Rule #9: Harness your demons

If we take the words for love, hate and fear away, what are emotions? There is no simple scientific definition, but I think of them as energy in our bodies. When your feelings change, from happy to sad, or from depressed to excited, how would you describe what happened? I bet you’d say it’s some kind of movement or motion. We say things like “my depression has lifted”, “jumping for joy” or “my heart goes out to you”, which describe actions in the physical world, despite how we think of feelings as something not tangible at all. If emotions are energy, how can we relate to them in a way that is healthiest for us? That’s what this rule is about.

Something unhealthy we do is to demonize certain emotions. We consider joy, love and happiness as good emotions, and sadness, hate and depression, as bad ones. Why is this? I realize few people prefer to be sad, but sadness is something we need. Without sadness what we would do when our beloved pet cat Copurrrnicus died? Pretend he never existed? If we loved our cat, grief is a reflection of that love and it makes sense to feel that loss. We should at least look to integrative holidays like the Mexican Day of The Dead, that help us express both joy and sadness about loss in life, instead of demanding we can only feel one or the other. The polarization of emotions is a harmful cultural invention that we need to escape. We need to see them all having value as long as they are expressed in a healthy way.

I’ve learned to accept that emotions are part of who I am and that I don’t have to fight with them. They are simply forces we don’t directly control (See Rule #7: You are not your thoughts). To my point about Copurrrnicus, the goal isn’t to control what we feel and to force ourselves into or out of feelings. If we had complete control over our emotions life would be boring. It might even make us insane. It reminds me of the Talking Head’s song Heaven, which has the lyric, “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.” It suggests that the idea of life with perfect control over everything is probably more like hell.

It’s also true that it can feel good to feel bad, which pokes at how limited these categories are. Have you ever enjoyed a sad movie or a depressing song? Much of the best art is about something going wrong. Why? Perfection is boring. It’s hard to relate to perfect, and it’s bizarre how much we admire the (unrealistic) idea of perfect lives or perfect people. Often it’s the imperfections, and the tragedies, that bring people together. Have you ever bonded with someone over something difficult or depressing? A project that went wrong or a day that went sideways? Sometimes it’s the sad and painful things in life that bring us together in ways joyful moments do not.

When I was a young boy I was angry. My parents separated for a few years and as the last of three children I felt lost in the shuffle. I didn’t feel seen by my family and especially not by my father. This fueled an intense competitive drive I did not know how to control. I was lucky to discover that basketball was a safe place to vent that energy. That anger, and desire to been seen, was my fuel to work hard at practice and compete. As a result of that hard work I felt capable and seen. I look back and see that without the luck of finding sports, the energy I had might have led me into dark, destructive places I would have struggled to escape from.

To get to the point of this rule, harness your demons, I stumbled into harnessing my anger for my advantage, in basketball but also in life. I did it without knowing this rule, so I was lucky. But I learned the lesson well. I discovered that emotions were something I could direct into actions of my choosing. At first it was running up and down the basketball court, lifting weights or practicing the same drill on the court hundreds of times. When I felt anger, frustration, anxiety or any difficult feeling, I had a safe place to put it. And later in life I learned I could apply this lesson to other things, like studying in college, building a career or writing books. Even now when I have difficult feelings, I ask myself: how can I put this energy somewhere that helps me?

But as my therapist said to me recently, we can’t solve emotional issues through practical solutions. Redirecting or harnessing difficult emotions doesn’t change what is causing them to arise in the first place. We have to dig deeper for that. But until then, if I don’t find ways to use the energy of my emotions, if I demonize, avoid or deny them, their energy will go somewhere destructive, to me or to the people I care about. It’s for me to do the work to understand myself well enough to direct my energy towards the kind of life I want to have.