I Never Learned How to Handle the Big 7
~1200 words. 5 minute read.
I am a little torn about one very specific part of my upbringing: I cannot recall that my parents ever went deep into feelings with us. Any emotional distress was treated, by and large, like a scrape on the knee. A little bit of empathy (real empathy to be sure, not faked, but brief), followed by a band-aid or solution, and a lot of looking ahead and moving-forward-pep-talk.
My mom sometimes invited it, but my dad, whose influence over me was much greater, was not one to dwell with me on uncertainty, or despair, or regret. Not when I was younger anyways, which makes our time together today very exciting, because I have gained the courage and the tools to have these conversations with him and he has softened his stance and allows mutual reflection.
Big feelings and the threat of mental distress were not dismissed, rather it was always something to quickly move past or away from, to not fall deeper into a hole (maybe we’re British?!). I am not sure if this is why I cannot remember ever having to deal with prolonged mental distress in my childhood and adolescence. Or maybe I was just so blessed with friendship, happiness, and probably dumb luck, that my parents’ ability to detect and heal it wouldn’t have mattered either way. What I do know is that in my adult life, this lack of exploration of the Big 7 has led me to vastly underestimate the impact of mental unwellness. I am bad at detecting it in myself and in others. Once I am confronted with it, I do what my parents did: Find a band-aid and apply it with lots of pep talk.
I just finished reading ‘Big Feelings – How to be okay when things are not okay’ by Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy. I learned A LOT. First and foremost, the ‘help’ I have provided in the past (to myself and others) may not have been as helpful as I’d hoped. I learned that time is an unbelievably important factor and that oftentimes there is no such thing as completely healing. Life leaves us with scars. Healing can be out of the question. Coping is what we can hope for. And no matter how much I want to move on to fixing things, healing and coping both tend to begin with allowing yourself to feel it. How scary is that?!
The Big 7 are: Uncertainty, Comparison, Anger, Burnout, Perfectionism, Despair, and Regret.
I highly recommend reading the book. Liz Fosslien’s illustrations alone are worth it. And it’s only 200 pages, achievable in a weekend. Due to all our individual circumstances, every chapter will speak to each reader differently and the book can only offer anecdotal evidence. Yet, I still found myself pausing and re-reading many passages, sometimes out loud to my wife, because of how on-point the descriptions were. The authors don’t tire of pointing out that professional help is the way to go for readers who feel overwhelmed and stuck.
The educational value of reading it was outsized for me. The recognition that everyone has felt these, that they are really part of the human condition, makes the whole topic very accessible.
It was #7, regret, that I wanted to learn most about. Studies of day-to-day conversations show that people talk about regret more than any other emotion except love (those two are oftentimes related). Regret scares me due to its lingering quality. Endlessly contemplating the road not taken, replaying past decisions over and over in my head – these are obviously dangerous, paralyzing mind traps. Researchers have found that feeling regret and being afraid of feeling regret activate the same parts of the brain. Empirically speaking, I say that’s true.
I knew that the chapter on regret would have some good news though.
“While regret can ache, it can also be a powerful internal compass for how to live an engaged, meaningful life.”
My wife’s grandmother passed away recently. An event like this triggers, among many other things, contemplation about what constitutes a life well lived. Recently, I have stumbled upon two approaches to answering this question that I found to be actionable:
Warren Buffet was asked for advice on how to avoid major mistakes. His answer: “Write your own obituary and figure out hot to live up to it.”
Jeff Bezos was making good money in banking before he walked away from his career to start selling books online. Asked why he took that risk he described something he calls the ‘Regret Minimization Framework’. It’s a mental model for decision making and interpretation of the world. It starts with the question: “In X years, will I regret NOT doing this?”
Most of you will see the strength of this question immediately: It detaches you from the moment, is an assist to break status quo bias, and rests on research that suggests that we rarely regret having tried and failed (compared to never having tried at all).
I find immense comfort in the fact that all these feelings are inside all of us. They are universal in the truest sense of the word, quite possibly transcending time and space. Anderson Cooper interviewed Stephen Colbert for his podcast ‘All There Is’, in an episode titled ‘Grateful for Grief’. In ‘Big Feelings’, grief is presented as a close relative to despair. To think that we could ever interpret such a painful emotion with gratitude is unimaginable, yet something we all desperately desire for our own emotional wellbeing, especially as grief inevitably approaches with the passing of time, and the passing of loved ones.
Lastly, my mind rests easier knowing that all these alternate lives have not materialized because I chose this one. Having to say no to something because you are saying yes to something else is a fact of life. What use is there in lamenting it?
I am leaving those who made this far in this post with this quote from ‘Big Feelings’:
“Each of us must contend with the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. You stand on the ship that is your life and watch the ghost sip – all the choices you didn’t make – sail away. That ship is important and beautiful, but it’s not yours. All you can do is learn to gracefully salute it from the shore.”
