Ep 122: Feeling the big feels

Transcript

0:51

Hello, everyone. And welcome back to real, brave and unstoppable. This is episode number 122. All about feeling big emotions. As I record this, my daughter and I are going to be traveling to Italy in two days. it's mid-March right now. So, yeah, we're going to go to Italy. We're flying into Venice. And then we're going to Tuscany. We're going to make a stop in Siena, which is my daughter's name. And that's where her name came from. Her name has one N not two. So like Sienna, Italy. And then we'll, we'll spend a couple of days in Tuscany staying in a hanging out, seeing the pretty beautiful countryside and then we will finish up our time in Rome. Because you need to go to Rome. When you're going to Italy. So, yeah. So we've been planning this trip since November. And it's hard to believe. It's finally here, time flies, right? So, we're talking about emotions today. So like this, this trip is exciting. Like, we tend to kind of hang on to those types of emotions. Right? Excitement, joy, happiness, that sense of looking forward to something like we like those emotions, right? Yeah. We love them. And then, you know, in contrast the quote unquote negative emotions... don't like them so much. So recently I was actually thinking about a time in my life where I was really consumed by sadness and depression, and it just seemed to spiral deeper and deeper all the time. So for a long time, I've had this sort of fear about getting really sad. Like every time I start to feel really sad and unsure about something I kind of would panic because I had this scary story about the sadness. you know, that it was going to turn into like the severe depression and ultimately never go away. Yeah. So I didn't want to feel sadness, so if those are my thoughts, Of course, I'm not going to want to feel sadness. Well, no emotion stays forever. It's just not how it works. And actually the chemical part of an emotion like that happens in your brain, in your body only lasts, like it's less than 60 seconds. I think. It's something like that. It's. I've heard 90 seconds. I've heard 30 seconds. So somewhere it's short. And anything longer than that is just our mind perpetuating it. We've talked about thoughts, creating feelings on this podcast before. And so like when we have a thought about something and then we have an emotion, it can spiral because then we have a thought about the emotion and then we have more feelings that come from that thought and then so on and so on. So it's easy to see how our mind can keep it going. But I've done a lot of work on emotions and they're still challenging for me because I'm somebody who tends to feel them really strongly, like I get big emotions. And I have a hard time being really like, pragmatic about them. and there's yeah, there's still tough sometimes. So today I'm going to talk about feeling big emotions and yes, it is hard. You'll learn about emotions, how they're related to our thoughts, how they can fuel our actions. You'll also learn how to practice feeling them and to release yourself from those scary stories that you have about them. So that you can be more intentional in how you show up, even when you don't feel like it. I'll share some of my favorite ways to really like stick with an emotion and like, let it move through me, or like to process it at the end of today's episode. So stick with me. So, first of all, let's just talk about what emotions are. I always love to start with definitions, from Merriam Webster. An emotion is a conscious mental reaction, like anger or fear. For example, subjectively experienced as a strong feeling that's usually directed toward a specific object and it's typically accompanied by physiological and behavioral changes in the body. So, what that says is that there is something that happens. And we subjectively experience it. So that means we have thoughts about it. We perceive it in a certain way. And then we have a feeling that comes from those thoughts. We experienced the thought as the feeling, right? That's that's our experience. And usually that feeling... it comes it's from a circumstance, right. Or we feel it towards the thing that happened. And we also have a physical component, physiological component, and it fuels our actions. So that's how that all fits together. So just a little bit more about it. there's an article on very well mind online that I, I liked this. They suggest that emotions are complex psychological states that involve three distinct components. So this is similar to what I just said earlier. One, a subjective experience two a physiological response, three, a behavioral or expressive response. So that's thoughts... subjective experience. Emotion and physiological response and it leads to behavioral response. Another little bit about emotions. in 1972 psychologist, Paul Ekman suggested there are six basic emotions that are universal throughout human cultures. Fear, disgust, anger, surprise, joy, and sadness. In the eighties, Robert Plutchik introduced another emotion classification system. I hope you're finding this interesting. Cause I'm getting to the cool part. But that was known as the wheel of emotions. I love this thing. The wheel of emotions. is it's a, it's a big circle and it has those six I think he might've added another one. So there might be seven in the middle of the major emotions. And then you go out of the spokes of the wheel and it has more like nuanced emotions. Most of us don't have a huge emotional vocabulary, so it's really helpful and kind of making sense of what your emotion is. highly recommend visiting feelings, wheel.com and printing it off. But really knowing those nuanced emotions help you, it matters. Like it helps you make sense of them and when you can make sense of them, it just helps you process them. A little bit better. So looking at the three components that we talked about. So first the subjective experience, I mentioned it's subjective because we have a story about the circumstance. Or the experience. And that comes in the form of our thoughts. There's also a physiological component. Like I mentioned, which comes from our sympathetic nervous system. So think about your stomach sinking or your chest tightening. So then we experienced this emotion and then we express it or decide what to do with it. And that happens, subconsciously a great deal of the time. So we feel the emotion, we interpret it and then express it in the form of a behavior or action. Sometimes that's like a knee-jerk reaction where we don't really think about it. We also have primary emotions and secondary emotions. So primary emotions are the ones that we experience universally. Like the one that we feel first. Basic emotions like happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, surprise. And secondary emotions stem from, and they're also variations of primary emotions. And sometimes we have those secondary emotions in response to our primary emotions. For example, we feel sad, and then like, we're we have thoughts about being sad. We're mad at ourselves for feeling sad. And then those thoughts create new feelings or more of the same feeling. But, like I mentioned earlier, it's easy to get into that, like spiral kind of. So emotions, like I mentioned before, they don't last long, but they can be really intense and we don't really like that because they're uncomfortable. They're also likely to have a definite cause that you can pinpoint and identify. But the important thing to take away from all of this is that feelings are influenced by our perception of the situation. Our thoughts about a circumstance that's really neutral. So the thing about emotions though, is that they actually do serve a purpose. Because they prepare our bodies for action. You know, they influence our thoughts and they can be felt they can be motivators of future behavior. But we also work really hard, most of us, to avoid strong negative feelings, like who wants to feel anxiety, for example, So, let me give you two examples. First, this is an example in my own life. When I have some kind of conflict in my relationship, or if I'm feeling insecure in the relationship, like I need some kind of validation. I get anxious. And that feeling for me is really awful. Like I know for me, I get this burning sensation in my chest. I get a pit in my stomach. And I can't focus on anything. So, of course, of course. I want to avoid that. So personally, how do I do that? Well, this is what gets me into trouble. I will send a message to my partner. I'll fish for some kind of validation in a text, or, you know, maybe he sends me a message or, and I knee-jerk respond to something. It temporarily relieves that emotion that I don't like, like anxiety, I reach out for validation, I might get that validation. I might not, but just sending the message, like, okay... I'm going to get this. It temporarily relieves that emotion. Another example is people who. Emotionally eat. They might feel an emotion like sadness or depression or something like that, or maybe it's anger or frustration or stress. And then to avoid that they might pull out the Ben and Jerry's or the cookies or whatever. In both cases, we're avoiding the uncomfortable emotion. The problem with that is that in avoiding it, we get this temporary relief. But the temporary relief reinforces the avoidant behavior. So we get stuck there. And we never actually learn how to feel the emotions. And then the behaviors we get stuck in don't really get us closer to being who we really want to be, or like, you know, living the life we really want to live. We get stuck over in that pattern. So recall. I'm going to say this again. It's important. emotions really start when we perceive a neutral circumstance in a certain way. So then it becomes this subjective experience because we have thoughts about it. And then our thoughts create an emotion and then our emotions fuel our actions. And we can have secondary emotions and thoughts about our thoughts, emotions, and actions, which can, like I mentioned before, can create this fun little spiral. I'm sure that resonates with some of you. I know for me, totally. I have that happen too. So there are a couple of things we can do to work with emotions. And one is working on identifying unhelpful or limiting beliefs and thoughts and finding something new to believe. The six, a lot of practice. And a lot of times it's easier to like, get at with coaching. It's hard to see some of these things on your own. Especially because our brain is kind of wired to want to avoid that discomfort. So like looking at the things that are creating it can be difficult. And also believing new things. your brain will want to trick you out of that. So having someone to kind of keep you on course is super helpful. The other thing to do is to work on really allowing yourself to process emotions. So we'll talk about that. Emotions are really just like energy and they're there in your body. And, you know, a lot of times when we don't like them, we kind of contract, we tense up like, oh, I don't like this. I don't want it. I don't like it. I don't like it. But what happens is when we do that, like we're not really allowing them to move through. I saw this thing on Facebook once that was the pictures, like a cartoon body or something. And then there's like a hole in the, the figures chest- stomach area. And then there was this like rainbow thing that was just going through the whole. And the thing said, emotions are just flowing through. there's just experiences moving through us. So let them. And I love that because it's like totally true. They have to have somewhere to go and they will go. At some point. They come and they go. So we just have to kind of let that energy move through and that's processing emotions. So why do we work so hard to avoid emotions? The negative ones, quote, unquote, the only reason negative emotions are hard to hold is because we've labeled them as feeling quote, unquote bad. We have scary stories about the emotions. And addressing these stories is really important and it also helps us allow ourselves to go to the negative emotions. If we don't address those stories, we might not ever feel calm or confident enough to actually experience the negative emotion. So let's go there. Why is the negative emotion or problem? Some of mine personally are like, it won't go away. It'll last forever. I'll keep feeling bad. I don't like feeling bad. I won't be productive. I'm weak. I'll go back to how it was during my divorce. It'll ruin my life because I can't do the normal things to take care of myself. So, of course, of course, I'm not going to want to feel negative emotions if those are my stories about them. So then we got to ask. What if the stories aren't true. They're just thoughts. What then? Like, I mean, is it possible my story's wrong like that? It's never going to go away or my life will be ruined. Is it possible that's not true. What evidence might I have that I've been ignoring that contradicts the story. Well, I mean, I can tell you that there's no emotion I've ever had this lasted forever. So there you go. So, yeah. What if it's possible that it won't last forever? And this is also one of the most common, scary stories about feeling an intense emotion. So then it would probably be easier to make that emotion neutral. We could let those emotions come and go like waves and we just see the bigger picture. Like what if my story was, oh, here's anxiety, for example. This is just an experience I'm having like any other emotion, like joy or peace or whatever. It's just moving through me. Like, what if I could see it like that? So that brings me to another point, which is everyone has a mix of both positive and negative emotions. We really have to feel all of them. So. It would be weird if like someone died, for example, and you weren't sad. If someone close to you died and it would be weird if you weren't sad. They serve a purpose. And also like if we take like happiness and sadness, for example, like, um, without sadness, we wouldn't know what happiness was. There's no. It's a comparative thing. We just wouldn't know. So. If negative emotions are always going to be part of the human experience like, and they are, they just are. How will you get practice, feeling them? And navigating them more effectively if you don't ever come across them. Okay. Yeah, I know. You're going to say, well, if I don't ever come across them, then I'm not going to need to practice. But, you know what I mean. Negative emotions. They can also tell you something for me. Like anxiety can tell me to slow down and look at how I was looking to other people for validation, instead of giving it to myself. You know, it was showing me what I needed to work on, so that emotion, like it was on my side in a lot of ways. And then we can ask ourselves, like, who would we get to be if we didn't have the scary stories about negative emotions? So for me using my example, I think I'd probably have more confidence in myself. I'd feel stronger, more rational, pragmatic, empowered and like probably more at peace overall. And less stressed, which is so important. Yeah. So I know that you're probably wondering like what you're supposed to do though, when you're in it. Like when you're feeling those really awful emotions and just want to get out of it. Yeah. So I've got some good ideas for you. Okay. So first of all, It's important to accept them. So emotions just when they come into our being, like, we can't really control that. They pop in. We can't control that initial hit of emotion. We can control what we do with it. Right. But what, with acceptance, it means that the things that are out of our control. We make space for. We are open to feeling them without making them bad or wrong or having to fix it. It's just kind of, we take that stance of like, okay, this just is, it doesn't mean you like it. But you just like, you make space for it because you can still do things... even when you feel shitty. All right. You can still do the things that are important to you, even if it's harder when you feel shitty, but you can still do them. So acceptance of those emotions is really important. So it's a lot easier to say that than it is to do it. So I'm going to just kind of go through some things. And when I say acceptance of the emotion too, it's almost like what I said earlier about processing it. You're making space for it to move through you. You're not judging it. You're just sort of like, Hey sadness. How's it going? Come on in. I'll show you the door when you're ready, That's what it's like. So a few things that I really like to do too... Like it involves sticking with that emotion and a few things that I really like to do are first of all, what I call the three Ns. The first N is notice. So you're just mindfully noticing, like what you're feeling. The second N is naming it. So, this is important because the language is important here. Like if you're feeling. Let's say you're feeling sadness. When you name it, you want to say, I notice I'm feeling sadness. It's not, I'm sad. Because you're not sad. You're just experiencing sad. It's moving through you. So, if you say, like, I notice I'm feeling sad, it just creates a little space, creates a little distance. It kind of gives it a transient feel. I guess it's moving. So that's important. The third N is normalize. Or neutralize, however you want to think about it, but it's totally okay to feel what you're feeling. You know, you can kind of ask yourself, like, why am I feeling this way? Oh yeah. It makes sense. Why I'd feel this way. Other people feel this way too. So you're not like shitting on yourself for feeling it. Right or you're not, you know, you're not, you're taking the judgment out of it. so that is a good way to kind of just welcome in the emotion. Other things that I really like when it's really intense and it just, it's not really a pass, a quickly passing emotion. The first thing I'll suggest is just like observing the emotion in your body, describing it. So that looks like maybe closing your eyes, taking a couple of deep breaths and just noticing what your body feels like. So like I'm doing it right now as I'm talking. I'm feeling a little tense, like tightness in my chest. And. I'm cold. I don't know why. I mean, yeah, it's cold out today. So you just kind of do a little scan, like notice it. and then like, let's just say, I'm feeling I'm going to run with the example of sadness. So I'm just going to like scan that I'm not feeling sadness right now. But I'll just kind of, if I was, I would scan my body and see like, okay, where does sadness show up? If I had to locate it, where would I find it? So let's just say I noticed sadness in my stomach. So, okay. I'd kind of imagine looking at this, something object in my stomach. And then like, you can pretend you're a little scuba diver or something like that, or something like that. And you're inside of your body and you're going to look at this, whatever it is. That's in your stomach, like, what would you see? Like if it were an object, the emotion, the sadness, what would it look like? Is it big? Is it small? Does it have a shape or color? Just to have a texture. Is it moving? If it's moving, is it moving fast or slow. If it had a taste, what would you taste or a smell? Is it squishy? Is it. Like a lot of times when I ask people what they notice, they'll be like, oh, it's just a blob. So like, however you want to describe it, but like, get curious about it. Like, what does this thing look like? But it kind of depersonalizes it a little bit. So you're just observing this thing. And you want to watch it here too? Like, do you notice judgment about it? And if you do. It's okay. Just notice it. But our goal here is to be nonjudgmental about it. It's just a thing that we're experiencing right now. For some people, it helps to imagine taking it out and setting it next to you. So it's just kind of hanging out with you while you do your stuff, while you do your thing. But I really like that. It's helpful for a lot of people. It just kind of it makes you stick with it, and then you're able to observe it kind of moving and doing something. Um, another one that I really like is journaling while you're feeling it. So like, same thing as what I just kind of described, but you're just gonna, you just notice what are all the emotions? Do you notice anything besides sadness? For example. Like write it down and then look at like, what are my thoughts? What's what's in my head write all that down. And then start to connect like. What thoughts are creating what feelings. And while you're doing that though, You do really want to also take note of what the experience of feeling the emotion is like. Okay, so next thing is, this is like one of my favorites. You take a, take a piece of paper. And this one, you want a piece of paper that you can destroy. So just any piece of paper, notebook, paper, or whatever. Get a pen. And what you want to do is sit down and you want to just like scan again, notice, like, what is the emotion? And you want to just write... Stream of consciousness. Describing it, like, what do you notice? Where do you notice it? Like what I talked about with the observe and describe, you can do that. You can ask yourself, like, is the emotion trying to tell you something you're just going to write without picking up your pen or pencil without stopping... Until you feel something shift. As you do this at one point, you will feel a shift in the emotion. Who knows what it'll shift to, but you will feel a shift. And when you feel the shift, then you can stop writing. And then what you do is you go tear that piece of paper up. I did this a couple of weeks ago and I burned it, but I don't really recommend that cause. Can be dangerous. So just tear it up. And then once you dispose of it, wash your hands. Wash your hands. So you're kinda like, okay. Done with that. Yeah. other things that I like to you can go on like insight timer or something like that, and find, meditations where it helps you like process the emotion. So check out things like that, too. Any kind of journaling is great. You can get creative, you can like, I haven't really done this, but this could actually be fun too, is like, if you're, if you like to draw or paint or whatever, doodle, draw or paint the emotion or like, my mom's really into mixed media type stuff. Do something like that with it. Like what would the emotion look like? That can be really healing. You know, however you like to really express yourself, but that's the thing is that the emotion has to be expressed. So remember that. Yeah, so that is really all I have for like the, like, those are some great ways to really let that emotion, that energy really move. You gotta let it move. So. I do want to say that it is not easy to do this. Cause it's not supposed to necessarily help you feel better. Cause it's acceptance of an emotion, right. So we're not trying to get it, get rid of it. We're accepting it. We're saying, okay, fine. Fine. You're here. Okay. What I find is that it kind of helps change your relationship with it. And if your emotions are really intense, You know, it might not, it might not feel better, but it will eventually. So you got to kind of stick with it. But remember if you're only doing this to make it better, you're not really accepting it. And it is like, we've got to just let go of the need to control those emotions. And then, you know, when you can really handle your emotions, it leads to emotional maturity. Like you, then your actions are no longer dictated by your emotions. So you're able to be more intentional and more rational about things and like it's. Yeah, it's hard work, but it's definitely worth it. So. Go try those things and let me know how it goes. I hope that was super helpful. before I go, I just want to invite you to, or ask you to... hop on over to my website and go to the link. Courtney revard.com/love life. And there's a great free workbook. It's not related to emotions necessarily. It's about creating a life that you love. And to do that, you'll definitely need to process emotions because you know, we all have them. I mean, that's just life, right. But how about over there? If you haven't downloaded that yet? go check that out. And also I also, as always, I would love it. If you would go leave me a rating and a review. That helps other people find the show. And then share it with a friend. If you are getting some value out of this. All right, friends. Thanks for listening. And I will see you next time.