I’ve noticed when I don’t get enough sleep, the emotions I feel the next day are higher variance—I’m a sadder sad person and a happier happy person.
I want more of this, since I prefer feeling emotions to not feeling emotions and generally enjoy higher variance in life due to novelty and stuff. What are some ways I can get this without being sleep deprived?
(Also would appreciate pushback! Think this may be wrong due to similar reasons to variance being bad in finance.)
Have you tried leaning into an emotion?
If that doesn’t make sense: You can practice noticing the effects of the emotion on your body and mind and see if you can do more of that. For example, you may notice how parts of your face move when you smile while happy and them let the movement go further. The corresponding mental part is harder to describe but works kind of the same.
As far as you can remember, have your emotions always worked this way? Did they used to be stronger normally?
I ask because in my own case, I had depression for years before realizing that’s what it was, because it mostly manifested as a gradual dulling of my emotions. Different specifics (my emotions got suppressed even more with sleep deprivation), but even with therapy and meditation I didn’t start feeling more like my old self until I started taking bupropion.
Are you on any medications that might dampen your emotions? Do you feel more emotions when sleep-deprived or are you better at getting in touch with them? Does it affect how good you are at noticing and identifying the emotions of others? Alexithymia might also be something to look into.
Find music that compels you to dance, and then dance to it. Might release some inhibited stuff.
If the risks seem outweighed by the benefits, you could try getting a little drunk.
Learn to spot when you’re repressing emotions. You might be very subtly, with great skill, suppressing emotions before they reach your conscious awareness and before they really gain steam. Are there pressures in your life or in your social world that make you repress emotions? Can you avoid or alleviate those, at least temporarily?
Try hanging out with someone who you feel really comfortable with, and make common knowledge with them that you’re going to be trying to feel your emotions strongly. People are social and emotions can sometimes be bigger when there are other people around.
When you feel some emotion, do a bit of meditation on it. Give the emotion your full attention for a little while. Can you feel it, sensorily? Like a pressure in your head, a fluttering in your stomach, a softness on your back, etc. What does the emotion say if you let it speak? If you’re feeling X, then what is so X-ish about the world? Like, if you’re sad, what might you be sad about, and what exactly is so sad about what you’re sad about? (Don’t demand an answer from the emotion. But let the emotion use your brain to think of memories or facts that make you feel the emotion that you’re feeling, and describe what’s so X-ish about those memories or facts, and pay attention to the X-ish features and how X-ish they are.)
Exercise and stimulants tend to heighten positive emotions. They don’t generally heighten negative ones, but that’s probably all to the good, right? Increased social interaction, both in terms of time and in terms of emotional closeness, tends to heighten both positive and negative emotions.