Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Feeling stuck? Break free from anxiety, depression, and the patterns that hold you back. Join me as I share my recovery journey, along with practical coaching tools to help you grow stronger, feel capable, and create a life you love.
You are listening to break free with Becky, your go-to podcast for real talk, real tools and real freedom.
Hello, my gorgeous friends. I'm excited to be here with you today because I actually have a lot of great energy right now. I just finished an incredible webinar with some amazing people. It's the Get Unstuck webinar that I've been running this last week, and we're on day two of that this week.
It's a three day webinar. And today we were talking about our feelings and how our feelings are the key to overcoming our obstacles, how they are the key to everything that we want in life. And last week on the podcast, we talked about what our feelings are, where they come from, how we generate them in our body.
And I thought it would be really incredible to give you a little piece of the webinar of what we talked about today and. Kind of talk about some of the typical things that we do with our emotions and why they're not very helpful and what we can do instead if you haven't listened to the podcast last week, I highly recommend it.
It's a really good one, and it's gonna help build on this one. But just in case you haven't, I wanna just give you a little bit of a reminder of what our feelings are. So our feelings are simply just a chemical reaction to a thought. We have a thought in our brain, and then our brain is going to have a chemical reaction.
It's going to release neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, oxytocin, or it might release hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, it's gonna release these chemicals in your brain and it's gonna cause a sensation in your body.
We call this felt emotions. The sensation in your body might be a tight throat. It might be butterflies in your stomach, maybe a pit in your stomach, like that hole in your stomach. Heavy chest. A lot of people will feel heat in the back of their head. A lot of women will actually feel pressure or sensation in their hips.
Sometimes I feel a lot of emotion in my face, like right behind my eyes. Those are felt emotions. They're the physical sensations that we feel in our body when we have an emotion. So we have a thought. We have a chemical reaction in our brain. Our brain releases the neurotransmitters or the hormones, and those neurotransmitters and hormones cause a sensation in our body.
And that's it. That's all our feelings are. That's it. It's kind of amazing when you stop and you think about it, because most of us spend a lot of time trying to avoid our feelings. But when we can stop and just think, this is just a chemical reaction in my brain and it creates a sensation in my body. I don't need to be scared of that.
It cannot hurt me. It cannot cause me to do anything. It's just a physical sensation in my body. And then just also a reminder that our feelings are one word, jealous, anxious, happy, excited, angry, joyful. That's important to know. If you listened to the podcast last week, we talked about, name it, detainment. Just being able to identify and name your emotion, helps you to calm your brain down.
We also talked about last week that are emotions are the fuel for everything we do and we don't do. So I want you to think about this. This really blew, the minds of the people that I worked with today in the webinar, everything we do in life is either to avoid a feeling or get a feeling.
We want life is quite literally the pursuit of positive feelings and the avoidance of negative ones. I want you to watch yourself today. Just notice every time you make a decision, every time you make a choice, what is the feeling that's motivating it?
Are you trying to get to a positive feeling? Are you trying to get away from a negative one? This is just how our brain works, right? It's just survival, but it's really cool to be aware of. So I wanna give you an example , of a time when it feels like maybe this is not about you, but I wanna show you how it is.
Okay? So I want you to think about someone that you love. And they're about to make a really bad decision. They're gonna make a decision that, you know might possibly wreck their life. And then I want you to think about if they do make this decision, if they do wreck their life, why is it a problem for you?
Like, it's not your life. You're not gonna feel the impact of that bad decision. If it was an investment, you're not gonna feel the investment going bad. So why is it a problem for you if they make the bad decision
So let me ask you another question if they did make that bad decision, how would you feel?
Maybe sad for them. Maybe scared, so it's not even our decision or our problem. But the reason why we don't want them to do it is because if they do, we might feel worried for them. We might feel scared for them. And what typically happens is if we don't wanna feel worry, if we don't wanna feel sad or scared for them, we try and talk them out of that decision.
Because if we talk to them, and we change their mind, we have to ask what's in it for you? If you're able to change their mind, what's in it for you? You don't have to feel sad or worried or scared for them, right? Like it always comes back to us. It's always about us. It's always about the way that we think we're gonna feel.
And there's nothing wrong with any of this. This is not judgment. It's just good to know that I am incredibly motivated by the way I think that I'm gonna feel i'm incredibly motivated by positive emotions and I really wanna avoid those negative ones.
Let me give you an example that might make more sense. When my daughter was really little, I remember standing in my front door and she was having a huge tantrum, just one of those monster tantrums where you almost feel like they're possessed. She's upside down and she's twisted and she's pulling her clothes off.
And I remember feeling this incredible amount of anxiety and this need to, to fix it and to stop it. And I was sitting in my door looking at her thinking , this is so fascinating. I was just watching my brain and wondering why I was so anxious and upset about her being sad,
and I noticed that the reason why I wanted her to stop was so that I could feel better. And I turned to my husband. I was like, I wish she would stop having a tantrum so I could feel better, I want her to stop having this tantrum, and then I will feel better. And really the power in thought work is that I can help myself feel better while she's having the tantrum, but it's just really good to know that I wanted to solve the problem.
I wanted to make her stop having a tantrum so that I could feel better. And of course, I want her to feel good too. But ultimately, my motivation was just so that I didn't have to have the anxiety of wondering what was wrong and not being able to solve the problem.
So just good to know. Right. And we will see this pattern of, , moving towards our positive emotions and moving away and trying to avoid negative emotions in the conversations we have, in the tasks we avoid, the pleasures we pursue in the food we eat, whether or not we go to a social event. If we go to social events and we typically have a good time, we're gonna be motivated to go.
And if we're more of somebody who experiences social anxiety or feeling shy, we probably wanna avoid the event. We actually don't wanna avoid the event. It's just avoiding the negative emotion we think we're gonna fill. We'll see this whether or not we spend time with our family, whether or not we risk another relationship.
Just watch yourself and notice it. It's very interesting.
Okay, so we talked about last week too, that emotions determine the quality of your life and they're incredibly important to pay attention to. If we do not pay attention to them. They will rule you. They will determine every decision you make. I used to avoid so many things 'cause I was so scared of how I would feel.
I would avoid hanging out with my family. Traveling social events. I used to avoid skiing. I actually really like skiing, but I used to avoid skiing because I didn't wanna feel the negative emotion of when you first are really cold and your boots are uncomfortable and you have to wait in line and it's awkward to walk in the boots.
I missed out on the joy of. Skiing down that hill and feeling the freedom of my body going so fast because I was afraid of the negative feelings I would have in the parts that were boring.
So I wanna talk about four things that we typically do when we have strong emotion.
Like if we could categorize all the kind of different behaviors we have. When we have emotion, they kind of go into about four buckets. Okay? So the first bucket is react when we are reacting to an emotion. Reacting is yelling, blaming, slamming doors, leaving, driving off in your car. That is feeling an emotion and having an immediate reaction to it.
And the problem with reacting is that it gives us a net negative, meaning we now need to repair relationships. We may need to fix doors if we slam them really hard. If you've ever known somebody who's punched a hole in the wall, now we've gotta repair the wall. We might need to make apologies. And the other thing that happens is reacting.
It just increases our negative emotion. So I remember, I think it was back in the eighties, psychologists used to recommend that if you were angry. You needed to just get your emotion out. They encouraged people to be angry, yell more, get your emotion out. That's how you get it out of your body. But interestingly enough, there was a direct correlation between people reacting to their emotion, just getting the yelling out and heart attacks.
So , it's a very interesting thing to look at. So when we react, when we yell, when we blame, when we slam doors, when we drive off in the car and we have this big reaction, we're releasing a lot of cortisol and a lot of adrenaline in our body, a lot of hormones that are gonna wreak havoc in our body, and it just increases our negative emotion through the roof.
And then we have the net negative again, because we've gotta repair the relationship. And if we were physical, we might need to repair items, purchase new items. Another thing we typically do, I think a lot of you will relate to this one, is we avoid, we wanna avoid our emotions. I don't wanna feel that avoiding is just trying to not feel like I just wanna numb out.
I used to do this all the time for years and years and years. I just wanna turn on the tv, eat some food, and numb out. I don't wanna feel anything that's avoiding. So we use screens to avoid video games, phones, tv, social media. We avoid with food. I'm just gonna eat a a lot of food, so I don't have to feel anything we avoid with busy work.
Some people will work 12, 16 hour days, so they just don't have to feel. We also avoid with drugs, alcohol, sex, anything like that, that is going to like numb our feeling and distract us from a strong emotion we're having, and once again, we get a net negative with that because as soon as we are not avoiding anymore, all of that emotion is just waiting there for you.
It didn't go anywhere. It's not like you actually took care of it. It's just sitting there waiting for you, and you either have to deal with it or you've gotta go keep avoiding which is really hard because when we're avoiding life, we're not living our life. And that's gonna cause a lot of depression in our life.
A lot of just negative feelings if we're constantly trying to get away from our feelings because we're not being the people we wanna be, we're not living the life that we wanna live. We're not having the adventures that we wanna live because we're trapped inside this cycle of avoiding emotion
so it's just gonna give you a net negative and it's gonna increase your negative emotion. It doesn't do anything to solve the negative emotion. The other thing that we do is we resist, this is the third bucket. Understanding how I resisted my emotion was the hardest thing for me to understand.
Resisting is pushing emotions away. It's fighting emotions. It is thinking, I shouldn't feel this way. I shouldn't be so mad. I shouldn't be feeling this grief. It's getting mad at the emotion for being there in the first place.
It feels like a fight in your body. It feels like a struggle in your body, and a lot of the time people feel like they're actually feeling their emotions when they're resisting them because resistance causes so much exhaustion. It causes a lot of emotional exhaustion because you're fighting it so much.
So I would have clients that would text me and say, I've been feeling my emotions all day long. I can't feel them anymore. But when I would check in with them. What I would find is that they had been fighting their emotions all day, not feeling them. Feeling them looks very specific. It's very different and it doesn't cause emotional exhaustion.
So I like to think of a house, like an emotional house inside my brain, and when I'm in resistance, I'm on the inside of the house and the emotion is on the outside of the house. The emotion is trying to get in, but I'm locking the door and I'm holding the door shut.
I'm like, you cannot come in. You can't come in. Okay, so I want you to imagine if you've ever been locked out of a house before, like if your children have ever locked you out of a house, or if your sibling has ever locked you out of a house and you're on the outside. Think about how you feel when somebody has locked you out of the house.
Do you feel peaceful and calm and relaxed, or do your emotions get bigger and bigger and bigger? Like normally our emotions get bigger and bigger and bigger. Right? We're like hitting the door. We're knocking on the door really hard. We're like, let me in. Let me in. You can't lock me out. I'm gonna tell mom, right?
Or wait till you get inside there, you're gonna get it, whatever it is. Our emotions get really, really big. So this is resistance. When I'm on the inside of the house and I'm keeping the emotion out and the emotion is knocking at the door, it's like, let me in. Let me in. I have a message for you. I need to tell you something.
I need you to know that I'm here. And when I'm holding that door shut with all of my might, I am resisting the emotion, and the emotion is just gonna get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And the only way to help the emotion out is to actually unlock the door and let the emotion in.
And that can feel really scary because you might think, if I let the emotion in, it's gonna overwhelm me. It's gonna be too much, I can't handle it. But the opposite is true. Think about what happens when somebody finally lets you in.
You might kind of explode and yell for a second. Then you immediately start to feel better. You start to feel relief, and the same thing will happen with your emotions.
So it's important to know with resistance. Once again, we get a net negative. When we're in resistance, because all we're doing is increasing that emotion. We are emotionally exhausting ourselves. We get physically tired, and we are just increasing our emotion so much.
So the fourth bucket I wanna talk about is allowing our emotion. Allowing our emotion is processing the emotions in our body. It is focusing on the felt sense, the felt emotions in our body, and allowing them to move through our body. And this process confused me for a really long time, but it's actually quite simple.
It's best to do with a coach or a therapist or somebody who can walk you through it, but I wanna help you understand it 'cause you can start working with it at home even if you don't have a, a coach or a therapist to work with. But it is definitely easier when somebody walks you through the process a couple of times first.
The key thing to know is that our body is built to process our emotions, we have that chemical reaction. It releases the neurotransmitters, the hormones in our body. We feel a sensation in our body. And then if we allow it, if we allow it through, if we allow it to process, our body actually knows exactly what to do with those emotions and knows exactly how to process the chemicals that are going through your body, the vibrations that are going through your body.
Allowing is the only one that's gonna give you a net positive. Gives us a net positive. Meaning we don't have to repair relationships, we don't have to, repair doors or anything that we broke 'cause we threw something. We don't have to, deal with consequences from being on our screens too much or eating too much food or blowing off our family 'cause we're just trying to be in busy work all the time.
We don't get emotionally exhausted. It's actually very cathartic and relaxing and freeing to process your emotions. So you get a net positive and it is the only thing that decreases and softens your emotion and helps it to work through.
So, the way that we process our emotions. First, we have to notice them. We talked about this last week, is we first just have to notice our emotions. We have to know that they're there. We're gonna name it, to tame it. We're gonna connect with them a little bit like there you are, anxiety.
I see you fear. I see you. Shame. Even if it's a positive emotion, sometimes it's hard for people to feel positive emotions. We wanna notice those too. Like, oh, there's joy. Oh, there's excitement. Then we wanna notice how that emotion feels in our body.
You wanna pay attention to the the felt sense, the physical sensation in your body that is calling out the loudest. So if you have a really tight throat, if you have a lot of pressure behind your eyes, you're just gonna close your eyes and you're gonna put all of your attention on that area and just focus on it and be with it.
Then if it starts to move, sometimes our emotions will move. It'll start out in my chest and then it'll move to my solar plexus, and I just follow it. I just follow that emotion and I just keep all of my intention on it. That is allowing my emotion, that is allowing it in. I'm no longer resisting it. I'm no longer trying to get away from it.
I'm no longer trying to avoid it. I'm just focusing on that emotion and I'm being there with it. Because our emotions, they are messengers. They have a message for us and they will, if we go back to the the emotional house and the door, they will keep knocking until we listen to them. They will keep getting louder and louder until we open the door and we listen to them.
And the way we open the door and we listen to them is by acknowledging them. There you are. Shame. There's fear, there's despair. Then we notice the physical sensations they cause in our body. Tight throat, pressure behind the eyes, heat in the back of my head. And then we're gonna pay attention to the part of our body that calls out the loudest and the strongest.
And we're gonna put all of our attention on it. And at first you will have a lot of thoughts. Okay. And as your thoughts come in, I want you to just let them go through like a cloud, like you're almost in a meditation and you just let those thoughts move on through and you bring your attention back to your body.
And the reason why we wanna stay in our body is because if we are in our body, we can't be in our brain. And our brain is the one causing all the emotions, right? The sentences and the thoughts that are up in our brain. That's what's causing the despair, the anxiety, the anger. The jealousy, whatever emotion that you're feeling,
so we wanna make sure we're staying in our body and focusing on the sensations that are in our body. It can be helpful to describe them to yourself. It's heavy, it's light, it's hot, it's bubbly, it's, you see a color. You can describe the color, but mostly I like to just focus on the sensation and then if it moves, I like to track where it moves.
And then as it moves, I'm gonna watch it and you'll notice that it will just soften a little bit. It will soften a little bit.
. So we just focus on those physical sensations, and then if you want to, you can also listen to the emotion. This is one of my favorite things to do after I've given it time to be in my body and I've maybe noticed a lessening of the emotion, like the intensity isn't so big. Sometimes I'll ask my emotions, why are you here for me?
Or am I ask them, what do you need? And then I just listen. If I'm feeling anger or frustration, why are you here for me? And then I just listen. It's kind of like, you know when you're having a lot of emotion and you need someone to talk to, and if you start talking to them and they're not listening and not paying attention, your emotions will get bigger and bigger and bigger.
But once they sit down and they listen to you and they start to validate you, and they hear you and they witness what you're going through. Your emotions start to soften. So we're doing the same thing for ourselves. We just don't even need another human. We can do it for ourselves. We can ask the emotion, what's going on, love, what do you need?
Why are you here? And then we listen to the emotion and we just witness it and we're there for it. Is there anything I can do for you? I like to hug my emotions, I like to make little characters in my brain and I hug my emotions, and I let them know they can stay as long as they want, and that might sound a little scary.
A lot of my clients at first will tell me, I don't wanna tell 'em that because I want the emotion to go away. That's resistance, telling the emotion and trying to process it so it'll go away. That is resistance. That will increase your negative emotion. So what we wanna do instead is invite the emotion to stay as long as it wants, and it will actually do the opposite.
When we invite it in and we say, you can stay as long as you want, the emotion will start to relax. 'cause it's being seen, it's being witnessed, it's being heard. It can deliver its message that it's there for and it will start to move and process through.
So that might sound a little woowoo for you, but I have done it with so many clients and so many different people. I've watched it be incredibly helpful for people over and over and over again. This is how you work with your emotions. This is how you process 'em through. You focus on the sensations in your body and you'll let them be there.
If you're in your body, you can't be in your brain and your brain is the problem. Your brain is the one that's creating all the emotion, so you need to go to your body. We wanna give it space to stay for as long as it wants. Know that giving it the space, that's what's actually gonna help it to process and move through.
So I wanna give you an example. So when I first started publicly speaking about going through an addiction to prescription pain pills, I experienced a lot of fear in, particularly after a, a large event where a lot like thousands of people got to hear me speak about this.
After it was over, I experienced. Looping racing thoughts for two days straight. It was so bad I couldn't even sleep so bad. I was just had so much anxiety and my brain was just re-going over what I said and re-going over what I said. It was looping and looping and looping. And on the third day, I finally remembered that I needed to feel my feelings.
I finally realized that it was my feelings that was generating all of this looping, and it was really, really intense. So I. Laid on my bed and I was like, I'm gonna feel my feelings. And the feelings that came up were so intense. My throat was so tight, I almost felt like I was being strangled. It was very, very intense.
But I had to remind myself, my emotions can't hurt me. I'm safe to feel this emotion. And I had to stay with that feeling. It just put all of my attention on my throat where it felt like I was being strangled, and I just stayed with it. And I watched it. And I observed it and I reminded myself that I was safe to feel my feelings.
And eventually it was probably about 10, maybe 15 minutes of this very intense physical emotion in my body. The emotion finally moved through me, and after that my brain stopped looping and I was able to sleep like a dream. I was able to go to bed, and I had no more racing thoughts. I just needed to process all of the emotion that was in my body.
That's it. So often we wanna go to our thoughts to fix things, but it is our emotions that are the key. And I have found the more that I work with my emotions, the more that I process them, the more that I listen to them, the more I partner with them and help them out. The better I get at living my life, the happier I get at living my life and going through the body is almost like a shortcut.
I don't even have to work with my brain that much. I just go through the body a lot of the time. So I do wanna give you a couple of really powerful sentences that can help you when you're feeling a lot of emotion. That I think can be really helpful if you're not in a space where you can do this allowing and processing of your emotion.
And I do wanna also let you know that when we process and allow emotion. Sometimes it moves through us quickly. And sometimes if it's a really strong emotion, like if we're going through an incredible amount of grief or if something that has happened in our life that causes a deep amount of, injustice or anger, this can take a while.
So sometimes we're able to move through it, and we watch those emotions just dissipate and go away. And other times we process it and we work with it, and we listen to it. Then we just need to go live our life. We need to move with the emotion. We need to just continue living our life. And then we can come back, process it again, listen to it again, and then move on with our life.
And then we may need to do it again. Sometimes it takes time. We don't ever wanna process our emotion with the intent of getting rid of it. 'cause once again, that's resistance. We're just gonna allow it and let it stay as long as it needs to stay. And that is gonna help soften it. Okay, so some powerful sentences that you can think when you're feeling a lot of emotion is, this is fear.
I can do fear. This is overwhelm. I can do overwhelm. This is anxiety. I can do anxiety. Whatever the emotion is, you're just gonna label it, and then you're gonna remind yourself that you are capable of feeling it. Just label it and then I am capable of feeling this. This is despair. I can do a despair.
I also like to remind myself I am safe to feel this emotion. I'm safe to feel overwhelmed. I'm safe to feel uncomfortable. I am safe to feel unsafe. There's a lot of unsafeness out there right now, and it is okay for us to feel unsafe. I'm safe to feel unsafe. There's nothing physically actually happening to me right now.
So when my son was little. And he had a lot of his tantrums and, and, um, he was very physical. Like I've talked about before. I would often just remind myself like, this is me in my kitchen. My son is screaming, he's throwing things, and I am safe. Just remind myself I'm safe. I had to bring a lot of safety into my brain.
I'm safe to feel unsafe sometimes. I like to give my emotions a little wave, even like the happy ones. I love to point out the happy ones. Ooh, like there's delight. Oh, I just felt some excitement. There's joy, and I do it with my daughter all the time. She loves it. She's like, oh, mom, delight. Anytime we find something that we love, we read a book about a woman who would just point at things that she loved and she would say, delight.
So we do that all the time. See a butterfly delight. See a beautiful flower delight. So you can give your emotions a little wave. Oh, there's fear. All right, fear. My coach always says, I'm gonna take fear, put fear on my lap, give it a piece of paper and some crayons, and I'm gonna allow fear to color while I go and do what I need to get done.
We just bring it with us.
And then I always just let my emotions know. You can stay as long as you want.
So the skill of being able to allow and process our emotions is enormous it's a very tough one to do on your own, but it can be done. It's how I first learned to do it. I had to work with a lot and figure it out. But once I got a coach and I started. Understanding better how to work with it. It just really changed my life. But I do want you to know that you can just start using these skills today.
You can start labeling it and focusing on the physical sensation in your body, and it's gonna help you out. And mostly just know that we don't have to be scared of our emotions. We don't have to avoid things in our life because we're afraid of our emotions.
And we don't always have to seek out positive emotions. A lot of the emotions that get a lot of amazing, incredible things done in this world, they're not necessarily positive. They can feel very uncomfortable. Determination, commitment. They can feel very uncomfortable, and they get incredible things done in this world.
And once we understand how to work with our emotions, we can break the cycle of seeking positive and trying to avoid the negative. We can welcome them all in and have the full experience of life. So I hope this has been really helpful for you and, we'll talk more next week. Thanks so much.
Bye.
Thanks so much for listening to the podcast. If you're stuck and ready for change, grab my free course. Get unstuck@beckygarnercoaching.com slash stuck. It goes straight to the heart of what's keeping you stuck and gives you real tools to shift you out of it. Once again, that's becky garner coaching.com/stuck.
If this episode helped you today, don't keep it to yourself. Follow the show, leave a review or share it with someone else. And remember, you're stronger than you think, and you're more powerful than you know, and I truly believe that. I'll see you next time.