Are you Feeling Down? 4 Ideas to Manage Negative Emotions and Keep Up Productivity

Dear Real Academics,

It's the month of "love", and today I want to reflect on feelings. Regardless of what messages exist regarding feelings (e.g., go with your heart; don't trust your feelings), feelings are real and are part of being human. Feelings can also affect our writing and work productivity, so it's helpful to learn ways to manage them.

This week I want to talk about some things you can do in the event you are feeling down. Perhaps you've heard some bad news or are going through something difficult -- whatever the reason or length of the issue, how can you still be productive and/or restore productivity when feeling down?


Photo by Lukas Rychvalsky: https://www.pexels.com/photo/person-standing-near-lake-670720/

Here are four ideas to manage negative emotions and keep up productivity:

(1) Go for a walk/move. Weather permitting, go for a walk (or run). Or move somehow. Exercise can help clear the mind and relieve stress associated with negative emotion.

(2) Pray/meditate. Calming the mind and breath vs. being glued to social media or any form of screen emitting information can do wonders for both anxiety reduction and clarity of thinking.

(3) Channel the negative emotions into writing. For example, I had a rough Monday afternoon (ah, the joys of Mondays!), so I decided to blog about negative emotions. So far, it's really helping! :-) Journaling about feelings is also helpful, and no one needs to read what you write. 

(4) Be thankful. This is probably the single best long-term "thing" you can do to combat negative emotions. I've probably blogged about this countless times throughout, but it never hurts mentioning it again. Concretely, make a list of at least three things you are thankful for -- it can be anything! -- every day. Keep it up for a while, and see if your outlook changes. 

I hope this was helpful, Real Academics. What are some ways you manage negative emotion and keep up with productivity in the long-run? We'd love to hear. Contact us anytime at www.therealacademics.com.

Until next time, happy writing and happy productivity,

Maggie

www.therealacademics.com

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Need a Boost of Encouragement? The Accomplishment List

Image
Dear Real Academics, As faculty (at the time of this writing), I am on a 9 month-contract.  But, every summer for the past 7 years in my tenure-track position seems to be a non-stop list of things to do including attending dissertation defenses, reviewing manuscripts, reviewing conference proposals, going to research meetings, analyzing data, writing and submitting conference proposals, writing and submitting manuscripts and grants, setting up classes for the next semester, setting up meetings for the next semester,  answering student advising emails,  managing upcoming faculty searches, and more. So, you can imagine how annoyed I get when I hear people assume that I am so lucky to be an "educator" because I get summers off. I wish!  Around the end of July this year, I was near burn-out.  Around the first week of August , I was looking ahead to the gazillion of emails streaming into my in-box to get things set up for the start of the semester (not to mention the...
Read more

The Power of Logging

Image
Dear Real Academics, There's a pattern among productivity strategists: If you want results, track your progress. Whether I'm watching a video or reading about financial planning, nutritional well-being, exercise programs, writing productivity, or self management in general, all programs that WORK have some element of what I default to calling "logging". I default to this term because of my experience with logging with writing (more on that below). Logging is tracking your progress.  I know, I know...it sounds dull and mundane and boring and hard to remember to do. It may even sound rigid, but here's the news: It is powerful. Why? This is a good question. For this post, I will not get into any facts or figures or empirical data to prove to you that tracking your progress is powerful when it comes to making progress.  But, reflect on your own experience. When have you made real progress on any goal you had that required change/effort/difficulty? What did it look lik...
Read more

Writing Models

Image
Dear Real Academics, Did you know there's such a thing as a writing model? And, here, I don't mean a person holding up the palm of their hand under a piece of paper to display it. Here I mean an example of writing similar to the one you need to or want to (or both!) compose. When I was in graduate school, I knew I needed to write a dissertation in order to graduate. Early in my program, I had never written a dissertation, much less read one. So, I looked for dissertation models in my program and studied them -- not for the content but for the structure. I asked myself: How long are dissertations? (they vary tremendously depending on methodology, I discovered!). How are dissertations organized? (there are traditional chapters, but there are formats that include a collection of related journal articles). How does each dissertation section begin and end? (I learned they are fairly repetitive in the beginning and end of each section because they are so long and want to remind the ...
Read more