A little while back, I wrote an article on the function guilt performs in our lives and the limiting ways we tend to perceive it.  Today, I want to expand on a particular point I made in that piece, which is that the amount of guilt we feel seems to depend on the time of day.  For instance, I’ve observed that, right after I wake up in the morning, my conscience seems to be spotlessly clean.  However, at around 10:00 a.m., I start shaming myself about things I did or failed to do in the past.  The volume of my self-blaming reaches a crescendo at around 1:00 p.m., after which it tapers off again.

In my earlier article, I suggested that, if guilt were actually your conscience condemning you for your past wrongs, you wouldn’t expect the degree of your suffering to depend on the time of day.  After all, the amount of scolding you deserve from your conscience shouldn’t vary based on what time it is.  Instead, you’d think your conscience would keep up a steady level of punishment throughout the day, until you’d suffered enough and “served your sentence” for the wrongs you’d done.

I want to take the inquiry I began with these comments a bit deeper.  Perhaps the fact the severity of our guilt depends on the time of day suggests that guilt is not simply what we experience when our consciences reprimand us.  But what does that fact say about what guilt really is?  To my mind, it suggests that guilt, like hunger and fatigue, is a natural, regularly occurring biological process.

In other words, just as you get hungry at around your regular mealtimes, and you get tired at around your regular bedtime, your body has regular times of day when it naturally feels most guilty.  One way to put this is that, just as we have mealtimes and bedtimes, we also have “guilt-times.”  The main difference between guilt and other regularly occurring physical sensations like hunger and fatigue lies in the way we perceive guilt.  We take our feelings of guilt as a sign that there’s something wrong with us, but we don’t interpret hunger and fatigue that way.

Put differently, when our stomachs growl, we interpret it to mean we need more food in our stomachs.  But we don’t view our need for food as proof that there’s something wrong with us.   We don’t perceive ourselves as bad people because we happen not to have enough in our stomachs.  By contrast, when we start ruminating on painful past events from our lives, we do tend to interpret it to mean there’s something wrong with us—that we are bad people.  Or, perhaps, we spend time and energy defending ourselves against our guilt, devising reasons why we aren’t so bad after all to try to make the unpleasant sensations go away.  Either way, our interpretation of guilt causes us to suffer, while our interpretation of hunger does not.

I’ve come to believe we can transform our experience of guilt by treating it more like hunger and fatigue.  The next time you feel guilt, try saying to yourself “oh, it’s guilt-time again”—just as you might think “oh, I guess it’s time for lunch” when your stomach growls or “it’s time for bed” when your eyelids start feeling heavy.  Try perceiving guilt as a routine bodily function that, regardless of what you do or think, will recur again and again.  Recognize also that, in a sense, guilt is easier to deal with than hunger and fatigue, because you don’t have to do any activity—such as eating or sleeping—to cause your guilt to pass away.  Instead, guilt simply arises at certain times of day, and subsides during others.

This practice has changed the way guilt occurs to me.  Before, when my mind would dwell on the ways I felt I’d screwed up in the past, I would feel ugly sensations in my body.  My upper back would tense up, and a prickly feeling would creep across my skin.  My perspective on guilt—my view that my guilty feelings proved I was a bad person—was actually causing those physical sensations.  When I changed my perspective, and started to view guilt as a natural biological process, those painful feelings began fading away.

I haven’t addressed one question that may be on your mind, which is:  what is the function of guilt?  It may be a natural process of the body that occurs at certain times of day, but why does it need to occur?

I don’t know for sure.  I certainly have theories, but they’re not important for the purposes of this article.  The important point is that the fact that we don’t know what guilt is for doesn’t set it apart from other body functions like sleep.  Scientists still don’t fully understand why we need sleep, but the fact remains that we do, and no one questions that our need for sleep is part of our bodies’ recurring daily cycle.  We don’t need to know exactly what function guilt performs to understand that it’s a routine aspect of the human experience.

The perspective I’m suggesting here has implications that aren’t limited to guilt.  When you experience a “negative emotion,” or an emotion you’d rather not be feeling, take a look at the way you’re interpreting that feeling.  If you’re taking the feeling as a sign that something is wrong with you, I invite you to experiment with a different view.  Try saying to yourself “oh, it’s time for this emotion,” just as you’d think to yourself it was time for lunch in response to a noisy stomach.  You might say, for instance, “oh, it’s anger-time again,” or “oh, it’s sadness-time.”

With this way of thinking comes an acceptance of the emotion that’s arising in you as a natural part of human life.  When you simply accept the emotion and allow it to move through you, without shaming or judging yourself, you eliminate the suffering the emotion used to create.  This acceptance is key to changing your emotional life for the better.

Related posts:

1. Is Guilt Good For You? (Part One)
2. How To Put “Negative Emotions” In Perspective
3. Thoughts On Conscious Suffering
4. How To Want Less Stuff
5. Where’s Your “Emotion License”?