negative emotions, remind yourself at that moment that these emotions don’t belong to you and they’re just feelings in passing so you can choose to tune out from them like you’re changing a channel. 

This method isn’t foolproof but it’s worked more times than it’s failed. 

And when it’s failed, acknowledge what you’re feeling but don’t let it get a hold over your life.