Opposite Action

There’s a concept in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy called “Opposite Action” which advises that when we’re feeling emotionally overwhelmed we should do the opposite of what we feel like doing in that moment.

The theory is that when we’re completely overloaded with psychological weight our emotional regulatory systems can become dysregulated, which in turn can cause us to crave things that will make us worse, not better.

Research published in 2015, for instance, suggests that people who are feeling down will tend to want to listen to sad music, even though sad music will (according to other research) tend to make a sad person feel even sadder.