Accepting the Emotional Roller Coaster

In the past month that I’ve been working on my book, which is launching today on Amazon, during the creative process I experienced many highs and lows, and I learned many lessons. But today I want to talk about controlling emotions.
This is perhaps the most important lesson I learned while writing this book because sanity is tied to our emotions. It’s as though emotions and sanity are running a three-legged race together. It’s our job to make sure we’re not dragged in the wrong direction.
Below I’ll discuss the 4 themes that will help you control the very thing that makes you you. Depending where I am in the creative process I’m either laughing or crying.
People often think the creative process looks like this:

This though is not a process, this is a single, beautiful, moment on the journey that the creative process will take you down.
This, is what the creative process looks like. (Credit to Derek Halpern, socialtriggers.com)

I haven’t yet met anyone who’s conquered this process. Every day Stephen King wakes up and faces a blank screen just as everyone else does.
The lows do not go away and neither do the highs. We cannot move the mountains, we just learn to traverse them better. These peaks and valleys happen over long periods of time as well as within an hour. They have their own macro and micro cycles.
As we go through these cycles it’s easy to fall back to wondering why we feel these intense emotions. “Why me?” we think, “No one is going to like my product. Why should I even keep going?”
Remember that these feelings are normal. It is hard to do in the moment but below are some tactics that will combat this situation and allow you to turn your mood around. All of these I learned first hand, and I learned the theory behind the emotional roller coaster through reading.
But to fully understand one must go through it and apply the practices.
Remember, in this situation we’re like mountain climbers. We start our journey, ascend the first mountain, embrace the feeling at the top, look at the next peak and perhaps get a little depressed, then we begin our descent.
The goal is to control the descent.
I always felt fantastic after finishing a chapter. Dopamine flooded over my brain and I felt proud that I had knocked out yet another chapter on my journey to a final product.
Then I would look at my outline and see the unwritten chapters and fall back to earth, remembering to put one foot in front of the other on my way to the next peak.
Rather than stumbling down the mountain uncontrollably and letting the fall keep us there we want to control our descent before moving to the next peak.
The first step is knowing this process exists.
By knowing we can anticipate the descents and accept the cyclical motion of the work. It may not feel good in the moment, but we know this is the nature of the work, and that the tides will change.
Throughout the writing of my book I made sure not to beat myself up if I didn’t hit a self-imposed deadline.
In the past I’ve had a bad habit of applying negative self talk if I didn’t complete something exactly as envisioned. Remember that you are your own ally during this process. I was doing myself no favors with this negative self-talk — but I thought it helped. By becoming our own ally we are more powerful than we could ever be while hosting a known enemy in our mind.
Once I hit my deadline 5 hours late — which sounds inconsequential to some of you — but to me it was a tangible failure. I had missed my deadline.
My goal was March 15th at 12am, but when midnight struck I still had a ways to go. I decided to finish during this session, staying up for another 5 hours to finishing the first draft.
I’d planned a reward for myself if I hit my deadline. A harsh Luke would have said “No, you didn’t make the deadline so no rewards.” I was tempted by that thought but remembered a wise friend who advised me to be easy on myself.
I finished my book and was happy to have completed it. I took Tuesday off, spent the day with my brothers and got lunch with a friend.
It felt great.
The second step is to put habits in place to control our day.
Implement a morning routine (Check out Hal Elrod’s Miracle Morning) and set up timed breaks in your day where you go for walks. It’s really important to have structure and control during these times.
Without control and structure it can be easy to drift from task to task or distraction to distraction only to realize at the end of the day that we didn’t accomplish what we wanted to, which doesn’t help us navigate those valleys.
Here is what my schedule looked like during my creation process:

Daily walks were integral to my productivity. I now do this regularly – take walks because how well they work for me.
The third step is to feel what you are feeling.
As Mark Epstein says in The Trauma of Everyday Life, “When we stop distancing ourselves from the pain in the world, our own or others, we create the possibility of a new experience, one that often surprises because of how much joy, connection, or relief it yields. Destruction may continue, but humanity shines through.”
Learning to embrace emotions is daunting. Most of us, men specifically, are taught to hide our emotions. Therefore many of us try to keep the emotions at bay for as long as possible until they eventually seep through the cracks.
Stop resisting.
This has been a lengthy process for me and it doesn’t happen overnight. I started by talking to a confidante to whom I could express my deep-seated fears and traumas. I urge you to do the same. For me I started with my mom and it has slowly progressed now to a couple of individuals whom I share more private feelings with.
I can clearly remember one night sitting with my mother a couple of years back looking out the window at a thunderstorm, crying.
I told her how I was scared of burning out in business. I was too wrapped up in everything around me to come to a proper conclusion — but the conclusion didn’t matter.
What mattered was that I was finally expressing these feelings. This cleared up some of the fog enveloping my brain. This eventually allowed me to come to my own conclusion on how to solve my burnout problem — learn to respect the ebb and flow.
This was one of the first times I can recall sharing something innately a part of me as a young adult and it’s been a beautiful journey ever since.
During your creative process ask a friend or a family member if you can call them occasionally just to vent. Express to them what you are going through and that it would be valuable and meaningful to talk openly.
Damming the emotions is unhealthy.
Remember that nature always wins. We build walls but nature laughs and knocks them down like Hurricane Sandy did to New York City. Just when we think we are comfortable in our nice NYC loft apartment nature rolls through and reminds us that clean water is not a guarantee.
The same applies to the dams we build. After a while the water will find a crack, break the infrastructure, and knock down our dam causing a giant mess in the process.
This doesn’t have to happen.
Are you in the middle of the creative process and feel like the work is beating you up? Thrash in your bed and scream into your pillow. Be 4 years old again when there was no judgement. No one has to know. And when you do tell people that you cried because you were feeling beaten you may be surprised to see their reactions. Typically people like when others lead first, they will most likely respect you for sharing.
Once you have navigated and felt the feelings that you should be feeling you may feel brighter. Every time I finish sobbing I emerge feeling refreshed. Embrace that feeling too and use it to ascend your next mountain.
The fourth step of this process is a way to pull yourself out of a hole by utilizing a breathing technique.
One day while writing the first draft I had a really hard time bringing myself to do anything. I was in one of the valleys and it was rather paralyzing. I started freaking out about everything. “What if no one cares about my book?” “I have so much to do and I can’t bring myself to do anything.” 
I started having an anxiety attack.
Thankfully I had the wherewithal to step outside and drop everything I was doing to just breathe and meditate. It completely turned me around and felt magical to have that type of control over my anatomy, it was empowering.
The breathing technique I used is called the Wim Hof method. To listen to instruction straight from Wim Hof go here.
After charging your body with oxygen you will not need to breathe immediately, you may be able to hold your breath longer than 2 minutes.
When your anatomy is reminding you that you need fresh oxygen take a big inhale and hold for 10 seconds and then let go.
The excess oxygen stimulates the brain stem including our pineal gland and our amygdala which control hormones that regulate our body.
The list of hormones and functions include but are not limited to:
1) Regulatory sex hormones
2) Melatonin production
3) Seratonin production
4) Adrenaline production
I repeated this technique 3 times and sat in the sun for about 30 minutes focusing on my breath.
It was like someone changed my inner circuitry. I was happy, smiling, and chatty. I had effectively pulled myself out of a bad hole just by focusing on my breath. 
Learning to navigate the mountains is fundamental but it is also important to have control over ourselves in times of chaos.
The first 3 steps focus on the long term and the process of controlling our emotions throughout the peaks and valleys of the creative process. But this 4th step can pull you out of a hole on demand. If you are really feeling down I highly recommend putting this into practice.
As a rule, emotions don’t go away. They are here for the long run and it’s important to learn to embrace that and understand how to control them.
To quote the Dalai Lama, “…it will become obvious that most disturbances are stimulated not by external causes but by such internal events as the arising of disturbing emotions. The best antidote to these sources of disruption will come about through enhancing our ability to handle these emotions ourselves.”
The mountains are here. The peaks are yours to ascend and the valleys are yours to cross. If we learn to do it in a controlled manner it can be a beautiful thing.
Read More By Luke Harris-Gallahue on the ManTalks Blog:
Why I Invite Micro-Dose Suffering Into My Life

This one’s for all of you long-term relationship folks!

While I usually tend to write about how to turn a good relationship into a great relationship (through things like connection exercises, date nights, sexual communication, romantic gestures, overall prioritization, and increasing depth in your communication) today I’m going to talk about something equally as important.

What do you do if your relationship is struggling? What actions can you take when your partner seems more and more emotionally grating to you? Essentially, how do you save a struggling relationship?

Here are six of the highest leverage things that I walk my clients through when they come to me with a question regarding their struggling relationship.

Whether you’ve been dating your partner for three months or three decades, there’s something in this list for everyone.

1. Ask yourself these three questions

Self-reflection is sexy.

On some level, you know that relationships take two people (at the very least) to work well. Whatever problems you’re ruminating on your mind… or whatever things you’re telling yourself are all about them… it’s quite likely that those thoughts are simply inventions in your mind. Your mind’s purpose is to look for drama. If you live exclusively in your mind you will be reduced to fear, anxiety, and worry 24/7. So the following three questions will ground you in reality a bit more firmly.

If you’ve noticed your relationship running off the rails lately, ask yourself these questions with total honesty.

– What do I love about them?

– What have I always loved about them?

– How do they make me a better person?

These three questions lead to a beautiful, overarching reminder of “Oh right! I actually love them like crazy and there’s a LOT of good stuff here that I’m taking for granted. And not only do I love things about them, but I love what they bring to my life.”

If you really can’t think of a single answer for any of them then you might need to read this article.

2. Cultivate depth in your communication and let them in further

If you’re suffering from relationship resentment then it’s quite likely that the depth of your collective communication has been tragically truncated. Three rounds of alliteration in one sentence anyone? I know. I’m amazing.

It happens so, so, so frequently that a client comes to me and says “About a year ago this thing started to bother me in my life, but I didn’t want to bother my partner with it so I kept it to myself… and for the last ten months we’ve been struggling FOR SOME STRANGE REASON!?”

Well, you don’t need a masters degree in relationship psychology to assume that it’s more than a coincidence that your relationship started to suffer when you started keeping your big, scary secrets from your partner.

No matter how naturally intuitive someone is, we can all detect when our partners are withholding information from us.

If you’re afraid to tell your partner something (that you don’t like your job any more, that you don’t feel sexually desirable, that you miss how much you used to touch each other in a non-sexual way, etc.) and it’s weighing heavily on your mind, then your best bet is to TELL THEM. I wrote about this phenomenon recently in my article The One Practice That Saves More Relationships Than Anything Else.

So set aside some time. Tell them you have something to tell them. Tell them you’re afraid to say it. Tell them that you want to tell them about it because you love them so much and you want to get it off of your mind so that you can feel closer to them again.

And if you don’t have any big scary secrets that you’re holding on to, but you would still like to go deeper in your communication with your partner… check out my article 10 Questions To Ask To Go Deep In Your Relationship. There’s some real gems in that piece.

3. Practice the habit of ‘Gratitude Immersion’

So much of your intimate relationship is lost or won in the battle field between your ears. Aka your mind.

Every seed that you plant in your life produces a result. A good seed produces a beneficial result, and a poisonous seed poisons the field.

In your relationship, you can either plant seeds of gratitude or seeds of resentment.

You plant seeds of resentment by score keeping. Keeping track of every time that you did something nice, noble, or awesome for them… while actively ignoring or minimizing the things that your partner did for you.

You plant seeds of gratitude by cultivating the pause between noticing something that your partner did and sitting with it. Don’t just notice “Oh look, they did the dishes.” Really sit with the noticing, acknowledging, and gratitude of the moment. You could stretch that dishes example into, “Wow. My partner loves me so much that they took the time to do their dishes and mine. They know I hate fruit flies and so they did this as an act of love to keep me feeling safe, clean, and loved. They probably even did this because they knew I had a busy night coming up and they didn’t want me to be late for my plans. They love me so much. I am so lucky to be with such a loving, thoughtful partner.”

Gratitude immersion is the ultimate antidote to taking your partner for granted. Do this and you will eradicate a score keeping mindset within a matter of days.

4. Accept them entirely and acknowledge that you can only change yourself

I tend to attract a certain kind of reader/client to my work. A sometimes-anxious, high-achieving, semi-perfectionistic, hyper-intentional kind of person (just like me! Law of attraction whaaaaaat!?).

And one of the most common questions that clients come to me with is “Is my partner the right one for me? Because I’ve noticed some things about them that I don’t love but I’m not sure if I’m being too picky.”

And, when they frame it in that way, the answer, nine times out of ten, is “Yes, you’re being too picky. They sound like a fantastic person, and those tiny details don’t necessarily warrant the severing of the relationship.”

The antidote to this anxious mindset that might be sabotaging your relationships from the inside out? Accept them entirely and acknowledge that you can only change yourself.

Yes we can influence other people’s behaviours… but really, the only sustainable way to do this without being a jerk is to lead by example. Aka do the thing that you want to have more of in your life (go to the gym, read, eat cleaner, etc.) and then see if your partner joins you in that way of behaving of their own free will.

Believe me, it’s much easier to just start going to the gym yourself and asking your partner if they want to join you every 5-10 times then to give them a gym pass as a birthday present (seriously… don’t do that… unless they’ve explicitly asked for it).

So whatever the thing is that you wish they did more of, just do it yourself. If they join you in that activity/behaviour/way of being… great! If not, well, at least you already have more of that thing in your life because you’re doing it on your own.

5. Plan a sex date

Sex is integral to a thriving relationship. By sex I don’t necessarily just mean penetrative intercourse. Sex can mean a billion different things to a billion different people.

Sex is often the first thing to go when a relationship starts struggling… which is unfortunate. I like to think of sex as your body’s way of communicating. If you stopped verbally talking to your partner for three weeks, you would expect that it would be highly likely that your sense of connection would diminish. It’s the same way with sex. Sex is another form of communication, and can be just as important to your relationship as going deep in your conversations.

Good, connected sex can offer breakthroughs in your relationship… in your collective ability to communicate with each other… in your collective desire to want to work through a major emotional roadblock that you both might be experiencing.

So put it in the calendar. Plan an extended sex date. Do some spoiling sessions.

Phones off. No TV. Hire a babysitter for your kids or pets. Get all of your distractions out of the way.

Make love, in whatever way makes the most sense to the both of you. And you don’t have to wait for all of your communication to be at 100% before you can have deeply fulfilling sex. Often you need to sexually connect first, and then communicate afterwards.

6. Clear out old resentments

In the course of most relationships, little things tend to build up over time.

Maybe they did or said something that hurt you months ago. Maybe they forgot a special date or anniversary. Maybe they unknowingly embarrassed you when you were out with your friends.

Whatever resentments you might be holding on to, it’s time to move past them in order for your relationship to be able to go to it’s next layer of depth.

First, do your forgiveness work to remove the majority of the emotional charge surrounding the event on your side. For a lot of people, this is easier said than done. Ask yourself “How could what they did have been coming from a place of love? How could I have misunderstood what happened? How could I look at that event in a different way that would assume the best of them?”

By putting that initial wedge of doubt in there that makes you question whether or not you know the full story (hint: you don’t… you only know your interpretation of that event) makes you a lot more receptive to whatever your partner has to say about it.

Once you’ve done all of the work that you’re able to do on your side, bring it to your partner and invite a dialogue around that thing that still hurts for you. Tell them “Hey, I know that it was a little while ago, but I’ve been thinking about something that still feels a little bit unresolved for me. I’m doing my best not to hold it against you, and I’d love to hear your side of things regarding _____. The story I’m telling myself about it is that (this happened) and (that happened). Can you tell me what was happening in that situation on your side?”

It could be difficult to air your metaphorical old dirty laundry, but it might just be one of the most freeing things that you’ve ever done for yourself and your relationship.

Make Your Relationship A Priority

Your relationship slid down the priority list. I get it. You get it. Your significant other gets it.

You started the relationship, guns a blazin’, and you promised that you’d put each other above anything else in your lives. And then you allowed time to erode that promise. More accurately, you allowed your decisions to erode that promise.

First it was your career. And then your health. And then friends, family, kids, pets, Netflix, or any other number of things. Whatever got in the way, you allowed it to get in the way.

Now it’s time to take your relationship back into your own hands and declare “I care about my relationship. I want it to work as well as it used to in the beginning. In fact, I want it to be significantly better than it was in the beginning.”

And that’s amazing. Good for you. You deserve to have a thriving love relationship in your life. It all starts with your intention (and is carried out in your actions).

If you need any help in your process you can check out some of my books on intentional relationships here, or you can reach out and work with me directly by clicking here.

Read More By [and about] Jordan Gray on the ManTalks blog:

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