It seems proven that grief, or sadness alone, can make you impatient. Whether we take advantage of the opportunity for emotional growth at the same time is up to each of us.
Those who feel depressed are advised to be cautious. Especially when it comes to important decisions. Because if Harvard researcher Jennifer Lerner and her colleagues in the U.S. are to be believed, a sad underlying mood has an impact on our monetary decisions.
Around 600 trial participants were asked to decide whether they would receive a certain amount of money immediately or first 3 months later. Those who were in a melancholy mood preferred the immediate gift of money more often than those who were in a neutral mood; and thus accepted a financial loss.
Gloom and melancholy seem to cause a subliminal longing in us for quick rewards, scientists say. The thesis is strengthened by a further investigation. This one is about food. For while test subjects answered a questionnaire about their eating habits, they were handed sweets. And lo and behold, neutral or positive-minded participants ate fewer sweets than the sad-minded ones.
Jennifer Lerner feels vindicated, concluding that grief and sadness make us more prone to impulsive decisions and actions.
But, the extent to which we live through and endure our sad moods or grief, or calibrate ourselves at times, is always up to us. So what do we do with our state of mind?
The important thing to understand here is that we have a real choice. Thanks to effective self-coaching with EMDR, we have the opportunity to influence our emotional and mental state.
Thus, remaining in a negative frame of mind with possible adverse consequences from our resulting spontaneous and thoughtless actions is not fate but rather our own decision; albeit primarily an unconscious one that needs to be realized and reconsidered.
It may sometimes be useful to dwell in sadness and brooding in order to live through our feelings as well, and to get to know ourselves and our moods better. Only how long is reasonable? We may all find an answer to this for ourselves. Ultimately, we should all be able to explore our capacity for suffering to some degree. For therein lies precisely an opportunity for each and every one of us to grow emotionally. However, if the perceived suffering or stress threatens to become too great, it may be advisable to intervene at this point with a self-coaching application. Of course, we do not use the classical EMDR process but the “coached” form for everyday sensitivities.
Thanks to the simplicity of the method, a coaching intervention with EMDR and the REMSTIM 3000 is applicable in almost any situation for almost all of us (see important information).
In doing so, we follow the guide – Self-coaching with EMDR in 6 steps. Unlike coaching with a coach, we can do without instructions from the coach, who only then becomes familiar with our topic and how we feel. Because familiar we are with our feelings and thoughts at that moment certainly. And so we simply decide for a self-coaching session and start with the topic that moves us most at the moment; and are already in the middle of the 1st step of self-coaching: determining the topic.
