Latest / The Body Rhythm: Nervous System Health, Digestion & Daily Rhythms for Women / Ep. 36 The Top 5 Ways Your Body Responds When You Suppress Emotions

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Ep. 36 The Top 5 Ways Your Body Responds When You Suppress Emotions · The Body Rhythm: Nervous System Health, Digestion & Daily Rhythms for Women

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Where are you right now, here now, in this season, in this moment?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can move forward towards balance from a place you're pretending you're not in.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: And isn't that what we're doing sometimes when we're suppressing the emotions down?
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: We're pretending to be in a different spot than we actually are.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Body Rhythm Podcast, the podcast for women who are ready to stop pushing through and start feeling like themselves again.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm CJ, Ayurvedic Wellness Guide, helping women reconnect to the natural rhythm their bodies have been craving.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: But it wasn't that long ago that I was exhausted in a way that sleep didn't fix, bloated no matter what I ate, and lying awake at 3 a.m.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: with my mind already running tomorrow's to-do list.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: I thought I just needed to be more consistent, more disciplined.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize that my body wasn't feeling me.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: It was completely overwhelmed because you're not broken.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: You've just been living outside your natural rhythm for a long time.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Body Rhythm.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: I am so glad to be with you today.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I am really excited about this topic.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's how do we allow our bodies to unravel?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: So often we're told to keep it all held together, and we can only do that for so long.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: So when was the last time you actually let yourself fall apart?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: Not just vented to a friend or cried in the car for a couple of minutes before pulling yourself back together and getting on with your day or your next task, but actually let your body do what it's been wanting to do for a long time, which is to let go and not hold everything together.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: It can actually be very scary for a woman to allow herself to unravel, especially when she is trying and gripping so hard to keep everything together.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And we live in a culture that rewards that kick-ass woman and kind of puts to the side or doesn't put as much value on the woman who is more tender and compassionate and loving.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Something that I think is one of the most misunderstood parts of healing.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Healing is the capacity to recognize that we matter, right?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's not supplements, it's not protocols, it's not even nervous system regulation, but it's when we finally allow the body to unravel, to stop gripping so tightly what is being held.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I will be in an intake session with a client.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And from the outside, this a woman can have it all together.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: She's professional and capable and thoughtful.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: And she shows up for everyone.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then we get to talking, we're talking about her symptoms and her sleep and digestion and energy, all ordinary topics to cover during an intake conversation.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And then in the middle of a session together, tears will begin to fall.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: And not just a few tears, but they all just come in, flooding out at once.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then usually women will say, I'm sorry, I don't know why, I'm crying.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the first time it happened, I was really surprised.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't expecting it.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: But it's happened over and over and over again with the women that I work with.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And there's no apology needed.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: And you're not crying because something is wrong.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: You're crying because you finally feel safe and supported enough to let go, to not hold on so tightly.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And this moment, this unexpected release, is one of the most important things that can happen in the healing process.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And today I want to help you understand why.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: When was the last time that a woman was celebrated or even depicted in a film or movie or entertainment as being tender, as being nurturing, as being soft, as being the one who is the quiet strength for those around her, for being able to say to others in her life, I see you, I love you, I've got you.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Because we are living in a culture that rewards the go get it, hold it all together, never let them see you struggle, never let them see you cry mode.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: And we are very, very good at it as women, right?
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: I would say we are suppressing the emotions down most of the time.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: But when we're in that suppression mode, in that burying mode, where at that go-getter mode at all costs, it becomes to have an emotional and physical and mental toll on us as well.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: A student came to me not too long ago.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: She had been working two jobs for a long time and was finally able to retire.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that she said she loved the most about my class was that it allowed her body to relax.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then she admitted something deeper that there was a fear there too, a fear of the unknown, a fear of not having something to do.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because when your body has spent years in survival mode, in years of output mode, in constant motion, of carrying everything, of just doing everything, slowing down doesn't automatically feel like relief.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: It can feel unfamiliar.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: It can feel unsafe.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And so being outside of productivity mode was scary.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: And tell me if this feels familiar.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: You arrive at a moment finally of rest and relaxation, right?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's a quiet weekend, a quiet morning.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's this fabulous vacation you've been dreaming about, but instead of relaxing, you feel more anxious, more unsettled, like stillness is wrong somehow.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And because it's vacation or a long weekend, whatever it might be, you feel like you have to constantly do, do, do, do, do.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not wrong, right?
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: For traveling, for instance, we want to experience what is around us.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: But it can also be the sign that it's a nervous system is encountering something that it hasn't felt for a very long time, which is safety and stillness.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't know what to do with those things.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: And the qualities of softness and receptivity, and the willingness to be held rather than always doing the holding.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: We have been told in a thousand different ways that these qualities are secondary, that the qualities of strength and achievement and doing and figuring it out and holding the room mode are the most important.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: And so we learn and we lead with that capability and we suppress everything else that feels too slow, too um tender, too much, too vulnerable.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: And here's what that costs us if we've been doing it for a long time.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: When we are emotionally overwhelmed, when we are in crisis or a chronic stress, or just carrying far more than any one person should have to carry alone.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's to get rigid, it's to push the feeling down into what I call the void, into the cellular level.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's the place in the subconscious where we put everything that we don't have the bandwidth to deal with right now.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it serves us in that moment.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's how we make it through the day, it's how we make it to tomorrow.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: But when that suppressing everything into the void becomes our pattern, when it becomes how we live, the body starts to accumulate what Ayurveda calls ama or toxins that begin to move throughout the body.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: And this ama, this toxin begins to cover everything, the bones and the joints and the muscles and the fascia.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's this unprocessed residue that gets left in the body.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: And ama can come from undigested food, but it also comes from undigested emotional experience, from grief, from stress that never fully moved through the body.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And this is when we begin to notice the symptoms speaking.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: That vague sense of anxiety or the heaviness, the exhaustion that you can't explain, the inflammation in the joints, the feeling that something is wrong that you just can't quite put your name to it.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's your body trying to digest or complete an experience that got interrupted in the moment.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it's being buried, and the symptoms are beginning to bring it back up to the surface.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And this might be a little uncomfortable to hear, but most of us aren't doing nothing with that discomfort.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: When we suppress it down, something is still happening.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: We're doing something that moves us farther and farther away from the experience and from the body.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: This might show up as scrolling the phone at midnight when you know you should be sleeping, but you just can't stop.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: It can be food, not because you're hungry, but because it feels something within, because food is readily available and it's immediate.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And for a few minutes it quiet the noise.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I know I was there, you know, not too long ago when I was under such immense stress and caring for my dad, and just the anxiety was so, so, so, so high that the only thing that could bring it down was eating sweet cake.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it wasn't cake that was particularly good.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: It was from Cherry Joe's.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: But that sweetness was able to quiet the noise, the anxiety, all the movement in the head for a brief moment in time.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: It was able to provide groundedness in a time when I needed it most, when I was unable to get grounded because of all the external things that were happening.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: It can be the Netflix binging, right?
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: I just can't stop.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: I have to watch the next episode and then the one after that, and the one after that.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: It can also show up as alcohol or drugs, right?
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Things that take us away from the emotional and physical experience because it becomes just too much to deal with.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll admit it here first.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: I've probably done all of these things.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think a lot of us have, whether it's shopping or the food or the alcohol or the scrolling, they're the nervous system reaching for relief in the fastest way that it knows how, in the way that it knows will bring satisfaction in that moment.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: But here's what I've learned, both personally and in working with women, is that when we reach for these soothers, when we suppress our emotional experience, the bypass doesn't clear the backlog, doesn't clear everything that's been suppressed down.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: It just postpones it.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna have to deal with it later.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: And every time that we suppress down, the body has to work a little bit harder to get our attention next time.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: So the vague anxiety gets louder, the digestion becomes a bit more unpredictable, the sleep disruption maybe gets a little bit more stronger.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: The 3 a.m.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: wake up becomes a regular thing.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: The body keeps finding ways to say there's something here that's not right, there's something here that needs to move, that needs to be released.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of the things that I love most about Ayurveda.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it's missing from what I see in most wellness frameworks because most approaches to health and wellness ask the question of what's wrong and how do we fix it?
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they're looking for the problem and trying to eliminate it.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: And in Ayurveda, too, we want to find the root cause of things and bring those things back into balance.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: But Ayurveda also is asking a different question about where we are right now, Vikruti.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Not where we should be, not where you were six months ago, not where you'll be when you've done all the things that you want to do.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: But where are you right now, here now, in this season, in this moment?
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can move forward towards balance from a place you're pretending you're not in.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: And isn't that what we're doing sometimes when we're suppressing the emotions down?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're pretending to be in a different spot than we actually are.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you're in chronic stress mode, if you're in burnout mode, if you're depleted, we start there.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: If you're wired and tired, if you're inflamed, we start there.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you're numb and flat and disconnected from joy, we start there.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Because the whole system of healing, of building that capacity to know that you matter is built around the honest assessment and look of where you actually are today.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then using that information to begin to restore balance to your nervous system, one small sustainable rhythm at a time.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: Not bypassing it, not pushing through, not waiting until the perfect time, until you have more capacity, but starting here, starting now with the body that you have today.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: I find this so fascinating.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: What is actually happening in the body when we cry?
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Emotional tears.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: And emotional tears are tears that are chemically different from the tears your eyes produce when you're, say, cutting an onion or something gets in your eye.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: Emotional tears contain elevated levels of stress hormones, including cortisol, and including this quantum called ACTH, which is a primary driver of the body's stress response.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so a researcher, um, a chemist named William Fry was one of the first to document this chemical stress release through tears.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so when you cry, when you allow the tears to fall, you're actually excreting stress from the body.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Isn't that amazing?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then once the tears begin to fall, the initial release begins, your vagus nerve activates.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: The parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest nervous system begins to come online.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And there is also research by this researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Bilsmack, that shows that the parasympathetic, calming effects of crying actually outlast the initial arousal of crying by two to three minutes.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: And have you ever noticed that?
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: Like when you cry, when you just have a good cry, right?
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: All the tears fall that you actually might feel a little bit better.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: Meaning that your body already knows how to bring itself back into balance.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: And the crying itself is just the beginning of the return to a more balanced state, to a state of feeling better in your body.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I've talked about the glymphatic nervous system before, our brain's natural toxic waste trash pickup system that gets activated when we sleep.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: But when we allow ourselves to sleep, when we allow genuine emotional release, when we allow the body to soften into rest and digest mode, the body, the brain's toxic cleanup system begins to activate.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: And it begins to clean up for clearing out what the stress left behind, that toxic byproduct.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so we just need the right conditions to allow ourselves the emotional release that our body needs.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Emotion is movement.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: Tears are movement.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: And when you move through an emotional release, when emotion moves, the rib cage begins to expand, the heart begins to lift, the tissue of the lungs begins to expand.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: What's been held in the body begins to release from the tissues.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the body beginning to increase its emotional container.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I think about my dad's cancer journey the past almost three years now, about all of the emergency rooms and the doctors and the logistics and the managing everything and trying to stay composed so I could be useful and manage everything.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: There was no room in those moments to feel what I was feeling.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: The emotion got pushed down to later.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing is that later almost never comes on its own.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because the body holds with the mind, with the emotional body can't process.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: And until we create the conditions for it to move, it stays down in the void.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what happened to me until I couldn't move.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: Until I was lying in bed for three days, unable to move anywhere.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so what I've come to understand about emotional health is this is different from what we've been taught.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Emotional health isn't the absence of dealing with hard feelings.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's about our capacity to feel them without being swallowed up by them permanently.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: When the emotional body is healthy, we can feel sadness and grief and frustration and even devastation.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: And those feelings can move through us.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: We don't dwell in the same emotional state for weeks or months or years.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: We can feel, we can process, and we can return back to center to homeostasis.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_00: This is emotional resilience.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the ability to never fall down, to never feel anything.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's the ability to recover, to process, take what we need, let go of the rest, and move forward.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we expand that capacity through practice.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: We expand it through giving ourselves enough safety and space and stillness and movement that the body can do what it already knows how to do.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: So where can you start?
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: The long exhale.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_00: Extending the exhale longer than you breathe in.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe if you can only breathe in for one to two counts, you extend the exhale to three counts.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: And this begins to activate the vagus nerve directly.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: It tells the nervous system that the threat has passed.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Gentle movement, a gentle yoga, a walk outside in nature.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's just turning on music and dancing alone in your kitchen, right?
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the most fastest ways for the nervous system to shift out of contraction and rigidity.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: We begin to move through what we can't speak.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe it's just sitting with the question of what have you not been wanting to feel and let yourself be present with it.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's creating 60 seconds or two minutes of stillness, of not having to solve anything or carry anything or analyze anything, but just allowing yourself the space to begin to feel what is happening in your body, in your emotions.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's yoga nitra, right?
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: This is a practice that I come back to over and over again.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's a practice sometimes referred to as yogic sleep that brings the brain into a deep state between waking and sleeping.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: The same state as deep sleep.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same state in which the brain's toxic cleanup system is activated, clearing the ama and toxins that stress leaves behind.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: And it doesn't require you to concentrate or sit still or be good at it.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: You lie down, you follow a voice, and you let the body do what it already knows how to do when it finally feels safe and supported enough to do it.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: And some women cry.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: Some women feel a gentle softening happen in the body.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Some women even fall asleep because it's the body taking exactly what it needs without you having to do anything.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I recorded a yoga nidra practice specifically for the kind of tired that sleep doesn't fix, for nervous system depletion that lives underneath a life of high output and holding too much.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's available to you right now.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: The link is in the show notes.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: Download it tonight, lie down, press play, and let your body finally do what it's been wanting to do.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I'd like to remind you that the anxiety, the sluggishness, the exhaustion that doesn't seem to lift, none of that is your body failing you.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's your body carrying more than it was meant to carry.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it's looking for a safe moment to put it down.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't have to earn that moment.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: And you don't have to understand everything at first.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: You just have to create the conditions and let your body do the rest.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for joining me on this episode of The Body Rhythm.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: I will see you next week.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: Be well and nourished.