Latest / Enough & Evolving / Understanding Emotions Part 1
Transcript
- Tyona Vallejo: Hello and welcome to Enough In Evolving Podcast. I'm your host, Tyona Vallejo, master certified life coach and mindfulness expert, you reclaim confidence, break through unhelpful patterns and manifest the relationships and life you desire. Now let's get started. Hello, welcome back to the podcast. This is number six about understanding emotions I'm so excited to dive in this week. This one of my favorite topics ⁓ I know if I say that every week, but really I do love this. ⁓ This so fun and one of things that Hey friends, if you loved what you heard this week, then please give it a five star review be sure to share it out with a friend. Also, ⁓ you're not on my email community, ⁓ get connected. Another example is instead of exploding in anger with a partner, you can process the emotion first and then communicate with a calm, courageous voice. is where emotional processing changes our relationships and our lives. That's where you'll get weekly value in your inbox me, as well as an update of scheduled events and the latest workshops coming out. ⁓ I have a workshop actually this month on self doubt to self ⁓ hear most often from the women that I work with and honestly something that I've experienced in my own life as well is the emotions are hard navigate. most common emotions I see women struggle with are ⁓ feelings like ⁓ overwhelm, anxiety, A simple practice to start today is this. Pause. Ask yourself, what am I feeling right now? Then notice the sensations associated with that feeling in your body. Where do you feel it? What does it feel like? Is it heavy? Is it light? Is it constricted? Is it expansive? So make sure you join and you'll get the information in your inbox. Have a great week. disappointment, ⁓ grief, and uncertainty. And in life, these emotions often look like ⁓ such things as resentment our ⁓ or our parent feelings of overwhelmed by responsibilities of raising kids, managing the household, trying to stay productive at work. If you stay with the sensation and breathe, you can often watch the emotion begin to move and shift. now in I you to remember that our emotions are not ⁓ enemies. They are messengers. And more learn to listen to them instead of fight them, the more emotional freedom we begin to Now next week on the podcast, I'm going do part two where I'm gonna dive. ⁓ up in the morning ⁓ feeling anxious about the day ahead, ⁓ like a sense of dread is looming ⁓ heavy on heart. I also women talk about feeling disappointed in themselves, ⁓ and ⁓ definitely had my share of that ⁓ as well. time, that create a lot of deeper into the energetics of emotions and how emotional states that we spend time in can influence our manifestations and what we attract into our lives. if you've ever wondered why emotional patterns seem to repeat in business or life, you're definitely going to want to tune in next week. feelings of overwhelm as well as feelings of being stuck. personal experience ⁓ these emotions actually brought me to my first life coach. And remember realizing ⁓ that I feeling at the time was affecting everything my life. And Learning to with your emotions isn't about becoming perfectly calm all the time. ⁓ It's about learning to that you can handle whatever you feel. ⁓ could see it in my relationship, I could see it in my confidence, even my ability to enjoy the little things as well. working with a coach was the first time I learned something really important that ⁓ was feeling number one, completely right? ⁓ That difficulty in emotions is completely normal. Now thanks again for tuning in this week. And more importantly, that there were tools that could help me work with my emotions instead of feeling controlled by them. I remember really feeling like I was a victim to my emotions. ⁓ of the biggest shifts that I learned was that ⁓ themselves are not the problem. The issue is how we relate to the emotions, how we respond to them. before I learned ⁓ intelligence, I really believed that, ⁓ I said, I was a victim of these emotions. I thought that this was something was happening me. Like I had absolutely no autonomy over them. and think a lot of women can relate they grew up believing something very similar. Many of us taught, for instance, either directly or indirectly, ⁓ that certain emotions acceptable. And ⁓ maybe you things ⁓ stop crying or suck up, ⁓ or you're being too Or you maybe received subtler like, showing emotions means that you're weak ⁓ angry is very ⁓ ⁓ again, ⁓ conditioning ⁓ of us received growing up can deeply affect how we feel about our emotions and we're responding ⁓ when show up. You might feel like your emotions are controlling you like you simply don't have the time or space to deal with them And if that sounds familiar, you're not alone. Many of the women who come to me for coaching feel the exact same way. truth is most of us were never taught emotional intelligence. ⁓ it makes a lot of sense ⁓ this ⁓ feel ⁓ This can feel like an area that we definitely struggle with. So let's look at what emotions actually are. Over time, I've come to understand that emotions are not signs that something is wrong with you. That's for sure. They're simply signals that tell us something about what our brain and our body are experiencing. One definition I really love is that emotions are energy in motion. while many of us ⁓ through life unconscious to our emotions, becoming aware of them is the first ⁓ to learning how to navigate them in a healthy way. of the frameworks that I learned in my coach training ⁓ the cognitive theory of emotion, ⁓ suggests that ⁓ emotions are largely influenced by our thoughts, specifically we interpret and evaluate events. ⁓ Learning was incredibly empowering. It completely has changed my life I have seen how it has influenced my clients' as well. Because it that the thoughts we think can influence ⁓ how we And that gives us so much more autonomy than we may have realized. Now I will say, in my experience working with clients, some emotions can also be influenced by our nervous system state. For example, sometimes people wake up already feeling anxious that might not be tied to a specific thought they're consciously thinking. Sometimes anxiety is coming from the body and the nervous system, which is why it's helpful to understand emotions from both ⁓ the down and the bottom up. Multiple perspectives. Okay, so let's look at how we can work with emotions. So how do we actually manage our emotions? There are a few different ways we can do this. One, we can change our circumstances, right? We don't feel great about where we live. We don't feel good about our job. We don't feel good about... you know, the clothes we're wearing, we can change, right? That's the beauty of being human that we have free will to decide what we wanna do with our lives. The is we can shift the thoughts ⁓ that thinking. So let's say you're ⁓ having in your marriage, in your relationship. If ⁓ ⁓ want to change that circumstance, if you want to stay in the marriage or the relationship, you want to work on it, then it would be really for you to start to ⁓ recognize thoughts that you're holding and how ⁓ they affecting your feelings. Now, the thing is we can change our physiology, meaning state of our body, how we're feeling inside. And ⁓ one the reasons I ⁓ love yoga, Yoga is a wonderful outlet ⁓ for changing physiology. You can also change your physiology by going on a walk, Moving your body, doing different like let's say you're experiencing anxiety. You ⁓ put your ⁓ in ⁓ a tub of ice or you can cold water on your This change physical state, which will you change your emotional state. And the last but not least of course is that we can learn how to create a sense of safety in our nervous system. And honestly, I believe that is truly where we should always start by a ⁓ of safety ⁓ our system. Okay. Now another important thing to understand is that emotions need an outlet. need to move up and out. And they don't, ⁓ they stuck down and in. And that's they start to show up ⁓ as ⁓ irritability, or overwhelm. They show up as ⁓ symptoms, right? So learning how to process our emotions is incredibly important. Now have you ever heard about the 90 second emotion? There is a fascinating discovery from Harvard Neuroscience, Dr. Jill Bult Taylor. She found that the chemical life of an emotion in the body lasts 90 seconds. meaning the surge emotion, the chemical in the bloodstream moves through ⁓ relatively quickly, minute and a half. If an emotion ⁓ lasts longer that, it's ⁓ often because mind keeps re-triggering it through rumination or repetitive thinking. which is why awareness of our thoughts becomes so powerful. Now as a yoga teacher and a coach, one of my favorite things to help people do is connect with the physical sensations of their emotions emotions don't just live in the mind. They also show up in the body, For example, ⁓ overwhelm feel like ⁓ heaviness the chest. Sadness ⁓ feel a lump in the throat. Shame might feel like a hot pit in the stomach. end of the emotional ex... On the other end of the emotional spectrum, love might feel like warmth in the heart. Relaxation might feel like a lightness in the body. Excitement might feel like buzzing energy in the chest or the torso. Often when emotions arise, the mind wants to immediately create a story about them. But there is also this felt sense happening in the body and learning to connect with that felt can be empowering. Now here's why feeling matters. we learn to feel emotion in our body, we needing to avoid them or ⁓ buffer away. Now buffering may look like you, instead of feeling an emotion, you another activity to not feel that emotion. So it could be like scrolling ⁓ your social, or could be like turning on Netflix ⁓ and going or it could be over drinking overeating. So instead of feeling the emotional discomfort, you insert the activity that you the dopamine that you're actually wanting to feel instead. But that obviously can lead to some issues, right? If once that gets out of balance. Now the benefit to feeling our emotions instead of shutting down when you're overwhelmed, you can feel the sensation of overwhelm, regulate your nervous system, and then take the next step forward.