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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 friends. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we're gonna talk about something that literally drives every single thing that you do, whether you realize it or not. We're gonna talk about emotions, and I have been feeling a. A lot of emotions lately, as I have been promoting my group, as I've been putting out a webinar that I'm doing, as I have been working on this podcast, there's been a lot of emotions in my life, a lot of opportunity to work with them, and I thought it was a great time to talk about it on the podcast.
Have you ever wondered why you can't move forward even when you know exactly what to do? You know all of the steps, you know exactly what to do, but you can't get yourself to budge to move. Maybe it feels like a giant wall in front of you, or maybe why you avoid opportunities that you know would be good for you.
Chances are your emotions are at the root of that. So that's why I wanna talk about it today because the emotions are everything. They are the center of everything. They're the fuel for life, and they determine the quality of your experience in this life. Before we jump into talking about emotions, I think it would be good to define what an emotion is because we all think about it really differently. And I want us to have the same vocabulary.
Often when I ask someone how they feel, they will give me their thoughts, especially if I ask a client how they feel, they'll give me their thoughts. How does that feel? Well, I feel like I wanna run away.
I feel like life isn't fair, like isn't fair, and it should be fair. I feel like I could move mountains. I'm on top of the mountain and I could do anything. I can rule the world. Notice how those are all thoughts. They're not feelings.
It's just good awareness. It's just part of kind of our social world. It's something that we, do socially we ask about a feeling and then our brain tends to go more cognitive and to think about our thoughts, but a feeling is actually a one word emotion.
So when I'm talking about a feeling, I'm talking about words like, sad, jealous, hurt, peaceful, confused, loved. Those are all examples of feelings and if you start lick up how many different feelings there are in the world, it's in incredible. One of the things I like to do for my clients is give them a list of all the different feelings and I, I shouldn't say all the different feelings, as many different feelings because it takes up an entire page of small print words that you can choose from, and there's so many more than that.
But if we can grow. Are feeling vocabulary. It really helps us to dial in on what we're feeling. And this distinction matters, being able to name when that feeling is, it really matters. And I'll tell you why in just a little bit. The other thing we tend to get mixed up is we get body sensations mixed up with our feelings.
So we might ask, how are you feeling? And somebody might say, oh, I'm feeling hungry. I'm feeling cold, I'm feeling tired, I'm feeling energetic. Right? Those aren't the feelings that we're talking about. Those are physical sensations in the body that has to do more with, the state of the body. Once again, when we're talking about emotions, we're talking about that one word, feeling disappointed, angry, confused.
Those are emotions. That's what I'm talking about. Okay, let's talk about what an emotion is. At its core, an emotion is a vibration in your body. It's physical. Different than cold and hungry and tired, but it is physical. We feel physical sensations of emotion in our body.
When I cry, I feel a tight squeezing in my throat. It's really, really tight. Sometimes it feels like my atom's, apple's gonna pop off when I'm really angry. I feel a physical sensations in my fists, maybe in my jaw, 'cause I tend to clench my jaw.
So what an emotion is, is a chemical reaction to a thought. I believe it's eckel to Hart that talks about this, that a. Emotion is simply just a chemical reaction to a thought. You have a thought, your brain reacts to it with a release of chemicals, and depending on what you're thinking, you're gonna release a combination of neurotransmitters and hormones like serotonin, oxytocin, dopamine,
Norepinephrine, or cortisol. Either way, you will feel a sensation in your body, and that's all an emotion is it's just a sensation in your body that's caused by a chemical reaction in your brain because of what you were thinking.
This is happening because of sentences in my brain. So for example, anxiety might feel like a buzzing in your chest. It might feel like energy in your limbs coupled with an urge to move. A lot of times people, when they have anxiety, they get energy in their legs, in their limbs, the sensation that they can't sit anymore and they need to move around.
They might feel their heart pumping. They might feel a warmth of flushing in their face. Everyone's gonna experience it differently. The sensation isn't gonna be the same for everyone. For one person, they might feel the heart pumping. Another person might feel like more of a buzzing joy might feel like lightness or warmth in your body.
It might even feel like it's pulling you up, making you stand a little bit taller. It might feel more on the top half of your body. Something like grief. The sensation of grief might feel heavy. Like a weight that's pressing down in your chest, or it might be a, a heaviness or a weight that's all over your entire body.
I really want you to notice and feel how emotion creates sensation in your body. So I wanna see if we can experience the feeling of excitement together.
If you're able to, close your eyes and go to a time in your life when you felt excited. Maybe it was on a vacation or at a sports game. Maybe it was when you found out you were pregnant or getting married. Maybe it was when you graduated from school, maybe it was hanging out with a friend or at a concert,
When you find it, notice the physical sensation of excitement in your body. What is that experience like for you?
When I tap in and I notice what that experience is like for me, I feel almost like bubbles in the top of my chest and I feel light and I feel pulled up. Like I could stand a little bit taller and almost makes me feel like a little giddy. Like I wanna laugh. Like there's a little bit of emotion coming out that way.
Just really tune in and feel what excitement feels like in your body and notice that you can generate that feeling with your brain. Like all we have to do is find a a time when we felt excited and we can generate that sensation in our body. Now each of us has a different way of experiencing emotions.
Some of us have very big emotions. My emotions tend to be big. They tend to go really big and loud, and then they go really down, and then they go up and down. They're kind of like a big wave. And some people have smaller emotions and some people's emotions are more steady. And it's really important to understand that neither way is right and neither way is wrong.
We need people who have big emotions. We need people who feel deeply. We need these people. We need people who cry at commercials, who feel sad about all the terrible things that are happening in the world because those people help us tune into our emotions. Those people help us be aware of our emotions and when they channel their emotions.
They can get amazing things done in the world. And we also need people who have smaller amounts of emotion because they keep us steady, they keep us a little bit more. Even now, my emotions are really big, and my husband's on the opposite side. He tends to just be more steady, so I bring the excitement into the marriage.
I bring up the things that he wouldn't think about because my emotions are bigger and they're more in tune. And then he brings the steadiness, he brings the calmness to me. When mine get a little bit too big, he can help me bring it back down. So it's just really important to know that whether you have big emotions or they're just tend to be a little bit more steady, a little bit smaller, that's okay.
Neither way is right, neither way is wrong. I think one of the coolest things that I learned about my emotions is that my emotions are messengers. They are information. They're there to tell us when something doesn't feel right, when maybe we should leave an area, 'cause maybe there's danger.
They're there to tell us what we need to pay attention to, maybe how to take care of ourselves. They have really important information for us. Because we're typically not taught to understand our emotions. We tend to ignore them and shut them down. I want you to think about when you were younger and what happened when you had big emotions.
What were you taught about emotions when you were younger? Were they safe to feel or were they shut down? Were you taught skills on how to work with them, how to manage your anger, how to manage anxiety, how to deal with sad feelings, or like many of us where you sent to your room, told to keep it to yourself,
it's kind of crazy to think about because when you're having these huge, intense emotions, typically what happens is you're either ignored. Or you're told to remove yourself. Or in some cases, you know, for some people growing up, they were threatened when they had big emotions. You know, if you, uh, don't stop crying, I'll give you something to cry about.
That was a pretty famous one. I don't know if that's said anymore, but when I was growing up, that was pretty normal. I, so it's no wonder that most of us push our emotions down, ignore them, or pretend like we don't have them. 'cause that's what we were taught to do. When we were sad and we were upset, we were sent to our rooms, we were told to remove ourselves.
We were told to pipe down. It's most likely what your parents were taught to do. It's most likely what their parents were taught to do. It's been like this for generations, and I do think we're getting a lot more awareness about emotions. Our kids are being taught about emotions in school. They're being taught how to work with them, and I think that is a really, really cool thing.
But we still have this tendency to ignore our emotions, to push them down, to see them as not safe. And they're really, really important to pay attention to. , They're one of the most fundamental things to pay attention to because our emotions will determine what we do or don't do in life.
Every single action you take. Fueled by an emotion,
you hold back from speaking up because you're afraid to be embarrassed. You avoid a conflict because you're afraid that you'll feel angry. And if you feel angry, you might lose your temper. And if you lose your temper, then you might feel guilty.
We eat the cookie when we don't want to because we're tired of feeling the craving, and we think that it will bring us relief. I'm gonna eat the cookie and then I'll just feel relief. It'll be outta my mind. We are always seeking a way to feel better, and we are always seeking a way to avoid feeling badly.
That is fundamentally what we do as humans. Emotions are the fuel behind every choice we make in either an effort to seek pleasure or avoid pain. This is how our brain works. It's one of the, the fundamental parts of our brain. Emotions are why we seek relationships.
They're why we have hobbies. They're why we work, and they're even why we eat. So I remember reading in a book a long time ago and I tried to find this study. I couldn't find it on their internet. So I hope I'm not passing on something that was a misprint. But I remember reading a study in a book where,
there was an experiment where the scientists dead in the area of the brain in a rat responsible for emotions. They put in like a little glass tube into the area of the brain that's responsible for the emotions, and without the emotional input, the rat stopped playing. They stopped socializing.
They stopped procreating, they stopped eating. They essentially stopped doing everything, and then the rats died. And that's because without emotions, there's no motivation, there's no fuel.
Even if that study isn't true. Like I said, I couldn't find it. I want you to think about it. If you could not feel, if you could not feel happiness, sadness, joy, pleasure, all of the emotions, what would happen? And we see this happen when people go into a major depression.
When I was in a major depression, I stopped showering. I stopped getting outta bed. I stopped wanting to eat. I pretty much stopped doing everything. I was just so numb. There was no point to doing anything. So our emotions are really the fuel. For everything we do or we don't do.
They're so important to pay attention to. I want you to think about this. Your emotions determine the quality of your life, not your accomplishments, not your material items, not your family, not your kids. It's your emotions. Let me give you an example.
So how many stories have you heard of people who are, multimillionaires, billionaires, and they have everything they could ever want, and they are miserable. They have all the material items and they're miserable. Maybe they have fame, they have fortune, and they're miserable.
I listened to the Ed Millet show and he has a lot of multimillionaire on his show. And they talk about earning millions of dollars and being more miserable than they've ever been. Almost every single one of them gets on there and talks about this. They'll talk about how I started earning millions and millions of dollars.
I was this multimillionaire. I was going to parties, I was dating starlets. I was, driving all the cars and I was more miserable than I've ever been. And it's not about the money. Because there are plenty of multimillionaires out there who love life. There's plenty of people who make lots and lots of money, who have a great quality of life and have a great emotional experience of life.
So it's not the material items, it's not how we were raised. The quality of your life, whether you enjoy it or not, is determined by the emotions that you experience on a daily basis. And the best news is, here's the best, best, best news, is we literally get to decide what emotions we want to feel, and we get to decide how we wanna experience the emotions that we're having.
We get to decide how we wanna experience emotions, whether they're positive or negative. And because we have a prefrontal cortex or higher brain, essentially we can learn to partner with emotions that are difficult for us, and we can learn to generate the emotions that we want to have on purpose.
Which is the coolest thing ever because then we're not subject to just whatever emotional experience we're having in the moment. We get to truly generate what we want and we get to learn how to deal with the, the experiences that are hard and difficult and create emotions in us that we'd rather avoid.
But before we can do that, we really have to develop the skill of identifying our emotions, becoming aware of them. Most of the time when I ask people and they're brand new clients, and I'll ask 'em what they're feeling, they'll give me thoughts. They have a really hard time identifying what they're feeling.
I even give them a sheet of paper that has all of these different feelings just so they can learn feeling words, and they can start being able to identify that feeling. So the key here is, is that emotions are information. They're just messengers. They're physical sensations. They're not instructions.
They tell you what to pay attention to. They tell you if there's something going on, but you don't have to let them control you blindly. You get to be in charge of that. I remember a long time ago when I was seeing a, therapist and a. I didn't even realize it at the time that I was afraid of my emotions.
I didn't realize that I was avoiding them or resisting them or pushing them away. It felt like I was feeling them all the time because I was so anxious and so depressed. It felt like I was in an emotional puddle all the time. But she helped me to understand how I was avoiding them, pushing them away and resisting them.
And then she said to me one day, she said, Becky, your emotions can't hurt you. Your emotions can't hurt you. They're not dangerous. For whatever reason that really hit me at that time because I didn't realize that I had a thought in my brain that emotions were dangerous. And it sounds kind of silly 'cause when you logically think about it, you're like, yes, of course emotions can't hurt me.
They're fine. But there is this kind of fundamental fear of emotions, especially when you think about emotions like terror and horror, we get very, very scared of those emotions because they're so big. It's really good to understand that your emotions can't hurt you,
they're just physical sensations in your body. They're a chemical reaction to a thought you are having. So what I want to offer this week is I want you to start just noticing your emotions.
Just start noticing them. What are you feeling? What are the sensations that it causes in your body? What does sadness feel like? What does anxiety feel like? What does happiness feel like? What does peace feel like? What are the emotions that you're feeling? And you might notice that you feel just more neutral?
A lot. When I first started doing this work, I was like, I just feel neutral. I just feel kind of flat. But the more I started getting into and understanding my emotions, the more I was able to really target what I was feeling. And we really want to be able to name them. So Dr. Dan Siegel talks about this. I don't remember which book he was in that he talked about it, but he calls it, name it, detainment.
I think it's called the whole brainchild, it's name it to Tame It. One of the things that happens is if we can name our emotion, if we can identify it, our body starts to calm down around it. So there was a study done where they showed people images of scary things.
And they would watch the body's reaction, right? I think they put them in like an FMRI machine, and they would watch the reaction in the body what would happen, and then they would ask them to name the emotion they were feeling. And as soon as the person named the emotion that they were feeling, their body would start to calm down.
So that's name a detainment. You can just start naming the emotion. All right. I feel upset, I feel frustrated. I feel wired. Just start naming it to tame it. Name it first, and then notice what's happening in your body. I feel a buzzing in my chest.
I feel warmth in my cheeks. I feel, um, a pit in my stomach. And we just start labeling that through. And I like to tell my clients to do this three times a day for about a week. You can even set an alarm on your phone. Just check in with your emotions. Or for me, every time I open the fridge, that's just my cue.
If I'm opening the fridge, I'm like, all right, what are you feeling, Becky? What's going on? And remember, hunger's not an emotion. What's going on? And it's just an, it's not a, you know, it doesn't mean that I'm not hungry. I just wanna check in and say, that's a good time for me to just check in and see where my emotions are at.
So start noticing your emotions. Name them, and just notice the sensations in your body and give yourself a really good reminder that I feel this way because of sentences in my brain. It's just a chemical reaction to a thought that I'm having, and I am safe to feel this emotion. I'm safe to feel this emotion.
Then we are gonna talk more about emotions in the coming weeks. We're gonna talk about the different ways we handle them, the different ways we tend to wanna get away from them, numb from them, and different things we can do to work with our emotions. So I will see you next time. 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.