Rethink Your Rules
The Power and Paradox of Emotion: Surprising Truths For Working Moms (Part 1)
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Need help applying this to your life? Ready for more strategies like this, but personalized to YOU? Set up your free consult and let’s talk about your unique situation and how coaching can help:
https://getcoached.jennyhobbsmd.com/consult
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Everything on this podcast and website is for informational purposes only and should not be used as medical advice. Views are our own, and do not necessarily represent those of our past or present employers or colleagues.
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Need help applying this to your life? Ready for more strategies like this, but personalized to YOU? Set up your free consult and let’s talk about your unique situation and how coaching can help:
https://getcoached.jennyhobbsmd.com/consult
_________
Everything on this podcast and website is for informational purposes only and should not be used as medical advice. Views are our own, and do not necessarily represent those of our past or present employers or colleagues.
Welcome to Rethink your Rules with Jenny Hobbs MD. A fresh perspective on relationships, success and happiness for high achieving moms.
Speaker 2:Hey, there it's Jenny. Welcome back to another episode of Rethink your Rules. This week I want to share with you a really fun and sort of quick list of 10 surprisingly paradoxical truths about how your emotions work and how to regulate your emotional life and manage it. Before I jump into that list, I just want to say the reason I really think this is important for all of us is that we are never taught in school or any of our training really directly about how to navigate our emotional life. For most of us many of my clients work in really high, achieving, competitive fields, often in the sciences or business.
Speaker 2:Emotions are sort of relegated to this area where we either want to pretend they don't exist or we're told they're just getting in the way or they're too woo, and we really everyone in our field of work really feels more comfortable in the black and white, logical, rational side of things, right. So we get all of those messages to kind of ignore the emotional side of things, right. So we get all of those messages to kind of ignore the emotional side of things and maybe even pretend it doesn't have the power that it does. And we aren't. You know, no one really was taught traditionally in school how to think about their emotions in any sort of direct way. Right, our teaching is about learning all kinds of other things about life, but often not emotions, unless you get to the point where you're becoming like a therapist or a coach. That's the first and only time where these things are really talked about in any sort of direct way. And for those of us who maybe are discovering that we have neurodiversity, like ADHD or autism, or we're noticing that that runs in our families and maybe our kids have it, we also tend to be not as great at handling our emotional life as the neurotypical person for various reasons, and so, for all of those reasons, often our ability to understand our emotions is lacking. And then, on top of all of that, the way emotions work and how to manage them isn't very intuitive. So we're all smart people, we figured out a lot of stuff on our own, but, as you'll see from this list, a lot of the things that work when handling emotions are just not things you would necessarily stumble upon when you're going about life and tackling big feelings the way that you would tackle anything else. Feelings and emotions just kind of behave differently.
Speaker 2:So one of my goals here is just to give you some of that information you might not otherwise stumble upon in your busy life with a million other things to think about, so that you can have these truths in the back of your mind the next time that you're feeling overwhelmed or stressed or anxious, or your kids are having a big emotion and you can't figure out what to do, and just maybe kind of try to see if any of these beliefs resonate with you and you want to keep them in mind. And if they don't resonate with you or they don't make a lot of sense to you, that's okay too. Maybe just think about why that is and maybe talk about with someone. Of course, I'm always here, as I always say, to do a consult call. If you want to explore how some of these truths would look in your life or how they may or may not apply to your specific situation, I'm always here for that, okay. So, with that said, here are some of my top surprising, counterintuitive, dare I say paradoxical truths about emotions.
Speaker 2:Number one we underestimate the importance of emotions but overestimate our understanding of them. So the average person walking around, consciously or not, kind of thinks that emotions are less important to their life, but also kind of thinks that they understand them and are aware of them more than they actually are. Number two emotions are very powerful, but they are not in complete control of you. So, as we've talked about, emotions have a powerful, big impact on how we act and how the results we get in the world, for sure. At the same time, it wouldn't be correct to say that we're just at the whim of our emotions and have no ability to say, hey, I'm not going to act out of this emotion in a way. That's negative. Right, so you can learn the skill of harnessing the power of your emotions rather than being at the mercy of it, okay. Number three emotions are very real, but they are not necessarily reality.
Speaker 2:Another way I like to think about this is emotions are your truth of your experience, but not necessarily the truth of the entire experience, right, and so this gets to the concept of like. When we have miscommunications or misunderstandings, right, we may have an emotion like that person was rude to me, that person doesn't care about me, that person forgot my birthday or didn't respond to my text fast enough, and the emotions that arise from those beliefs that we have, like rejection, hurt, whatever are very real and valid, always right. However, they may not necessarily reflect the entire picture of what the other person's intent was or even what actually happened. So our emotions are always real and always our truth, and at the same time, we have to hold a little bit lightly to them and recognize that they may not be the entire reality of what's happened.
Speaker 2:A great example of this would be, you know, on a recent trip with my kids, we got my daughter this princess makeover that costs like $100 and something she definitely wanted to do. My son didn't really have anything that he wanted to do, but on the trip he eventually found this really big, nice stuffed animal that he wanted, which costs like $40. It's like a crazy Disney prices. But when we got my son the stuffed animal, my daughter was very upset and hurt and said you love him more than me, you got him a better gift than me, all this stuff and she wasn't even remembering the makeover, right. And so at first I said, well, remember, we got you the makeover and so this was like his thing. And you know she was like well, you care about him more because you gave him something he can take home and actually use after the trip and I only got my makeover for the one day and then it's over. And so in that example, her emotion of feeling hurt and like we cared more about her brother and that wasn't fair that emotion was her truth and her reality, right, and it was valid. However, it was based on her belief system that a stuffed animal you could take home was better than the makeover right, it was also based on the fact that she didn't even know that we actually spent more money and time and effort on what we gave her, and so to me, that's actually a bigger gift than what we gave him, which took very little time and effort and cost less. And I know in my heart of hearts that the reality is not that I love my son more than my daughter or, you know, don't want things to be fair. I'm always working hard to be fair and love them both. So the reality of the situation, both based on the external logical facts and what I know to be my heart and my intention, is not that we are mistreating her or don't care about her or anything like that. So her truth and her reality is not the same as the entire reality of the situation, right?
Speaker 2:This also happens a lot, if you can imagine, like in the workplace. So in my job I sometimes get messages from nurses or other staff members with a question and they're sent directly to me. But once in a while I have so many calls to call back all at one time that I might pass off one of the questions to one of my partners. And so if one of my partners and this has actually happened has said, oh sure, I'll get back to them about that, and then they forget or don't do it, what can happen is hours later that nurse that originally contacted me has heard nothing back, right? So from their perspective now they're thinking, you know, dr Hobbs was ignoring me and unresponsive and unprofessional, right? And the full reality of the situation was actually that Dr Hobbs did see it and did respond and someone else closed the loop and said they would get back to that nurse and didn't and dropped the ball. But the nurse doesn't know that, right? So they don't have the back end text conversation where that happened.
Speaker 2:And so in that case that staff member that tried to contact me that feels that I was being rude and dismissive and is frustrated or angry, or the patient, right, who's waiting for the care is frustrated, angry and thinks that we're, that it's like Dr Hobbs is so terrible, et cetera. Their feelings are completely valid because, from their perspective, that is the truth and that matters and that should be heard and that should be addressed. At the same time, their experience with that is not the full reality of the situation, and this has actually happened before where I've literally had to be like you know, I don't want to throw this other colleague under the bus, but you're saying that I didn't respond. I just wanted to show you like, actually, this other person closed the loop and said they would get back to you, and I'm not sure why they didn't. But you know, the reality of the situation is different than what's being felt on the other end right. So I'm sure, with those examples there to jog your memory, you could probably think of some situations in your own life that have been similar to this right, and so I love keeping in mind this truth.
Speaker 2:Number three of your emotions are real, but not necessarily reality, because you can use it when you're on either side of this right.
Speaker 2:So if you're the one with the big emotion about something you know you're feeling rejected or hurt, you can always remember that is real is valid is true, it matters, right, and you can give yourself a little distance recognizing that, like it may not be entirely based in the full reality of what's going on for the other person or the situation, because you may not have, you know, the full 360 degree view.
Speaker 2:And then the converse is also true. When someone else is upset with you and it seems like you're being misunderstood or they're not seeing the full reality, you can remember it doesn't even matter really if their beliefs are not the full reality, because their emotions are still real and valid and matter and need to be addressed and can't just be dismissed, right. But you can also remember that it may be partly because they don't have the full situation, because they're human, right. So I have found that has really helped me in those kinds of interactions to kind of remember that both things can be true at the same time. Truth number four about emotions is that they can seem irrational, but there's usually a reason for them, right? And so we often relegate emotions to the irrational side of things and this is part of why we dismiss them.
Speaker 2:We think other people's emotions are irrational, like my daughter in that situation. Well, this is just irrational. Obviously, we love her. Here's all the facts and reasons why it comes out of nowhere, right? But even when it seems totally irrational and out of the blue, most of the time if you get curious there's a reason for them, and the reason may be that person has a belief or a viewpoint that is different than ours, or they've had a past experience that has triggered them in that situation to think about it differently. They may be tired or hungry or, you know, they may have a neurodiversity so they look at the world differently. There's a million different examples of what the reason could be. But what's powerful about remembering this is when someone appears irrationally angry or irrationally hurt or whatever, or when we have an emotion that comes up that feels like out of nowhere. That's just doesn't make any sense, right? We can pause for a second and be like okay, emotions feel so irrational and crazy, right, but emotions usually have a reason. So instead of being frustrated with this you know these feelings that are messy and don't fit into our logical reality we could choose to kind of set that aside, just accept the fact that, even when they seem completely illogical and irrational. If we get curious, we can likely find a reason, even if that reason is a thought that ran through your mind subconsciously, you didn't even recognize it until you felt crappy. And that's where a lot of coaching really helps, because once you start to see this framework of how thoughts can lead to emotions, then you can get curious about emotions rather than frustrated that they're there in the first place and you can often find the reason. And then you can get curious about emotions rather than frustrated that they're there in the first place and you can often find the reason. And then you can get to the root cause. And likewise you can be curious about other people's emotions rather than just frustrated that they are being quote unquote irrational. And truth number five is kind of a follow-up to the fourth one. And truth number five is our emotions are influenced by our thoughts, but not always entirely explained by them.
Speaker 2:So yes, as I just said, most often if you're having an emotion and you ask yourself why it's happening and you kind of dig deeper, you will find a thought that led to it, so a thought or belief that you had that created that sensation of that feeling and emotion. For you. This would be one of the big tenants of cognitive behavioral therapy and coaching. When we work on the cognitive side of things okay, we sometimes call this thought work. So you work with someone or coach yourself to say, okay, I feel hurt or angry or sad, why is that? You get down to the thought that caused it, and then what you can choose to do is unpack that thought and maybe adjust it, tweak the wording, things like that, in order to make it something that creates a less negative feeling for you. Or sometimes you can kind of like add on or replace with a different type of thought that's also equally believable and true for you in that moment, but doesn't make you feel so crappy. Okay, so this is a lot of what we do in, again, thought work coaching or cognitive behavioral therapy. It works very well because thoughts are so influential in terms of creating your emotional life terms of creating your emotional life.
Speaker 2:However, it is also true that your emotions are not entirely always explained by your thoughts, right? Your physical state of being also affects your emotions, right? Which makes sense, because emotions are vibrations and feelings in our bodies. So if you are hungry or tired or sick, right, or you've just been sort of overwhelmed and exhausted by dealing with a bunch of other things. That is going to affect how you're feeling in a given situation, even if you're doing the best you can to sort of manage the cognitive side of things, like, sometimes your body is just not able to come along with you, right, and it's creating some emotions. So there's kind of like this other influence from your physical state, and sometimes this influence from the physical state is actually triggered from something from the past, right? So your primitive brain experiences something that in the past was scary or traumatic or difficult and it triggers this fight or flight or freeze response. And when you go into that state it's not something that goes through your cognitive brain or your thinking high-level brain really at all, and it's so fast and it's so primitive and it's so strong that you often can't stop it.
Speaker 2:Of course, for people who have like well-documented PTSD, this makes a ton of sense to us, right? So we know that if someone is a veteran and a loud noise goes off that might sound like gunfire, right, there's going to be this physiologic response for them that can happen and be triggered even though the situation doesn't warrant it, and that we can all kind of agree that that makes a lot of sense, but I would argue that most of us have this to a lesser degree from smaller types of trauma, even if we don't have sort of the official diagnosis. And the reason I think this is so important is because, as you are noticing that your emotions are valid and real, noticing that they have a reason, getting curious and asking yourself what the reason is, you just want to keep in mind that one of the reasons could be something that's not at all cognitive or thought based, but could be based on an unconscious or subconscious trigger, or being tired or hungry or thirsty or things like that, and it could be a combination of the two as well. So you just want to give yourself a little bit of grace that, while you can do so much with thought work and cognitive work and all those things, you also don't want to beat yourself up if that doesn't fully solve it or if, like, there's a thought that keeps coming back that's really hard to kind of snap out of for you, as you're doing thought work, you might have to consider well, maybe that's because my brain's really stuck on that particular thought loop, because it's tied to a strong physiologic trauma response or something like that. So maybe it goes a little deeper. I might need to engage in some different type of work to do this. So there are parts of the coaching that I do and others do where we focus more on the emotional side of things and the physiologic side of things and getting into your body, and then there is a type of therapy called dialectical behavioral therapy that focuses more on this side of things than cognitive behavioral therapy. And the other reason I like to really point out that your emotions may be influenced by physiology in addition to your thoughts is that sometimes the best way to handle a difficult emotional state is to, you know, put the thought work aside, get some food in your stomach, go to sleep, get some space and come back to it, because there may be an influence there. That's a very simple fix, like taking care of your body, and if we kind of just really overly focus on the thought work side of things, we can sort of start spinning and anxiety and working really hard and not getting the results that we want. So you want to give space for that and sometimes, again, it can be both. So once you give yourself the emotional space and you kind of get past that. If those thoughts are still there, then you're better prepared and suited to have good results from the cognitive and thought work.
Speaker 2:Okay, so just to summarize these five counterintuitive truths about your emotional life. Number one we tend to underestimate the importance of emotion, but overestimate our understanding of our emotions. Number two emotions are powerful, but not in complete control of you. Number three emotions are real, but not necessarily reality. Or you could say it as emotions are your truth, but not necessarily the truth. Number four emotions can seem irrational, but there's usually a reason for them. And number five emotions are influenced by our thoughts, but not always entirely explained by them. So I hope you found that super helpful and maybe a little thought provoking, as always.
Speaker 2:If this was useful to you, please take a minute to leave a five-star rating and, even better, a review.
Speaker 2:It's really hard to reach people with podcasts unless people do that, so I know it takes a bit of your time and I never take it for granted, but I would so appreciate that If you are interested in exploring some of these ideas and how they would look, with examples in your own life or some of the processes I talked about here, whether doing thought work or learning to navigate the physical, emotional side of things. That is what I do as a coach for women just like you, and the way that you would get started with that is you would set up a consult. The link is in the show notes, it's totally free. You and I would get on a Zoom call and I would hear all about what's going on in your life, what big emotions are coming up, what struggles you have, and then I would reflect back to you about how these concepts would apply specifically to your unique situation and, of course, how I can help you. So with that, I hope you have an amazing week.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to Rethink your Rules with Jenny Hobbs MD. Would you like to learn more about how to apply this to your own life through personalized coaching with Jenny? Visit us on the web at JennyHobbsMDcom to schedule a free consultation. If you found value in what you heard today, please consider subscribing to the podcast and giving us a five-star rating so we can reach even more women like you.