Don’t Change That Radio Station: Working With Your Inner Emotional Landscape
By Joree Rose, LMFT
Imagine your emotional life as a radio. Dozens of stations are available at any given moment — anxiety, contentment, irritability, warmth, grief, joy, restlessness, peace. Throughout any given day, the dial moves. Sometimes it moves because of what’s happening around you. Sometimes it seems to move for no discernible reason at all.
Most of us, when an uncomfortable station comes on, immediately reach for the dial. We change the station as fast as we can — through distraction, busyness, food, scrolling, a glass of wine, a plunge into work. Anything to not have to sit with the static.
And it works, temporarily. The uncomfortable feeling recedes. We feel better, or at least less uncomfortable, for a while.
The problem is that we never learn to actually work with the difficult stations. We just get faster at changing them. And the feelings we’re so determined to avoid continue to drive our behavior in ways we don’t fully recognize — because we’ve never actually sat still long enough to understand them.
What Happens When We Always Change the Station
Avoidance works in the short term and compounds in the long term. This is one of the most consistent findings in clinical psychology.
When we consistently avoid difficult emotional states, several things happen. The feelings don’t go away — they go underground, where they influence our choices, our reactions, and our relationships in ways that are less visible and therefore harder to address. Our tolerance for discomfort decreases over time, meaning we need to reach for the dial faster and more often. And we never develop the capacity to actually regulate these emotions — because regulation requires being present with the emotion, not absent from it.
The avoidance strategies themselves often become problems in their own right. The drinking that started as a way to ease anxiety. The overworking that began as a way to escape relational pain. The numbing that replaced genuine rest. These are the dial-changing strategies that gradually take on a life of their own.
Staying With the Station
The mindfulness instruction — across virtually every tradition that teaches it — is essentially this: stay with the station.
Not forever. Not passively. Not in a way that means drowning in the feeling or feeding it through rumination. But long enough to actually be present with what’s there. To notice: what is this emotion, actually? Where do I feel it in my body? What is it telling me?
Emotions are information. They are the body’s way of signaling something about your environment, your relationships, your needs, your values. When you change the station the moment an uncomfortable emotion arises, you cut off the signal before you can receive the message.
What It Means to Work With an Emotion
Working with a difficult emotion — rather than away from it — involves a few key moves:
Naming it. Research shows that labeling an emotion — identifying it with a specific word — reduces its intensity in the brain. Not “I feel bad” but “I feel anxious” or “I feel lonely” or “I feel like I’m not enough.” Specificity matters.
Locating it in the body. Where do you feel this? Tight throat, heavy chest, hollow stomach, clenched jaw? Bringing attention to the physical sensation grounds the experience and often makes it more workable.
Getting curious rather than critical. Instead of “why am I feeling this again” said with frustration, try “I wonder what this is about” said with genuine openness. Curiosity changes the relationship to the emotion entirely.
Allowing it to be there without acting on it immediately. You don’t have to do something about every feeling the moment it arises. Sometimes the most useful response is simply to let it be present, to acknowledge it, and to wait. Many emotions, when genuinely allowed rather than fought, move through on their own.
The Station You Keep Avoiding
Most people have one. The emotion that they are most practiced at changing away from — the one that triggers the fastest and most automatic dial-reaching.
For many people it’s anxiety. For others it’s sadness, or loneliness, or a particular flavor of shame. Whatever yours is, it’s worth asking: what would happen if you stayed with it for just a little longer than you usually do? What might it be trying to tell you? What might become possible if you learned to work with it rather than away from it?
The dial will always be there. You can always change the station. But what’s waiting on the difficult ones is often exactly the information you need.
For support in learning to work with difficult emotions rather than away from them, schedule a free consultation to learn more about individual therapy.
Want a Higher Baseline of Calm, Confidence, and Control? Start Here…
😡 For info on Dr. John’s Ultimate Online Anger Management Class (which has over 25,000 graduates!), visit his High Performer Shop.
🧠 Top tools for emotional mastery and high tech execs from the best executive coach in the San Francisco Bay Area:
💬 The best podcast for relationships and those who want to create a happier, safer love life:
👉 For the tremendous work Dr. John & Joree are doing to heal relationships, visit their top couples counseling site:
🎙️ Straight talk on emotional mastery, relationship skill, inner peace & real strength on one of the best podcasts for high-performing men who still feel dissatisfied in life:
🌱 Joree’s expert work on mindfulness, therapy & transformation from the best therapist for women near you:
💬 A top podcast for women who want to get unstuck in life and make the next 30 years better than the last 30: