You get a phone call and discover the person you have fallen in love with has decided to end the relationship.

An event is coming up and each time you think about this, you experience waves and waves of fear.

Some big kids at school teased you in front of your friends and when you get home you find yourself vividly recalling, over and over again, what happened.  These images are accompanied by gripping, gut-wrenching feelings of embarrassment.

Americans typically use three approaches when they are faced with such experiences.  Let’s take a quick look at them, and then consider three very different approaches that are free and backed by research effectiveness studies.

Three Typical American Approaches to Deal With Emotional Pain

1.  Drinking alcohol or taking pills.

Here we see a man who is using the drinking approach, and he ends up falling into the great sea of turmoil.

2. Trying to avoid thinking about the emotional pain.

Here we see Linus using the avoidance approach.  People who try to avoid the problem of emotional pain sometimes say they don’t pay any attention to it, or that they just ignore it.

3. Trying to divert your attention to something more pleasant.

Here we see Ted trying to “face his fear” by diverting his attention to some fantasy.

If you are using one or more of these three approaches and find that you are completely satisfied with the results, I’d still like you to consider trying three different ones.  They won’t cost you a dime, and there is scientific support for each.

Three Different Approaches to Dealing with Emotional Pain

1. Sensory Focus

Illustration by Jack Star Rubin

“Sensory focus” involves turning your attention to the physical qualities of the pain and observing the sensations you are experiencing.

If the sensations bring forth words such as pain, or awful agony, you accept this without judgment.  You very gently, when you feel ready, return your focus to the physical sensations as if you are tasting, for the first time, some fresh mountain water from a tropical island.  Just let the sensations wash over and through you for a couple of minutes.  Do this each time you begin to experience the sensations.  Also, find some time once in the morning, and once in the evening to take a couple of minutes to sit by yourself and practice doing this.

Although for many Americans distraction is believed to be more effective for managing distressing painful experiences than observing the physical sensations, when compared in experimental studies, distraction most often turns out to be the inferior technique.

Now, I should point out that if you look quickly online, you will see research reports that claim just the opposite—that distraction leads to better outcomes than experiencing the felt qualities of distress.  These reports are usually based on an analysis that failed to make a distinction between sensory focus and emotion focus.  Emotion focus has individuals attending to the emotional aspects of the pain.  For example, someone going through a painful experience might focus on a thought such as, “This pain is making me feel terribly angry.”  Notice that the emotion focus approach has one observing a set of words describing the feeling, whereas sensory focus has one observing its physical sensations.

In more recent studies, researchers have been making a clearer distinction between emotion focus techniques and sensory focus techniques.  It now looks like sensory focus tends to be more efficacious than distraction.[1]   More importantly for dealing with distressing emotional experiences, sensory focus was found to be even more effective when researchers looked not just at the short term effects of coping, but what happened in the long term.

Most studies on the effects of different coping styles look at what happens within four minutes of a painful experience.  In such studies, sensory focus tends to be a more effective coping technique, but occasionally distraction did just as well, or even a little better.  In a study by Kevin McCaul and Carl Haugtvedt,[2] for example, distraction reduced distress early in the four minute trial, but attention to sensations was a superior strategy for the last two minutes.”  When studies looked at what happens when pain lasts longer than a few minutes, or a similar pain occurs again a week later, sensory focus over time more clearly is the better coping strategy.

Now some have argued that sensory focus works with men, but not women.  However, even for brief pain lasting for just a few minutes the results have been inconsistent.  For example, Thompson and his associates[3] found that women experienced less pain with distraction, but Roelofs and his associates[4] found that women who report that they are high in pain-related fear benefited more from the sensory focus technique than they did from distraction.  In this study the whole painful experience was of the short term variety, lasting four minutes.  There are fewer studies involving women and longer term pain, but Leventhal[5] and his associates found that women in labor who were instructed to monitor their pain sensations experienced a sharp decline in pain and negative mood during active labor.  There was no decline in the control group that received no such instruction.  Note that labor tends to last several hours, in contrast to the four minute type of pain that is usually the object of study in the scientific literature.

It appears that when you focus on carefully observing the sensations, your body mobilizes its internal resources to cope with the distressful experience.  You have seen what happens when you cut your finger.  You experience some pain, and before long your body, in an incredibly complex process, begins healing.  Within a few days the cut is completely gone.  You see from this that your body has a way to deal with the cut in a manner that the greatest scientists cannot yet duplicate.  Similarly, when you take the time to fully observe the sensations from a distressing experience, your body over the course of time appears to carry out a process to address the distress in an incredibly helpful manner.

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