Dear Misery,
Why keeping a misery diary might make life a little less miserable
Have you ever noticed how misery can take over your day or even week? Maybe you have a bad meeting. Someone says something that irritates you. Your carefully constructed plans fall apart. Or perhaps you wake up one morning feeling thoroughly miserable, without being entirely sure why. And then the feeling starts to spread.
The bad meeting becomes a bad morning. The bad morning becomes a bad day. Before long, you're questioning your career choices, your relationships, and whether you should have bought that expensive coffee machine. All because someone scheduled a meeting that could have been an email.
And our brains are rather good at this. When something unpleasant happens, we can find ourselves repeatedly revisiting it. We replay conversations, imagine alternative outcomes and construct elaborate arguments with people who aren't actually in the room.
Psychologists call this rumination.
It's rather like having a particularly unpleasant guest staying in your head. They eat all your biscuits, complain about the furniture and show absolutely no inclination to leave. And the more attention you give them, the more comfortable they become.
Your brain on misery
There is some interesting neuroscience behind rumination which has identified associations with activity in the brain's default mode network, a collection of interconnected regions involved in processes including thinking about ourselves, remembering the past and imagining the future (all useful capabilities). Without them, we would struggle to learn from experience or plan what happens next. But they can also contribute to our getting caught in repetitive, negative thinking.
But guess what! We can change our relationship with those thoughts and feelings.
I am miserable. Or am I?
Consider these three statements.
"I am miserable."
"I am feeling miserable."
"I'm noticing that I'm feeling miserable."
They appear to be saying much the same thing. But there is a subtle difference.
In the first statement, misery has become part of my identity. I am miserable.
In the second, I recognise misery as something I'm experiencing.
In the third, I am observing the experience itself. which has created a little psychological distance between myself and the feeling. And that distance matters.
Research by psychologist Ethan Kross and his colleagues suggests that the language we use when reflecting on difficult experiences can influence how we respond to them. Even something as simple as referring to ourselves by name, rather than using "I", can help us gain perspective (all those 3rd person humble brags on LinkedIn begin to make more sense now). There is also research showing that naming our emotions can change how our brains respond to emotionally unpleasant experiences. In other words, the simple act of recognising and describing what we're feeling may help reduce some of its emotional intensity.
Of course, this doesn't mean that saying "I'm noticing I'm miserable" three times will magically transform your afternoon. But it does suggest that we have some influence over how we relate to our emotional experiences.
Whic brings me to an interesting idea.
The misery diary
Most of us have heard about gratitude journals. Write down three things you're grateful for every evening and, over time, you may start noticing more of the good things in your life.
It's a useful practice, but what about the other stuff? Like the frustrations, disappointments, anxieties and occasional moments when you'd quite like to throw your laptop out of the window?
What if we gave those experiences somewhere to go?
Enter the misery diary.
The idea is simple. Rather than attempting to suppress an unpleasant feeling, take a few minutes to write about it. Express it, describe what happened, what you're experiencing and what you notice about your response.
And the important part? Write as an observer, rather than becoming completely immersed in the experience. For example, instead of writing:
"My boss is an idiot. That meeting was a complete waste of time. Nobody listens to me, and I'm thoroughly fed up."
You might write:
"Andrew noticed that he became frustrated during the meeting. He felt that his contribution wasn't being heard. He also noticed that he continued thinking about the conversation for some time afterwards."
Same experience. But a different perspective which creates room for curiosity.
What was it about the meeting that triggered the frustration?
Was it the behaviour of the other person?
Was it an expectation that wasn't met?
Was it something that had been building for some time?
Or was Andrew simply hangry? (Never underestimate the emotional impact of missing lunch)
The purpose to become curious about what we're experiencing rather than cataloguing our grievances or convince ourselves that everything is wonderful.
A small experiment in misery
If you fancy giving this a try, here's a simple experiment.
For the next seven days, whenever you notice yourself feeling particularly frustrated, unhappy or miserable, spend five minutes writing about it.
You don't need a special notebook, an expensive fountain pen or a subscription to an app that promises to transform your emotional wellbeing. A piece of paper will do.
Try answering four questions.
What happened? Describe the event as objectively as you can.
What am I noticing? Name the feelings, thoughts and physical sensations that are present.
What might an observer notice? Describe your experience from a little distance, perhaps using your own name.
What, if anything, needs my attention? Is there something to learn, something to change, a conversation to have or perhaps something to let go of?
Then close the diary (that's important) because the intention is to develop perspective, rather than spend the rest of the afternoon producing a comprehensive catalogue of everything that's wrong with your life.
You can also revisit your entries at the end of the week.
Are there patterns?
Do certain situations repeatedly produce the same emotional response?
Are there things you can influence?
Are there things you're attempting to control that are simply outside your control?
And, perhaps most importantly, are you starting to recognise the difference between experiencing misery and being defined by it?
PLEASE NOTE If writing repeatedly makes you feel worse or leaves you more caught up in distress, stop the experiment. The objective is perspective, not more rehearsal of painful experiences.
And what about the workplace?
There's another dimension to this that I think deserves some attention.
Modern organisations spend an extraordinary amount of time encouraging employees to develop resilience. Wellbeing programmes, mindfulness sessions, resilience workshops and occasionally a webinar about managing stress, thoughtfully scheduled during someone's lunch break. We encourage people to take responsibility for their emotional wellbeing. And there is value in that.
But I sometimes wonder whether we're asking people to become better at coping with environments that could themselves benefit from some attention.
An employee who feels overwhelmed by competing priorities might benefit from learning to regulate their emotional responses. They might also benefit from having fewer competing priorities. Someone who feels frustrated because they have little autonomy might benefit from developing greater self-awareness. They might also benefit from being given some autonomy.
And someone who feels miserable because their calendar contains seven consecutive meetings might benefit from a misery diary. Although cancelling two of the meetings might be a rather more effective intervention.
There is a danger that we turn every unpleasant experience into an individual development opportunity and sometimes our emotions are telling us something useful about the environment we're operating in.
The challenge is to listen without becoming consumed by the message.
For leaders, this raises a question.
When someone on your team appears frustrated, withdrawn or unhappy, is your first instinct to help them become more resilient?
Or are you curious about what might be happening around them? Both questions have their place. But asking only the first risks overlooking something important.
Making room for misery
I'm increasingly interested in the idea that we can improve our relationship with difficult experiences by learning to notice them. Noticing creates the possibility of understanding.
And understanding creates the possibility of choice. Choice creates the possibility of doing something different.
A misery diary is one way to practise this.
It gives us an opportunity to acknowledge what's happening without allowing the experience to become our entire identity.
Of course, there will still be difficult days. People will continue to irritate us. Plans will fall apart. Meetings will be scheduled that could have been emails. And occasionally we will simply feel miserable. That's part of being human.
But perhaps, with a little practice, we can learn to give misery a seat at the table without allowing it to chair the meeting. And if nothing else, at least we'll have something interesting to write about.
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