After wrestling with the cultural expectation to prioritize intellect over emotion, I've come to a profound realization about the power of embracing our feelings, especially in moments of stress and joy.
Today we navigate the complex terrain of our emotional world, where I share my journey of self-discovery and the transformative impact of acknowledging every feeling that arises. We explore the idea of "foreboding joy," a term brought to light by the insightful Brené Brown, and discuss why allowing ourselves to bask in happiness without fear is essential for our emotional well-being.
Through the lens of my own experiences in therapy and the Manage Your Stress mentorship, I'll reveal the life-changing benefits of developing an emotional vocabulary and the importance of nervous system hygiene.
It's time to challenge societal norms dictating which feelings are valid, particularly for women, and to arm ourselves with the practical tools necessary for stress management and emotional regulation.
After wrestling with the cultural expectation to prioritize intellect over emotion, I've come to a profound realization about the power of embracing our feelings, especially in moments of stress and joy.
Today we navigate the complex terrain of our emotional world, where I share my journey of self-discovery and the transformative impact of acknowledging every feeling that arises. We explore the idea of "foreboding joy," a term brought to light by the insightful Brené Brown, and discuss why allowing ourselves to bask in happiness without fear is essential for our emotional well-being.
Through the lens of my own experiences in therapy and the Manage Your Stress mentorship, I'll reveal the life-changing benefits of developing an emotional vocabulary and the importance of nervous system hygiene.
It's time to challenge societal norms dictating which feelings are valid, particularly for women, and to arm ourselves with the practical tools necessary for stress management and emotional regulation.
what is up? Hello there, my name is jessica patching bunch, you can call me jpb, and this is brain body resilience. This is a podcast dedicated to growth, human development and stressing a little bit less so you can go ahead and live a little bit more.
Speaker 2:
Hello my friends, and welcome back to the Brain Body Resilience Podcast. I'm your host, jpb. This is episode 181. And we're gonna get right into this.
Speaker 2:
I recently asked a few people how they felt when stressed, overwhelmed, anxious. What are these feelings? How would you describe that in your own words? And when you're looking for relief, how do you express that? Like, what are you looking for? I was looking for shared language, to see what makes sense to folks, and so most of the people that I asked responded with hmm, let me think about this for a bit, and this is what led me to this episode.
Speaker 2:
I am so grateful for all the people who helped me with this, and it reminded me that we have been taught to place more value on our thoughts than our feelings, and most of us never learn how to express our feelings, but rather repress them, ignore them, shrink them and generally detach from the feeling part of it.
Speaker 2:
When we and I am absolutely front of mind here when we are trying to express feelings, so much of the time we are trying to figure them out, trying to intellectualize them, trying to justify them, when really they just are. Whether we understand, justify like dislike, whether we understand, justify like dislike, they exist the same either way. The difference is in how long they stay and how we experience that. Think about how a moment of joy or realizing things are going really well, becoming aware that you are excited with your life, in love with someone, etc. We tend to jump straight to losing that thing. We begin to think of holding on so tight because we could lose this at any moment. So instead of being with that joy, love, excitement, we have turned it to fear and worry and we miss the thing we are trying to hold on so hard to.
Speaker 2:
Brene Brown calls this foreboding joy. I think that's really interesting. I definitely am aware when I am doing that now. Anyway, circling back around, I find myself saying things like I feel like this, I feel like and then, following up with what I actually think about that thing, I feel like this isn't a good fit.
Speaker 2:
I feel like maybe that's not a great example, which none are coming to me, but I hear this. It's more common in language. Now, I feel like, and then followed up with just your justification and your thoughts about that. When we spend so much time training ourselves to push our feelings down, to ignore them, to pretend they don't exist. For many years I told myself I don't feel. I don't feel anything Because I just wanted the pain to stop, the grief, the anger, the sadness and fear, the disappointment and love I was missing most of all from myself.
Speaker 2:
When we spend so much time separating ourselves from our feelings, it's no wonder we don't know how to identify or express them. The most used expression for feelings are good, bad, fine, happy, sad, mad, and there are so many more than that. Nuanced and layered and coexisting. It gets complex and when we need things to be simple so we can survive, we live in the extremes, the black and the white, when in reality the world and inside of us and around us is full of shades, of all of them, all of the shades we understand and we do. We understand and we do back up. We understand through language, and when we don't have the language ourselves, we can't make sense of it for ourselves or express it to others.
Speaker 2:
My therapist gave me a feelings list several years ago to help me find words for feelings and build an emotional vocabulary, which was incredibly helpful. I would look at each word closely, making sure not to miss any, because if I did, it would surely be that word that described exactly how I felt. But I wouldn't know until I saw it, and so it took me some time to find and begin to kind of relate to that system. And then I started looking for those words again, trying to intellectualize it, going over every one, thinking if that was the one that was right or wrong. Your brain and nervous system are sneaky. They'll do anything to protect you from pain, and sometimes the feeling we're trying to escape is that pain or grief or sorrow.
Speaker 2:
I was in a session with another therapist and they were asking how I was feeling in that moment and I was trying to find the words and I couldn't. I couldn't explain it. I wasn't really sure what it was. I'm still working on just allowing those things. I was looking through my list of words and getting so frustrated I was really having a hard time and said I don't know, how to do this.
Speaker 2:
I don't know how to feel, I'm not good at this and I felt like I was doing something wrong and started rehearsing the story about how I've never let myself feel. And started rehearsing the story about how I've never let myself feel and I practiced actively not feeling and now I don't know how. And while that is partly true, we always know how to feel because there's nothing to know, there's nothing for our brain to figure out. We feel, that's it. We feel, even when we can't describe it or make sense of it, we don't like it or try not to. We feel, we just do. We don't need to describe, figure out, try to know how to intellectualize. It is happening, that's it. You don't have to do anything but allow it to exist. That's it. You don't have to do anything, but allow it to exist. Which is the part we have to practice by learning to regulate, to create space, which does not mean get rid of that feeling in the discomfort. We are creating the space and learning to regulate so that we can gain clarity and do something proactive, like nervous system system hygiene, to maintain healthy flow in the nervous system, and have that proactive practice to foster well-being in general and not just address the state of crisis that we are feeling. So, while it is helpful to have some shared common language around our feelings and states of being in those moments so that we can express ourselves, this is not necessary in order to feel what is happening in your body.
Speaker 2:
Part of your brain's job is to make sense of things, so you will start making, meaning, making a story to try to understand and make sense of what you are feeling. The stories our brain tell are based on previous experiences, because it is a predictive machine For lack of a better word. I don't like that, but it is a predictive tool that this has happened before and there's no reference for new experiences because we don't actually know how to predict the future. It's all based on the past. Especially when it is a painful or seemingly threatening experience or something that holds any similarity to that of the past that of the past. Your brain is going to tell that story and reference that thing from the past that caused you pain and bring that to the surface in order to protect you from having that experience again.
Speaker 2:
And remember, threat is entirely subjective. What I find threatening you may not. Vice versa. It is dependent on our own lived experiences.
Speaker 2:
And, yes, there are like objective threats and harm that we can think about, but those aren't the only things that your brain protects you from and views as perceived threat. Your brain responds to perceived threat, which can be emotional or physical, and so it can be potential physical harm or emotional harm from perceived negative social interactions or fear of rejection in a social setting or in relationships. These all cause your threat response and your survival mode to kick in to protect you, and so feeling just is, but paying attention to the feelings and having the capacity to hold space for them and not to just jump in to ignore and suppress. This is the practice, and to hold that space, you have to be able to sit with yourself and allow time and space and silence, without distractions, without scrolling or even just reaching for your phone every five seconds and then like getting in there and not even knowing why, what you're doing or why, and you're all of a sudden you're sucked into Instagram, scrolling, looking at things you don't care about, which is the purpose of that app.
Speaker 2:
We've talked about that before. The never-ending to-do list is another way that we avoid these things, Things that keep us too busy from paying attention to ourselves, All the things we put in front of sitting with ourselves because it is uncomfortable. Sitting with our feelings takes a sense of safety and space to hold those and having space for your feelings does not mean holding onto them and keeping them forever and identifying yourself with them. It means allowing them to exist, acknowledging them and then letting them move on. Harvard neuroscientist no, I couldn't just say that.
Speaker 2:
Harvard neuroscientist Jill Bolte-Taylor says that feelings last an average of 90 seconds and, yes, some last longer. That comes from things like trying to suppress, ignore and resist them. Some of that comes from our bodies, our nervous system's inability to process in that moment, which is how trauma forms. Also, side note, dr Bolte-Taylor has a great book called the Stroke of Insight, which describes her lucid account of having a stroke. She also has a TED Talk about it. It is a great story, super interesting, highly recommend, all right.
Speaker 2:
Lastly, when we are pushing away and denying our feelings, we cannot select which ones we are resisting and ignoring. So joy and fear alike are dismissed and fear alike are dismissed. We are not allowing our feelings space to be and then wondering why we are lacking joy in our lives, why everything feels like shit. We were just trying to push away the things that feel like shit, the things we don't want to acknowledge the fear, the pain, the grief, the sadness, all of that. We don't want to allow those things. But we cannot selectively omit feelings. When we suppress our acknowledgement, we do not allow ourselves to recognize feelings. There is no differentiation. Feeling is a feeling. Yes, they are a spectrum. We cannot choose which ones we are ignoring, and so we're not allowing our feelings space, and then wondering why we're lacking that joy Because we have practiced not feeling it, not accepting it, not even recognizing it and just jumping to ignore our feelings.
Speaker 2:
Sometimes it doesn't feel safe to have those happy, joyful, excited feelings either. Again that foreboding joy, because we are in fear of opening ourselves up to that positive experience. When we are in a protective state, we expect the pain, the grief, the sorrow, the anger, the sadness. We expect those things and that joy and excitement is harder to let in because we want to protect. So, anyways, feelings are not good, they are not bad, they just exist as a part of the whole human experience.
Speaker 2:
You are a whole ass human person with a range of experiences and we like to make stories about which ones are acceptable, especially if we've been socialized as women. If we become angry or passionate, we are a bitch. If that is a man, in the same expression of feelings he's a powerhouse and other such bullshit stories that we have been told. And so, whatever they are, feel your feelers. It will likely take practice and might be frustrating. Keep going, resisting what we feel builds stress. Not addressing what stress is the stress that you hold, not addressing that stress leads to anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue, sleeplessness and your body just overall breaking down, because you cannot repair in a stressed state. It just doesn't work like that. I have lots to say about this and will likely talk about this more in the future, because it is such an important part of releasing that stress we are holding on to. As always, take a few moments to sit and breathe. Start small Two minutes, two minutes and then, when that feels okay, add more time. The goal is to expand your capacity and jumping right in trying to do it all at once, like we like to do Go big, get it done, force it to happen your system will likely close up and say no, I don't think so, because of that whole protection thing. It's got going on for us, which is great.
Speaker 2:
If you are like most of us and you were never taught about your nervous system or even just how to deal with emotions or stressful situations, at this point it might be really frustrating. You might be skeptical about feeling better at all and you might not think that there's really anything you can do about living completely engulfed in stress and anxiety. Because I'm projecting, that was my experience, because we never learn these things. We have to actually learn how to chill out, how to find calm, how to sit with our feelings, and this all takes practice.
Speaker 2:
Your stress response is not the bad guy. Your stress response is a biologically adaptive tool for the purpose of keeping you alive. It doesn't care about whether you're happy or sad, it just knows perceived threat and it's trying to protect you from pain and unpleasant experiences. It also has not adapted to the modern life that we have. It hasn't adapted as quickly as our society and way of life and how that has changed, with constant stimulation and overworked and overwhelmed. So we have to practice giving our system new information so that we can start to rewire the patterns of safety within us and the Manage your Stress mentorship that I have is built for exactly this to help you learn the science-backed tools, learn about how your system works, learn about yourself in that way so that you understand that this isn't something wrong it is just how my body is responding and then learning to regulate your stress and mood so that you can build mental resilience resilience to that stress, increase focus, energy, sleep better and then generally just feel better in your life.
Speaker 2:
More clarity, more calm All of the information for that is always in the show notes and I am always happy when I get to connect with y'all over on IG, on Instagram, or shoot me an email. I love that as well. All right, this is getting long, so I am going to leave it here. I'm wishing you a beautiful week Until next time, peace.
