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#7 Microdose on Intense Emotions: How Regulating Your Emotions Can Help Improve Your Interpersonal Skills · College Is Fine, Everything's Fine

[00:00:00] In earlier episodes, Sarah and I have discussed factors that interfere with our relationship skills. We heard from many college students about how their emotions often got the best of them and unfortunately negatively impacted how they related to others. This may be avoiding introducing yourself to someone new because of your anxiety or inappropriately expressing frustration when you get upset.Making and keeping friends is on the top priority of college students. Knowing how to manage your emotions is a necessary skill to make better choices in your social life. Today, we're going to learn about emotions, how we experience them, and what to do about them when they aren't working in your favor.Okay, so stick with me. I'm going to get a little science y on you. Emotions are absorbed in the body in about six seconds. Each burst of emotional chemicals from the time it's produced in hypothalamus to the time it's completely broken down lasts six seconds. If we're feeling something for longer than six seconds, we're at [00:01:00] some level choosing to focus on something that's part of our emotional experience and refueling those feelings.Sometimes that's good. If the bear is still chasing you, those fear chemicals are helping save your life. Sometimes it's not, but recognizing what emotion we're feeling, evaluating its purpose relative to our circumstances and deciding whether to focus or act on how we are feeling is the first step to managing our emotions without awareness of how we feel.We end up acting on our emotions and interpersonal situations where it's not in line with our goals or best interest. So today we're going to focus on tackling your emotions in three parts. Focusing on your body chemistry, our beliefs, and our behavior. Changing our body chemistry is one technique we can do to decrease intense emotions.Our brain chemistry directly impacts our physiology, and our physiology can impact our brain chemistry. There's a really cool study where they took people who don't experience anxiety and they had [00:02:00] them mimic the physical characteristics of an anxious person. So their shoulders were hunched forward, their arms were held out in front of them, their head was down, they had short, shallow breathing.And what they saw was that there were increased levels of the stress hormones. Cortisol and adrenaline. They took those same people and they had to mimic the physiology of someone who was confident. Their shoulders were back, their feet were apart, their chin was up, they had low, deep breathing. And what they saw was that there was reduced stress chemicals and there was an increase in the neurochemical serotonin.And this is the chemical that's With us feeling happy thus by simply changing our body posture and our facial expressions, we can change the brain chemistry that we have, which impacts our emotions. For example, just smiling a half smile, not a full blown glamor shot. Um, just turning kind of the corners of your mouth up can release some of those [00:03:00] positive neurochemicals like serotonin and can help decrease negative mood states.Changing your breath is another way to change how you feel. We know that when we're anxious, we really have a shallow breath that sits in our chest. There's something called paced breathing, where we can lengthen our breath, um, by focusing on a ratio, let's say, of four seconds in and six seconds out, that really deepens our breath, expands it into our, our abdomen, into our diaphragm.And this can really activate. The different part of our nervous system that's responsible for decreasing physiological arousal, which will help us decrease emotional arousal too. Lastly, cold temperature is highly effective in decreasing intense emotions. There's something called the mammalian divers reflex.Essentially, what that is, is that all mammals have a [00:04:00] reflex that when we dive and tilt our head into Ice cold water that it automatically gets us out of our fight or flight part of our nervous system and then into the part of our nervous system that is associated with relaxation. Now, how many college students do you think I have convinced to dunk their head into a bucket of ice water?Probably I can count on one hand. So way to modify this and to make it portable is to have ice packs. Maybe the ones that you activate, you could keep them in your car. You could keep them in your backpack, in your dorm room. And essentially what you want to do is you want to hold the ice packed under the eye area.You want to tilt your head in between your legs and you want to hold your breath for about 30 seconds. Changing your temperature is one way to tip your body chemistry into a different part of your nervous system that will help decrease [00:05:00] high levels of emotionality. So focusing on changing your facial expressions, your body posture, your breath, or temperature are all ways we can calm our nervous system, which helps decrease big emotions.