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Listen to Part 1 of this series here.

Hi, welcome to part 2 of a series on how to crush negative emotions without using food, cigarettes or alcohol and I’ve been on every bender conceivable. And what I noticed was then when I was pigging out on one of those things, or sometimes all of them, I actually started to resemble a pig. I looked bloated, well I already had these little eyes, I just looked piggish.

So I was on a date last weekend and I asked my date, “how do you handle negative emotions without using food, cigarettes, or alcohol? And she said, “I don’t. I kinda just let them bottle up inside me until they all burst out at once.” That’s probably the worst response, I could kind of imagine her having a meltdown or suddenly exploding in public.  For example, I was working at a newspaper in Hong Kong where I was denying to myself how bad the company culture wise, everybody was treating everybody else like crap, everybody was sabotaging and throwing each other under the bus, my colleagues were resigning every month. It was very tense until one day a junior reporter sent out an email to all the management about an issue that could have easily been sent to just one person, and in defence of that person I chastised the junior reporter in public, but I lost my control and I realise now it was bad judgement to publicly scold someone. I kinda wish I had practised these skills more before joining such a negative work culture, and if you happen to join a company with bad culture,  here are some other things you can do to release steam before it shows.

When you stop taking substances to deal with negative emotions, you’ll be surprised at first by the intensity of the feelings that you have once you reduce or stop taking the substance,  but just remember that your feelings have been exaggerated because they’ve been dulled for so long, will eventually go away. Your feelings, just like the high you get from the substances, are almost equally short lived. Most negative emotions are short, they come and go. It may be that you don’t need to “do anything” in response to a feeling, other than just notice that you are feeling it and wait it out. Activities like meditation and yoga can help you develop the skill of observing and sitting with a feeling.

So that’s what I did when I was going through a down patch in my life I was searching for something new that could help replace my old ways of partying. One of my friends in the startup community in Singapore suggested that I check out this meditation retreat called vipassana, it’s quite a well-known meditation retreat that is non-religious, and it’s taken by a lot of entrepreneurs. Very quickly I’ll explain what involved, it’s 10 nights where you’re disconnected from the outside world, you don’t have any access to technology, you don’t have access to talking to anyone, you take a vow of silence and you just s