I often find myself caught up in distractions when I’m feeling overwhelmed. It creates a sense of numbness. Maybe you’ve noticed it too. When emotions start to rise, there’s a natural instinct to look for a way out.
Enter Distraction: an urge that comes in many forms, and some of them might surprise you. Think about it: how often do you catch yourself engaging in activities that feel like just…white noise?
From overcommitting to tasks or projects, to mindlessly scrolling through social media, procrastinating, or even binge-watching Netflix for hours on end—the ways we distract ourselves are endless. Sometimes, we even turn to online shopping when there’s something lurking below the surface that we’d rather not feel. (Guilty!)
Interestingly, distractions often aren’t random. They arise when there’s an emotion we’re avoiding—something uncomfortable or difficult we just don’t want to confront. Whether it’s stress, anger, sadness, anxiety, or a sense of being stuck, distractions offer a temporary escape.
We can disguise our distractions as positive habits—like overworking or over-exercising—because they seem productive or even admirable on the surface. Yet, distractions can also manifest in less socially accepted forms, such as substance misuse, compulsive sexual behavior, or excessive pornography use. When we engage in these activities to avoid facing our emotions, we miss the opportunity they present us with to truly process them.
Here’s the thing: while distractions may help us numb out in the short term, they don’t allow us to truly connect with or process our emotions. Instead, by distracting ourselves, we merely distance ourselves from our inner experiences.
Suppressing intense feelings by avoiding them is truly exhausting over the longer term.
The metaphor I like to use here is shaking up a bottle of fizzy Coke. When you keep the cap on, the pressure builds. But if you slowly release the fizz, allowing it to escape little by little, the tension eases. Processing our emotions works the same way. Rather than suppressing them, when we take the time to feel and release them gradually, we prevent the explosive overflow and create space to heal.
Distractions don’t help us feel our feelings; they don’t aid in processing or resolving what we’re experiencing, and they separate us from what I refer to as our felt sense. Pushing our emerging emotional experiences down may provide a temporary solution, but they will eventually bubble back up, sometimes even stronger than before.
To a certain extent, distraction is necessary. Imagine if we had to feel everything at full force all at once—it would be completely overwhelming. Distractions offer a break, helping us cope in the moment by temporarily easing emotional intensity. The key is developing an intimacy with our feelings (what I call the felt sense) so that we needn't to avoid them at one end of the spectrum or collapse into them at the other. We must learn to allow distractions when they are useful, while also embracing emotional processing.
Take care of yourself, and remember, you’re not alone in this. We all have our moments of distraction—but the more we notice them, the more we can grow beyond them. In my experience (both personal and professional) this journey is never linear and rarely perfect—and that’s its beauty.
May your life be a masterpiece in progress, as we are always becoming.
Blessings, Lauran 🙏
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