The other day, I got activated into some feelings of shame, which thankfully doesn’t happen to me very often these days. What I noticed was that the experience offered me an opportunity to practice something I teach clients all the time: how to notice when distressing thoughts and feelings charge their way into awareness and then to avoid feeding them by creating a further “story” or obsessing about what happened. As you know better than I can put into words, this isn’t easy to do.

What I noticed as I found myself suddenly immersed in thoughts and feelings of shame was how deeply willing I had to be *not* to add to them. It was hard not to spiral into thinking of all the related ways in which I could feel shame, or to build on my experience by adding dimensions of what I imagined other people thought of me. (And, as we all know, shame is one of those feelings that often has nothing to do with anything outside ourselves – it comes from our private world of meaning and interpretation, often completely unrelated to what other people think or feel about us.)

As I continued to bring awareness to my urge to feed the shame, and my choice not to do so, I noticed that the feelings and thoughts began to subside. At those moments when they again jumped into the foreground of my awareness, by refusing to add to them they again subsided. I discovered how relatively quickly I could rebound when I didn’t add anything to the shame thoughts, and how surprisingly soon the whole experience passed from my awareness as I went on to other things. Now, if I think back on the original event, it doesn’t seem like anything shameful, and I can see how I fell into old patterns of thinking and feeling that aren’t real to me in my present life. I also discovered how useful it is to shift attention to something that supports and nourishes awareness of things happening in present-day life that are going right, or that reflect present-day competencies, or to shift attention to something inspiring and uplifting.

And so, this week’s experiment invites you to play with not feeding distressing thoughts and feelings that arise in the course of engaging the stuff of life. There’s nothing in the experiment that says you won’t have distressing thoughts and feelings. Instead, it offers an opportunity to notice what it’s like to catch yourself spiraling into feeding, adding to, expanding the experience with further, related thoughts. Then, the experiment invites you to notice what happens when you turn your attention to something in the present day, something that nourishes you or adds to your sense of present-day self and well-being.

As with all the experiments, there’s no right answer here. Instead, there’s an invitation to strengthen a particular psychological muscle, one that contributes to a greater sense of resilience in the presence of challenging experiences, thoughts, and feelings. If you think of is as muscle building, it may be easier to engage the experiment without feelings of judgment, and without any performance demands. It’s all practice, practice, practice, and our psyches give us ample opportunities to revisit this kind of skill-building.