How to Release Negative Energy Before It Overwhelms You

What you tell yourself every day will lift you up or tear you down. Choose wisely.

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Know how you could be having an amazing day one minute and a horrible day the next?

Like the time a friend made a careless remark. Or that time your music streaming service selected a song that reminded you of a negative experience. Or the day you became infected with a random wacky thought (like nobody will like you because you have stained teeth) that snowballs into a full-blown crisis.

Yeah, we all experience times like this. Sometimes on a daily basis. And it’s incredibly frustrating because of how quickly it can happen. So quickly that most of us don’t have a clue what’s happening to us before we’re awash in negative energy.

We like to think of ourselves as rock-solid individuals. But often our experiences are more like leaves getting picked up and blown around by small gusts of wind.

Before we know it, every little thing fills us with dread and overwhelm. Casual conversations become fraught with danger. Replying to an email feels as difficult doing calculus. And going outside your house can feel as deadly as stepping on the moon without a spacesuit.

Such negative episodes can last for hours, even days if we let it. But life is just too short to devote large portions of it to such needless suffering.

How can we gain better control over our feelings? How can we learn to release negative energy before we’re overwhelmed?

The care cycle

While attending a marriage intensive experience with my wife, I learned about a pretty effective strategy for diffusing negative emotions in intimate relationships. It’s called the care cycle and it can be applied to just about any situation where negative emotions may arise.

It’s a five-step strategy, each beginning with the letter A. This makes the steps easy to memorize and put into practice.

Here they are:

1. Aware

The first step involves becoming aware of your physiological state. What is your body doing? Are your muscles tense? Is your heart beating fast? Are you shallow breathing? Are you sweating?

The wonderful effect of becoming aware of your body is that it gets you outside your head. Your body tends to react well before your mind realizes what’s happening. If you stay inside your head, you miss important cues to what’s going on in the moment.

By becoming aware of the body, you have a chance to catch the negative energy before it gets out of control.

2. Accept

For most of us, once our minds catch up to what’s happening to our bodies, we get mad at ourselves for feeling the way we do. We also tend to blame our external environment or other people.

This step is meant to address these problems by giving us permission to accept and take responsibility for our feelings.

If you’re feeling angry, embarrassed, or sad, just acknowledge how you’re feeling in the moment. Understand no one can “make you angry.”

3. Allow/Ask

In this step, you get to exercise the option of allowing others to walk with you and assist you in processing your negative emotions. 

You can do this through prayer or seeking the listening ear of a trusted friend or family member. The truth is that you don’t have to go it alone. 

Even if it feels more vulnerable to reach out, doing so can have immediate positive benefits.

4. Attend

Here you get to attend to your feelings. You can do so by asking yourself questions such as: What am I feeling? Is this familiar? Am I making my feelings bigger than they need to be? 

What is the truth? (i.e. What story are you telling yourself? E.g. “When small talk with friends is awkward it means they don’t like me”).

What is the Truth? (i.e. What is the real truth of the situation? E.g. “I don’t know what’s going on in that person’s life at the moment. Maybe they’re distracted, upset, tired, overwhelmed with their own thoughts”). 

What do I want? 

What are my options?

These last two questions are powerful because they help you see that you are not as powerless as you might think or feel.

5. Act

This is where you get to create your own care package to help you create the feeling states you want and release the negative energy.

Your care package can include prayer, meditation, journaling, listening to or playing music, taking walks in nature, exercise, reading, volunteering, taking deep breaths, medicating pain, hugging, eating, or resting/sleeping

The possibilities are endless. Take some time to come up with as many self-care options as you can muster. When you run out of things, push yourself to come up with a few more, even if they seem outlandish.

The more options you give yourself, the more easily you release negativity and embrace positivity.

Take care of yourself

How do you release negative energy before it overwhelms you? You must be willing to take care of yourself. 

Become aware. Accept it all. Don’t be afraid to ask. Attend to your feelings. And take action. 

If you commit to these steps and develop your own care plan, you’ll no longer feel like a leaf blowing in the wind. 

And negative energy simply won’t have a chance to stick to you as it once did.

So what are you waiting for? Click here to begin working on your own care plan.