The Key to Managing your Emotions

Do you ever feel like you overreact when under pressure, stressed, or scared? Do your emotions sometimes get the best of your behavior? Or do you have a hard time connecting or labeling your emotion? You're not alone! Dr. Tami talks about how we work through our emotions to better cope with strong feelings!  

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Transcript

[00:00] Rob: The following is a series of candid conversations. The content is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for seeking help from a mental health care professional. To learn more info regarding additional disclaimers, privacy policies, and terms and conditions, please visit hellodocammy.com.

[00:15] Dr. Tami: Welcome back, listeners. And if you're new to this show, thank you for checking out. Psychologists say this is a great episode on emotion. What I'm going to focus on in our discussion today is emotion dysregulation.

[00:31] Dr. Tami: That is something that we would see in the clinic. That's something that I treat, that I work with. This is something that is so common in our society and with human beings and it's part of human nature, yet it's heavily misunderstood. It's not talked about in the way that it needs to be talked about. And maybe if it is being talked about, it's not at the level. And in using the kind of terms. That can help a lot of individuals that just want to find out why is something like the word emotion that seems so simple, that seems like I should know what that means or I assume I know, but yet why am I kind of struggling with this? That's very normal. We should struggle a bit to understand emotion because it's the one thing that out of many, I think it's one of the main things that we weren't really taught. I don't remember having a full class on this or having a good explanation as a child on how to label an emotion, how to recognize one, how to change one, how to understand one, even knowing that it's just where does it come from? Why do I have to have them? As a kid, you're just maybe told Stop feeling like that. Or you're labeled in a certain way. Or you find out that your emotional reaction ends up sometimes working, getting you what you need. If you're hurt and you feel that emotion of pain and that results in you crying, maybe having that physiological release of tears and that feeling of support.

[02:33] Dr. Tami: Maybe when somebody sees that, of them. Coming as an adult and giving you a hug.

[02:40] Dr. Tami: What I just described there is the basics of going through the emotional reactions of what every human being goes through. Yet we all experience it at a different level. And some of us can experience emotion at heightened levels and that it can have a profound impact on the way we express them. And other individuals may be in this total opposite direction where they may not have a high emotional reaction. They may struggle to connect an emotion to a situation. They may struggle to find a word to tell you what maybe they can label as a feeling or a reaction or a physical response to something that's happening yet still have great difficulty with connecting it to that full emotion.

[03:44] Dr. Tami: And so for those individuals, when you see those two extremes, it can be really difficult to understand. Where do they fit in when we just talk about things in terms of one word, emotion. Instead of saying okay, where are you at and how much you understand and how do you relate to emotion. And so I think this is a really important topic for us to start talking about in this psychologist say, because we talk about so many different types of disorders, we talk about different issues. And what I know and I understand is majority of us do not have a good grasp on just what our emotions are.

[04:43] Dr. Tami: And I think that there are a lot of people out there fighting their emotion, maybe feeling like they're struggling with it, maybe they're feeling really down about feeling down. Maybe some people are feeling backed into a corner with anxiety because the emotion they're not understanding. Where does an emotion come from? Like anxiety? And so today we're going to break that down a bit.

[05:16] Dr. Tami: And then I'm going to end the episode with giving you a few things that you can do to start to cope with your emotions when you feel like they're an overload, that they're too much for you to handle in the moment, or that you feel like you just want to gain some more control over understanding. And this podcast is for everybody on every level.

[05:41] Dr. Tami: If you're an emotional expert, I hope you can learn something because I don't think I've met one. I know there are people who do work in emotion and that we have a lot of information, much more than we've had in the past. But yet even the experts that are doing research I would say are not experts on this complex topic. So don't feel alone, don't feel like you should have known all this because this is something that we're actively working on, trying to get better at understanding. So the key would be to normalize some of the fluctuations in the way we process emotion and the way that we can express it.

[06:38] Dr. Tami: And so this is for everybody. If you're listening, I don't know how this couldn't relate to you because it's in every part of our everyday life. And so I want you to just break down to think about what is an emotion. It's a reaction that we have and it's subjective. Subjective is that it's coming from your experience. Nobody can tell you or interpret a situation for you. This has to come from your lived experience of the situation, your perception of it.

[07:09] Dr. Tami: Even when somebody tries to explain something to us, we still have our own cognition, we have our own mindset, we have our own history, our lived experiences that will relate to our perception, the way we think about it and the way we view this experience.

[07:30] Dr. Tami: And then there's a physiological response that's our body, our body reacts to this stimuli. Whatever we're perceiving, whatever we're sensing, whatever is going on, then we're starting to feel it in our body. And then that can have a behavioral response. So that's where an emotion can relate to something of smiling, laughing, talking really loud. All of these things have an anger outburst. So that emotion is tied to this series of what does that all mean for me. So I want you to just kind of think about the last time that you had an emotion. If you're able to connect with that emotion, if you're a listener and you're one of the individuals and I think.

[08:17] Dr. Tami: This is about 10% the research of the population that can struggle with labeling their emotion or connecting with it knowing how to really get in and identify and talk about feeling so that they can feel the feeling and then relate to others in that capacity. This podcast is definitely for you. This episode is for all individuals, wherever they're at. And some of you may find yourself right in the middle where maybe some days and sometimes you feel like you can manage your emotion and that you're maybe feeling like you're living your best life, you're succeeding at controlling things. And then other days feel like you lose control, that you didn't react. You gave in to the anger. You told off that friend, you sent that email, that angry email, whatever it was, that emotion triggered a physiological of the body response and then a behavioral response.

[09:25] Dr. Tami: And so I want to break that down even further. I want you to think about emotion as a development, that this is something that we learn from childhood, that this it's gradual, so it doesn't it doesn't just happen, it comes in stages. And that our body is equipped, our brain and our body, it's equipped with a complete system on how to manage these emotions when they come in.

[09:54] Dr. Tami: And so part of this is your brain, that you have a prefrontal cortex. And I'm not going to go into a bunch of language, but I'm going to just give you the labels for these pieces of your brain, the parts of your brain, so that you can start to really feel like, okay, this is human. I'm human. I have a prefrontal cortex that's part of my brain that's very important to my personality, my decision making, the way I function in the world, the way I see the world. And within this, I have an amygdala, a hippocampus, and a basal ganglia. These are the pieces of your brain. This is what our biology gives us.

[10:36] Dr. Tami: And what the our amygdala does is it's responsible for helping us process our information. The hippocampus is related to memory. And so you can see why we can have a lot of strong emotional reactions to certain memories because the two are working and they're linked and trying to coordinate and signal each other in terms of how do we respond, how do we feel, how do we know how to gauge our human experience. And a lot of this is done through what we're seeing and how we were raised, our environment, how we were nurtured, our genetics, whatever we inherited. It affects all parts of our brain circuitry and the way our body communicates with each other. So if you're a person that says, I really struggle with my ability to recognize my emotion, I feel it there somewhat, it's vague, but I can almost kind of describe it a bit, yet I can't connect to it or it doesn't impact me as much. And then there can be problems with then how do I interact with others? If I don't know how to manage what I'm having difficulty labeling, then individuals on this end of the emotion registry can start to appear like they're disconnected from others. Maybe they're cold or aloof or indifferent. Some can be seen, some of these individuals, you may be seen as rude or dismissive. And so these are a lot of things that are it takes time to go to ask yourself as a human being when you're dealing with any person, what's behind the emotion of what I'm either seeing or not seeing? What's happening in this person's biology, what has happened in their lived experience that could be impacting how we're interacting with each other? And this is the point of this podcast, I think, is to always sit and first examine yourself. And then when you're in a situation, to start to look at people differently. And not in a way to marginalize them or to discriminate, but to really be more inclusive and understanding. This is one of the things as a psychologist, I always say it's tough. It's tough to really just be upset with somebody when they hurt you, when you feel like they because I can't help with all of my work and my knowledge on how our personalities form, I can't help but kind of think, what is this person going through in their life? Are they able to express this to me? Are they limited in their ability to feel guilt about what they've just done or said to me? These are things in my mind that I have to take into consideration because I know of all the variables, all the things that could be impacting them in their decision or their behavior that was hurtful to me. And so this could be a blessing and sometimes it feels like a curse, but I'd rather I know that and have that tool. Otherwise what we could be doing is reacting to everybody without having any complete understanding of the complexity of their emotional development, their ability to regulate their emotion.

[14:55] Dr. Tami: And where does this contribute on how they're functioning in our relationship? And so this can help you to start to first do this for yourself. And so what you can do, you can say, how can I start to recognize the first thing that you want to do is to learn, like what are the feelings? Understand how they're happening? Why am I feeling like this right now? And so this is for the individuals I'm going to talk to now who feel like they have a high amount of emotion dysregulation. These are the individuals out there who maybe have been called different things moody, who have been called maybe difficult. Maybe people say it's being around is like being on a roller coaster because they never know where you're going to be. And it's dramatic. It's intense. And so these are individuals who can have really heightened emotional expression. And when you're having a heightened emotional expression, that could be a sign that your amygdala and that your memory, your system, is not fully helping you regulate.

[16:26] Dr. Tami: So there's been a lot of research now pointing to the fact that trauma and early childhood hurts, especially in those first years of our life while our brain is farming. Those first two decades that can definitely get in there and impair, inhibit or block or change up the connection or pattern that can result in your brain developing in a way that can really maximize your ability to manage your emotion. And so not everybody who has high emotion dysregulation or has problems identifying or responding appropriately to emotion have trauma. Yet it's definitely one of the areas that we're finding that could explain some of this for individuals. And I think it's one of these important things as a listener to say, okay, so there's more work that maybe needs to be done. If I'm somebody who's struggling with controlling my emotions and that maybe I have some of the signs of somebody who has a chronic or a long history of significant different difficulty with managing my emotion. And that's what we call emotion dysregulation. And it can be found in individuals now that we're seeing that have had a lot of personal hurts or injuries or physical injuries or accidents that could have impacted their brain system on how to appropriately regulate and interpret emotions and then allowing them to respond to them in what we would consider like a healthy or adaptive or functional way. And most people, that's what we strive for. I think we all want to try to be able to handle difficult emotions. I think most of us I really think most of us want to walk away from a situation giving ourself a pat on the back that we feel like if it was a difficult or stressful time or that it was something that was really triggering to us, if we were feeling a strong emotion like jealousy or love, guilt, abandonment, regret, resentment, whatever is kind of coming at us. And if it's strong and the feeling is explosive, I think majority of us want to walk away feeling like our behavior in that situation did not match.

[19:08] Dr. Tami: That feeling in terms of being explosive. And there's a really high tendency when you're feeling an emotion that's overwhelming. It's exciting the brain, it's stimulating your physiological response to want to react in a way that's consistent with that feeling. That's the part of our brain that we want to really be working to our advantage to help us feel calm and regulated, feel the feeling, yet not act with the consistency of the feeling in certain situations. And so that's in those situations like anger, that's one situation where the intensity of the anger in a moment or the fear and that can result in a behavior that you're not proud of at the end of the day. And so we really want to look at how different things can impact the way we react under such circumstances. And just because maybe you're thinking you're one of the individuals who your emotions tend to get the best of you sometimes, it's definitely those emotions that are identified as strong that can be intense, that can feel overwhelming or maybe they're unexpected or their experience at a very high level. And so if you're wondering how do I identify what would be considered a problem for me? Where maybe this is something that there are some signs of where, like I said, anything that's chronic, anything that it feels like you've tried to control and yet you repeatedly are having trouble with any type of reaction that you feel has resulted in consequences for you that you didn't want yelling at a boss when they were maybe calling you out on you being late from work and yelling at them or directing it or blaming them somehow may result in you getting fired from your job. Those are just some examples of where people might want to think, okay, yeah. So if that happens or if there's several areas of life where you feel you're letting some of these tough, uncomfortable emotions get the best of you and the results aren't really working out for you, there are some other things to kind of ask yourself. Some people who have there are some signs of emotional dysregulation that would be individuals who may be really avoidant of really experiencing strong emotions. So they may be right there, they may be staring at it, looking straight at this emotion and not really wanting to come face to face with it, trying to walk around it, trying to push it aside, maybe failing it just on the surface. But overall, an avoidance of anything that's really triggering for an intense emotional reaction, inability to manage your behavior. That's the example I gave where you're feeling a very strong, intense, negative feeling, or not negative, but I would say an unpleasant so I don't want to label things as positive or negative, but something that's uncomfortable or unpleasant. And if you're an individual that has an inability to manage your behavior when you're having an uncomfortable feeling, manage it in a way that you behave in a way that you can be proud of, or that you would like to behave, or that you would like to see yourself behaving. If you feel like you've tried repeatedly and there's just an inability to manage your reaction under those types of situations, that definitely could be a sign. Some difficulty with decision-making because fear of really getting in and feeling the uncertainty of situations, that's part of needing to really manage your emotion and uncertainty while trying to finish out and maybe follow through with certain behaviors. And so it can really block if you're somebody who's stuck and you really are having trouble committing or going to that next step or just deciding which way to go. And you're almost paralyzed by some of the fear that could be that it's showing some history of difficulty managing your emotions when you have made the decision and dealing with consequences whether they be in your favor or not, and then relying on overly intense, impulsive behavior, that this is something maybe where you're acting without thinking. And it's not just every now and again it's going back and looking at your judgment, feeling like did he make a good decision? And if you feel like or if others have asked you or question your judgment that you may have had some of this impulsive behavior after responding under high emotion, you may then regret your decisions on how you behaved. And the other one is just like a lack of this emotional awareness, kind of being on autopilot, responding to difficult situations without really processing or allowing yourself to feel those emotions.

[24:47] Dr. Tami: Those are some signs of an individual who's definitely struggling with this type of emotion. Dysregulation and we all go through periods of this. We all have moments when we are unable to really process or we want to really feel an emotion or we've acted out. But again, this is something where this should not start to have a long pattern of creating some kind of dysfunction in your life that's where you would want to start to look at. This could be related to a bigger issue for me. It could be related to some past hurts or traumas, it could be related to some anxiety disorder, it could be related to some unresolved mood issues. There's a lot of things that can impact our emotion, but it takes time to sit and really start to become familiar with what could be triggering your style of how you feel and then interpret and then react to emotions. And also what kinds of situations get an emotional response out of you. How comfortable are you with feeling and to what level do you allow yourself to feel when you're in a certain situation? Now, I brought up the word trauma. So I just want to make sure that the listeners know that not everybody with trauma has an exaggerated response or difficulty controlling their reaction, that they can respond appropriately to certain stressful or threatening moments in their life. Yet the research has shown that there's about 50% to 60% of people that have experienced some serious trauma or some kind of real life horror in their life.

[26:39] Dr. Tami: And so of this percentage, not everybody goes on to develop disorders such as post traumatic stress. Yet about 5% to 10% of these individuals may go on to develop and meet that they've shown that have met criteria for PTSD. And so these are some of the things that for those of you who may have really been struggling with emotion dysregulation in a way that's bothersome. It's about this awareness that this isn't something that maybe I'm just chronically failing at. Maybe this is something that I got to take a deeper look and that maybe I'm not alone. And me learning more about how some of my situations through my development have impacted me, it could be a step into me starting to feel better and more empowered on how I can start to change some of the behavior. Sometimes we end up shaming ourselves and blaming ourselves without totally understanding the role of our history. And in everyday life we're not all doing the research, we're not reading all the books, we're not watching all the right shows that can educate us on this. And that's what I'm hoping that you're getting today. There's a lot of information out there, but hopefully today at least it gets you started on looking at the different variables that can impact how this word emotion and that it is complex even though the term is thrown out in society all over the place.

[28:26] Dr. Tami: And you're now I hope by listening to this, realizing, well, there's a lot of different things that I have to examine when I'm looking at myself and then when I'm trying to understand the emotions of others. And so there are certain things that we can do. So how can we start to control our feelings when we're having them?

[28:50] Dr. Tami: Or how do we not really control our feelings, but how do we control, I think and accept or learn how to act in a way that we can say that we're happy with or that we feel like we did in a good way. And so it's really common how do we do this? And some people feel like they can use a lot of ways to cope, some people do reappraisal. And so that's one of the most common ways that it's more like a thought process where you're able to balance the thinking, where you're able to look at it from a different angle and it's able to assign a different value to it, a situation that may feel really stressful, maybe it's really negative. And then you're able to instead of fully taking on that feeling of the heaviness of the situation, your brain is able to and your thoughts are able to take it and look at it from a different direction and maybe see the silver lining, be able to balance it with something a little bit healthier. And even just doing a little bit of that reappraisal can then help that shift in feeling into something that's maybe more manageable. And so that's not a form of denial that's a form of balancing.

[30:23] Dr. Tami: Because everything in life, there are two sides. There's both sides of anything that happens and we never fully know if the outcome was something that could have is pushing us in a direction that works out for us. So it's really part of learning to accept and feel an emotion, yet not let our mind just totally take us down with negative thinking or overwhelming thinking, which sometimes can feel kind of destructive. And at times it may not be even accurate because our thinking styles, again, those will be impacted by how well we can regulate our emotion. And so if we tend to have difficulty regulating our sadness or our anxiety or our fear, our thoughts are going to be more anxious, fearful and catastrophic. We're going to think about things that may be the worst case scenario in those situations. So learning how to do a bit of that reappraisal is a form of learning to balance and assign a new value to what's going on for you.

[31:34] Dr. Tami: Especially if you know you're somebody who really struggles with going off the deep end of getting into this negative spiraling of emotion. The other thing that people do to try to regulate is they suppress suppression is where we try to push away or not fully experience an uncomfortable emotion. And then we really are doing this because we don't want to respond. We feel that our response if we felt an emotion at its full level, the severity of it or the intensity of it, especially if it's uncomfortable or it's really powerful or if it's overwhelming. So this could be an emotion that you even interpret as really pleasant. It could be intense love, our happiness, our comfort that is unfamiliar to you or it's coming in a really intense rate that you feel like your behavior is going to be intense and overboard and that makes you uncomfortable so you shut it down a bit.

[32:37] Dr. Tami: You're able to express it or feel it some, but yet you don't want to focus on it. You want to push it aside. You want to only allow yourself to feel a certain percentage of it. And it's more of an avoidance. And a lot of times when we tend to avoid this can come out where we may have more depression or anxiety. This may not work for us maybe in the short term this is something that I think many people rely on to just get them through. But chronically or over the long haul continually suppressing something that is powerful may eventually come out in other ways. And so learning to accept that's the next way it's learning. How do I learn to accept even negative emotions or what is unpleasant to me as part of something that's very healthy and normal? All emotions are normal. They're all part of our human existence, they're all meant to be felt, even those uncomfortable ones. So when we can learn that and accept our humanness that if we have a spouse or someone we love, our partner who maybe is unfaithful and we feel intense hurt, we feel intense mistrust and that's a real feeling that would accompany something like that, that's a real appropriate feeling. Yet the intensity of it could feel really uncomfortable. And yet if you're able to label it, see what's causing it, and know that it is a healthy emotion to what you're experiencing and allow yourself to sit and feel that sadness, feel that separation, feel that betrayal, whatever. Those things feel like for you, and then to be able to feel it on a level that allows you to not suppress it, that allows you to feel like you can manage your behavior in it, your reaction that you're able to, at the end of the day, feel like you walked through it in a good way and so that's part of acceptance.

[35:09] Dr. Tami: Accepting grief is another one where denial is a very common or suppression is a very common part of when we lose anything that we're connected to. And so eventually accepting a feeling of loss, loneliness or longing can be really tough to allow yourself to feel. Yet a lot of the research now is showing being able to sit with uncomfortable emotions in the long haul can help people have less negative or less of these kind of symptoms down the road.

[35:53] Dr. Tami: So it's learning to find some acceptance and normalize difficult emotions, especially when they're paired with difficulty situations. And then to learn how do I get the kind of reaction that I feel is in my best interest, in the best interest of others? So it's looking at how does the way I handle my feelings, how do they help promote my health and not hinder somebody else's?

[36:21] Dr. Tami: So that's that's a really good way to say be accepting and live difficult emotions and think of overall walking away from them and releasing them in ways that you feel promotes you in a good way and is safe for people. So there's so much more. But those are just some common things that I wanted to bring up with emotion to get our listeners just a little feeling, a little more comfortable and prepared for our ongoing conversations as we continue to explore the psychological topics that you can start to use in your everyday life. And when we talk about the emotion regulation, there are some things I just want to give you where you can start to learn how to regulate your emotions. At the end of the day, one thing is to step back and observe feelings give that feeling a name, scan your body head to toe, see if you can get a sign of an emotion.

[37:30] Dr. Tami: Is there a physical display of any unseen feeling? Take a pen and paper or whatever you. Have and write it out, express it. Look up the terms, look up different sensations or words that you want to describe and it doesn't have to be a full page it doesn't have to be a short book. When you write out an emotion or a situation, there is no criteria of what it has to look like. From my generation, I watched Dougie Hellzer, MD. And at the end of his busy day as a child doctor who was treating people in the medical field, and he dealt with a lot of complex emotion and he was a child. He was a kid and the way he would summarize his experiences, he would sit down at his computer at the end of the day, and he would summarize his day, his emotions, his situation in usually one sentence. And so I use it a lot with my patients, because sometimes we feel like we have to be an author, professional writer, or that somebody is going to judge or read whatever we're writing, even when we're writing in our personal journals. If you've ever done that, it's almost like you already feel that you're not maybe expressing yourself accurately, even though maybe it's only for you to read. So this is why I want you to say it could be one word, it could be one sentence.

[39:11] Dr. Tami: But the part of it is that gives you the work to step back and observe and name it and do a little bit of your own work on finding out what are some terms that work for you. And so you can start to get to know how you process emotion, how you identify it, where you're having any problems next. It's look at instead of maybe that suppression, maybe that's what we need in the short term. But how do we start to change things up to redirect? How do we start to move and change our physical, our mental state? By changing to action versus reaction. So how do we start to excite our body and our mentality and our brain in a way that helps us change things up not by pushing aside, but by changing what we're doing physically. And so when I say change your action instead of your reaction. So by changing an action when you're having a difficult mood, by changing things up, by maybe exercising, putting on some music, changing your scenery, looking at switching up a situation where you feel like your mood is being triggered in a downward spiral, just getting up and moving that body can start to change the chemistry of your brain and your reaction. And so what you're trying to change is, how can I change my action to avoid an inappropriate, impulsive or explosive reaction to a situation? The other thing, and I threw this, I just said this is listen to some music, look at a feel good image, put on a sitcom that's really familiar to you, that, you know, elicits good energy time, your time yourself. Allow yourself to maybe feel for a while and then make sure that you're monitoring the feeling while you're in it. To make sure that you don't have an impulsive or an unplanned behavior that you're going to regret. And then create some kind of path where you can divert your attention by distracting. And not in the terms of avoidance, but in the terms of balancing and using something else to get your body in a feeling calm and balanced, especially if you're feeling really uncomfortable. This is part of how we start to learn how to cope with our manage and manage our emotions. Not be ashamed of them, label them, accept them, feel them, and also know how to release them in a way that allows us to feel like we're functioning well and that we can feel good about how we're starting to display those emotions and also, finally set yourself up for success. And remember, you have to define your success. So for me, I guess what I'm saying is my success when I'm feeling in an uncomfortable, difficult emotion is when I can handle that and express it in a good way, something that I feel good about when I leave that situation. And so that's my definition of success. What's your definition of success with what do you want the outcome of when you feel your emotion to be? What does it have to look like? And what are the top three to ten things you're willing to do to help you redirect, refocus or retrain your brain? This is where I will talk about proactive, coping. What are some things that you can do that you're willing to try when you're feeling like you're in a tough emotional situation that you feel like you don't handle well or you don't know how to handle? And then look for some of these things that we've talked about that work for you. And I'm sure there's a ton of things that I didn't mention that could work for you. So it's almost like if we don't have a plan in place for success, the odds of failure, the odds of us not getting close to success are greater. So this is where your plan is. Identifying things that you know have worked for you in the past or things that you would like to try and maybe you've been afraid to try or you haven't made time to try, but you think they could work for you. These would be things, some of the things that I know work for. A lot of people are learning to meditate, learning yoga, stretching, learning to carry certain essential oils or certain types of snacks in their pocket for when different things that we can do with our body and our mind to help us redirect, to help us refocus, to help us retrain our brain now that we have, hopefully, a better understanding of the complexity of emotion, and so the one thing I would want to leave you with at the end of this talk is that emotion takes more than there's several different avenues on how you have to go about getting through.

[45:11] Dr. Tami: I like to call it walking through an emotion. Climbing through, climbing up the mountain, not going around it. Swimming through the ocean and the waves crash versus sinking or jumping in a boat to take you to avoid the harsh water. These are all things where sometimes we don't have access to all of these ways to avoid or to get us through but we have our internal set. We have stuff that inside of us that we can learn to create and try to understand. What's our best way to tackle something big in life in an emotion? And how do we start small? By doing that first thing, which is stepping back and observing and scanning our body and starting a just brief description of writing it out or drawing it, making an image, whatever you need to do. But that's that first step of connecting. So I want to thank you for joining us today and I really enjoyed this topic. And of course this topic will be brought up several times. And down the road we'll go into more in depth discussions about how certain anxieties or certain hurts and things from the past may hacked us on different levels of where we're at in our emotional journey. So P. S. Thank you for being part of this today. And your emotions, they make you human.

[46:54] Dr. Tami: So here's to being human.