When we’re not sure what we are feeling, but we know it’s uncomfortable, then we tend to act in ways that are impulsive and self-defeating. For example:
“You just got home from a long day of work. Frustrating meetings, some conflict with a coworker, and a lot of running around. You’re tired and edgy. What is the first thing you do? Shove some food in your mouth? Turn on the TV to escape? Snap at your husband?” Write about your typical responses to emotions.
What are the positive and negative consequences of these behaviors? What kinds of difficulties are you facing in your life? How might your life be improved if you had better ways to resolve your emotions?
You can do this in your course workbook, or go ahead and write it in the comments or in your journal. Oh and by the way, here’s your second exercise-There is some very good evidence on the benefits of keeping a journal and writing down emotions. It has been shown to change brain chemistry, improve emotional processing and even resolve trauma.
(Now just in case you didn’t know, this video is section 1 of my 30 part course on emotion processing, you’re going to need a notebook or journal to work through some of the exercises, and if you’d like to purchase the who course and workbook, you can do that by clicking this link, but I’m going to publish the 30 main sections right here, for free on YouTube- so you also could just write this down or even leave your answer in the comments below)
OK so back to the questions- how do you tend to react when you’re feeling stressed, anxious or overwhelmed?
In this 30 Day Program one of the ways we are going to defeat mindless emotional and behavioral reactivity and build emotional resilience is with Skill #1- Name it to Tame it. We are also going to expand your Emotional Toolbelt- the range of skills that you have to work with emotions. So how do we do this?If this were the seafood processing plant, mentioned in the intro, this stage would be looking at what’s in the trucks and naming it- is it Salmon? Halibut? Lobster? For us we’d say, “What am I feeling? Is it anger, annoyance, sadness?”
When we use words for our emotions we can feel a greater sense of clarityHow we use our words can help us have greater power over our emotions. We can create greater clarity and power by making our thoughts more concrete.
So if you’re having a hard time figuring out what to do with a thought, problem, or emotion the first step to process your emotions is to take the time to notice, name and express your thoughts. Share them with others or write them down to get more power over them.
As you do these exercises you may be surprised at how often you’re feeling something but aren’t identifying that feeling. When we don’t know what we are feeling, it leaves us helpless to act. When we do identify and express our emotions in writing or speech, it gives us the ability to slow things down, develop some insight, and then choose a course of action that lines up with our values (the kind of person that we want to be). If, on the other hand, we act impulsively to suppress or react to our emotions, then our life begins to feel out of control.
How this works in the brainTo speak very simply of the brain, your brain has a rational thinking part (to simplify we call this the upstairs brain), this upstairs brain can think through problems, plan, and make good choices, and your brain has an emotional, reactive, feeling part (the downstairs brain) this is the limbic system or the survival part of our brain. It’s the fight/flight/freeze response and the impulsive emotional part. Both of these parts are good, but when our brain is stuck in the downstairs brain it can be hard to think clearly and we are often reactive. But when we give a name to our emotions it’s like we’re connecting those two parts of the brain so that they can work together to solve problems.
In you life this looks like using “I feel statements”An “I feel” statement is simple, you just say or write: I feel____ followed by an emotion word. It can be helpful to use a list of emotion words, or one of these emotion check-in/checkout charts.
Now this is really simple, and it’s really powerful. It’s probably one of the most common interventions I use in therapy- simply assigning my clients to pay attention to and write down their emotions. And just this can be enough to help many people really kickstart the healing process, because deep down you have an inner wisdom that knows what to do with emotions when you sit with them long enough to notice them. You may be surprised to see, as you notice and express an emotion, it naturally dissipates on its own.
Now real quick, let’s talk about a couple ways this can get twisted- the first way is saying something like this “ I feel like the world is a terrible place” “I feel like everyone is out to get me” I feel like a terrible human being”. These are not feelings, these are thoughts. There are no emotion words here. The first word after “feel” needs to be an emotion word, not I feel like or I feel that… So let’s get back to what an emotion is. “I feel worried” “I feel scared” “I feel disappointed. I feel regret” these are emotion words. So make sure that when you do this you use an emotion word in the sentence. This is key to Emotion Processing and Emotion Regulation.
Second, Say “I feel” instead of “I am”. The second problem I run into a lot is a problem with our English language- it confuses “I am” with “I feel”. For example, if you say “I am depressed” you’ve turned what you’re feeling into your identity. You create with your words a reality that gives you little to no power to change. But if you say “I’m having feelings of sadness right now” that describes something you are experiencing, but it puts you in the role of the experience-er. By noticing yourself as a person who is having feelings, it gives you some ability to act. So try to say “I feel sad” instead of “I am sad” or “I feel hopeless” instead of “I am depressed”
Pay attention to your words as you work through this course. The types of words we use matter. If we use words of truth and kindness as we describe ourselves and others we create strength and power. If we use words of fear or distortion (twisting, or exaggerating the truth) then we create helplessness.
The third problem is being vague. Research shows that the more specific we are with our words for emotions, the more power we have to resolve our them. You can use an emotions chart to increase your emotional vocabulary, or even try typing in what you’re feeling into a thesaurus to see if there’s a better way to put a word to your feeling. So are you feeling angry? Or irritated? Or furious? Or disappointed? Or annoyed or bitter? The more specific you are, the more power you’ll have to resolve your emotions.
OK- so here’s your homework for this week:
Exercise: Track your emotions every day for one month. You could download my free mood tracker or use a mood tracking app. Plan a regular time to do it, and set a timer on your phone. Each time the alarm goes off write down what emotions you are feeling. It can be easy to notice the big, loud or painful emotions, but it often takes a little more effort to notice the subtle ones. You may feel more than one emotion at once, this is normal. Write down as many as you can notice. Learning to notice and feel a couple of emotions at once is going to help you get better at feeling and live a healthier and happier life.
Then in your notebook go ahead and set 3 goals for this course. I’ve made a short video on setting helpful goals, so you may want to watch that first or read the post about goals here. Thanks for watching, I know you’re off to a great start!!
Let’s start by making a little analogy- We’re going to compare emotion processing to a fish processing factory. Every day trucks arrive carrying piles of the latest catch. They come with Salmon, Halibut, Crab, Lobster, Tilapia and other delicious seafood. At our processing factory we need to check in the trucks, unload the trucks, cut the seafood into usable portions, throw out the unusable parts, package the seafood, label it and send it out to stores where it can be used to make delicious salmon fillets and sushi and butterfly shrimp. Sounds delicious, if you like seafood.
Now remember this is an emotional processing analogy, and some emotions, just like fish, can be quite unpleasant, stinky to say the least. So let’s say that one sunny day something goes wrong. A truck arrives full of fish that are too big for our machines to handle. We may try to run them through anyway, but then our machine breaks down. Because the machines aren’t working, the workers leave for the day because they don’t know what to do- they don’t know how to fix the machine.
Now we’ve got trucks loaded with unprocessed fish sitting outside but we can’t process them, and more trucks are coming in but can’t be processed either.
You can see where this is going right? The fish start to rot. You and your workers are starting to feel stressed out. “What’s going to happen with our factory? With our jobs?” So we try to cope with the stress in the best way we know how. Maybe we use one of our three skills, we vent to a coworker about how much we hate processing fish, or we leave and go to lunch, but basically we just try not to think about those trucks of fish.
Pretty soon the trucks become more and more stinky, oozy, even terrifying. The longer we leave them, the easier it is to avoid them and the harder it is to face them. Maybe we avoid the trucks for days, weeks, years… At some point the fish that had the potential to be purposeful and delicious becomes rotting and putrid.
At this point we don’t want to go anywhere near those trucks of fish, they seem too terrible to face or approach. But avoiding the trucks seriously messes up our lives. We can’t work, because other trucks can’t get in. We can’t process seafood, our employees are out of work and the grocers are out of fish. Our processing factory and or rather our life is not working.
One day we drive up to the factory and decide “Something needs to change!!!” We get out the big hoses, the galoshes, the shovels, and we dive in. We clean out the trucks. It’s painful, stinky, terrifying, but we get through it. Maybe we need to ask for help, maybe we have to find someone who knows how to fix the broken machine or we need some extra support to finish the cleaning. We get our factory back in order, and decide that to prevent that from happening, we need to process each truck as it arrives or soon after.
And soon, as each truckload of seafood comes in, we check it in, we unload the trucks, cut the seafood into usable portions, throw out the unusable parts, package the seafood, label it and send it out to stores where it can be used to make delicious salmon fillets and sushi and butterfly shrimp. And we’re back in business. Our factory is running smoothly, turning a profit, and we feel pretty good about life.
And this is what the emotion processing looks like,
when big emotions come rolling in, we notice them, name them, pause and decide what to do with them. We cut out that faulty thinking that makes things worse, and we work with our body to calm down, and we break the emotions down into smaller pieces and explore what they are, and then, we decide what to do with them, whether to act on them, make some changes, or just accept them as a beautiful part of the process of being alive.
But
sometimes something goes wrong
.
Sometimes our emotions get backed up
. Maybe just like if you have too many trucks of fish, maybe you get overwhelmed with too many emotions to process at once. Maybe you go through some trauma that’s too big to deal with at once. Or maybe work is too stressful and overwhelming, or maybe you’ve got something biological that goes wrong, you’re not sleeping well or your body gets sick. And it just feels too overwhelming to deal with the truckload of emotions that keep coming in.
Emotions that had been meant to help you, become overwhelming and seem to be the thing ruining your life. Sadness takes over your day-to-day, or Anxiety stops you from doing important things.
So you avoid your feelings. You try not to think about them. Maybe you use drugs or food to feel good for a while. Maybe you avoid your feelings by keeping too busy or by blaming everyone else. And this leads to the emotions building up.
And on top of the old trucks of emotions, new trucks arrive every day.
