I have to admit – a few days ago, I had something close to a complete emotional breakdown.

The world felt like a hostile, dark place. I felt like I didn’t deserve success, I felt like I was being stretched thin since my energy is being spent in so many different ways, and I felt like there was no way out of the darkness and sadness that I felt for myself and the world.

The breakdown started when I couldn’t bring myself to do any work. I was paralyzed by anxiety. Did I try to fight it and push through? No. I’ve learned the signs of an impending breakdown over the years, and I’ve also learned that the best approach is not to fight the breakdown, but to welcome it with open arms and be swallowed whole by it. Resisting does no good. Only by embracing all emotions can we feel their impermanence and let them go.

I’m sure you all are thinking – “As a personal development junkie/blogger, you still have emotional breakdowns? How is that possible, given that you’re supposed to be excellent at managing your life and your emotions?”

Yes, I have breakdowns, and I’m sure everyone else who blogs about it does as well. Just because we talk about how to reach ideals doesn’t mean we’re experiencing those ideals all the time. In fact, since we (or at least I) preach about the value of experiencing a full range of emotions, I’d say that it’s healthy for us to experience negative emotions, and even have a severe outburst like the one I had.

Lessons Learned From the Brink of Disaster

1. Your emotional state dictates your “level” or “tier” of thinking.

After I had my breakdown, I went and played one of the best hockey games I’ve played in a long time. Why? After my breakdown, I let go of all the expectations I had for myself – I let myself “start over” in every project I had – and I simply played my game. The result? Great. We won against one of the best teams in our league. Before I left for my game, I hated playing hockey, as I really stopped having fun playing it. During our game and after the win, I realized I had fun, because I had let go of all the expectations I placed on myself.

Similarly, before I left, during my breakdown, I saw everything in a negative light. I was worried about my college acceptances, I was worried that none of the work I was doing (including work on this site) actually mattered, and I was sick of everything. I honestly wanted to curl up into a ball on my bed and vegetate for the rest of my life.

However, after the win, I felt elated, and everything reverted back to the positive light that I was used to seeing the world in. I was proud of my work on this site, I realized I had fun doing the things I was doing, and life felt good again.

The difference? Our emotional states dictate on what “level” we think at. When we’re feeling negative emotionally, we only look at the bad things in our lives. We make mountains out of molehills and exaggerate the problems that we have. When we’re feeling positive, we breeze over our problems, and consider them non-issues. We look at things positively and enjoy things for what they are.

When you’re in a negative state, as I was, it’s impossible to reason with you. I read over some of my posts on staying positive and the things I wrote felt like lies. Everything I wrote about staying positive and walking through the world with a sense of ease and confidence seemed like bullshit to me. All of my favorite inspirational quotes – and even my personal recenterer – couldn’t cure me. They didn’t even make sense to me. Does that mean that the things I wrote aren’t true? No. I still stand by them, but it’s impossible to reason with a mind that wants to wallow in sadness and negative emotion.

2. Don’t dig up the good seeds you’ve already planted; wait to regain your composure before you make any major changes to your life.

Following from lesson #1, take care to maintain a little bit of perspective and do not take any major action when you’re in a state of total emotional turmoil. Your emotions will kill your ability to make rational decisions. If you let yourself make any major decisions that could change the course of your life, you will make decisions you will come to regret. While I don’t have a personal story of my own where this has happened, I’m telling you that, when you’re feeling your worst, you’re going to want to sabotage yourself and ruin everything you’ve worked hard for.

Don’t let yourself do that. Don’t dig up the good seeds you’ve planted and wait for your emotions to pass before taking any action. Coolheadedness always prevails.

3. Your energy is finite. We need to spend time just “being”.

Lately, I’ve been bogged down, and haven’t had much time to create – which has killed my mood. It’s tough to find time to create or do anything else besides going to school or hockey, since they, on an average weekday, take up a mind-boggling 11 hours of my waking time, minimum. Take away a couple of hours for morning and nightly rituals, and I only have about 3 hours of free time a day, which is usually consumed by homework or reading.

That means I don’t have much time to create (I operate best when I have long blocks to let my mind meander and find the best solutions to problems) or read blogs or participate on social media – stuff that I enjoy doing, but not when I’m under pressure to do so. Scheduling those things in on a calendar-based system has made me more productive, but it’s also made me much more stressed out since I’m switching tasks so often.

I’m starting to figure out a couple of things – 1) “Specializing” on a certain project for an entire day is probably better than switching projects on-the-fly all the time (for me and my sanity, at least), and 2) I need to schedule in large blocks of downtime for me to recharge and just be me. Just being me should, ideally, involve me, a cup of tea, The Art of Looking Sideways or Linchpin or Meditations or Borges’s Collected Fictions, a pen, and a nice, Moleskine notebook.

Note: notice how I’m going to be consuming very little when I choose to “just be”. I’m going to unplug from everything, except from those books, because they are consistent providers of value to me. I’ll do my best to prevent constant consumption during “being” time, even though I already take about 20 minutes to meditate every day. Still, I feel like meditation isn’t good enough on its own to preserve my sanity. A period of time where I can drift off and create (writing in a notebook) sounds like something I need badly.

4. Do not hide from your emotions. You can’t – we all need to release emotions sometime.

Like I said before, it’s impossible to hide from your emotions, and if you feel a huge swell coming up, don’t resist it. Let it out, unless your emotions are going to make you do something that you’ll regret later. Ideally, you want to experience a breakdown alone or with someone you trust… And when you get to your breaking point, do not resist anything. Let it all out.

If you resist it, you’ll keep building up the emotional burden to be unleashed some other time… When it could be messy. Don’t wait for that time and release whenever you feel the buildup of negative emotion starting to weigh you down.

My symptoms for an impending breakdown? Lack of creativity, massive resistance to starting anything (procrastination), heightened anxiety, repetitive negative thought loops, and lack of motivation/inspiration. Your mileage may vary, but it’s important to keep those things in mind.

Closing

If you feel yourself moving along the path to an emotional breakdown – or are even going through a really rough time where your world seems to be turned upside down – do not reist it. You need to release the built-up negativity that’s inside of you – if you don’t, it’s going to come back to bite you.

No one wants to feel bad – nevermind feeling like the world is going to collapse on them (how I feel when I experience near-breakdowns) – but it is, in my opinion, a necessary evil.

The key to letting yourself experience these is to limit the damage they cause you. Cease all decision-making. “Zoom out” a bit, gain some perspective, and realize that the negative thoughts you’re having aren’t true, no matter how true they appear. Know that you’re just trapped in a lower level of thinking and that you have to release your emotions in order to allow your mind to think on a higher level.

Let yourself open up. To be vulnerable is to be strong.

Pull yourself through the breakdown, because even if your mind can’t see it, there is a better place for you waiting on the other side.