Latest / MIDDLE GROUND - Real Conversations on Faith, Identity & Becoming — Through Brynne's LDS Lens of Curiosity, Love and Doubt / Feelings Last 90 Seconds: The Science of Emotions in Your Body — Part 3/4
Transcript
- Brynne Erickson (01:05) Ninety seconds. That is the actual physiological lifespan of an emotion. Ninety seconds for the chemistry to surge through your body and flush out. After that, the only thing keeping a feeling alive is the thought that keeps reggering it. So why does it feel like some feelings last for hours, days or even years? It's because we keep thinking the thought. over and over without realizing we're doing it. Episode three, we're talking about feelings today, but not in a vague soft way. We're talking about what is actually happening in your body when an emotion fires. The biochemistry, the nervous system, the science, because feelings are not just mental experiences. They are full body events. and once you understand that everything about how you work with your feelings changes. So let's get into it. In the thought model, feelings are caused by thoughts, not by your circumstances, which are the things that actually happen. not by what people say or what they do, but by the thought your brain produced about those things. This is one of the most challenging ideas in the model because it can feel like blame. If I feel terrible, is that my fault because of my thoughts? And no, it's not about fault, it's about understanding the mechanism. Your thoughts generate feelings. That means you have far more influence over your emotional experience than you've been taught. But it also means you can't just think your way out of a feeling. Once it's already firing, and this is where the science gets interesting. When your brain produces a thought, it doesn't just stay in your head, it sends signals throughout your entire body via the nervous system, the endocrine system, and the immune system. Dr. Candace Purt, a neuroscientist and author of Molecules of Emotion, Demonstrated that emotions are not just brain events, they're actually biochemical events. So neuropeptides and their receptors, we're gonna get really sciencey here, which she called the molecules of emotion, are found all throughout your body, not just in the brain. They're in your gut, your heart, your immune cells, and they all have little receptors for emotional molecules. So this is why when you feel anxiety, You feel it in your stomach. My grief sits in your chest, and why shame makes you want to shrink physically. Your body is not metaphorically feeling these things, it is literally processing them. And Dr. Bessel van der Koek, psychiatrist and author of The Body Keeps the Score, spent decades researching how emotional experiences are actually stored in your body. And his work shows that the body holds the physiological imprint. of emotional experience, especially trauma, in ways that the thinking mind can't fully access or figure out and fix on its own. So you can't simply think your way out of something that your body is physically holding on to. And neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bolt Taylor, who famously documented her own stroke from the inside in her book, My Stroke of Insight, found through research and direct experience that the physiological lifespan of an emotion, the actual chemical process, is approximately 90 seconds. So 90 seconds for the chemistry to move through your body, your entire system. And then after that, what keeps the feeling alive is the thought. That re-triggers the chemical response. So you think the thought, the emotion fires again, ninety more seconds, and so on and so on, every time you have that thought. So this is why willpower doesn't work the way we think it does. When a strong emotion is already fired, when the chemistry is then surging through your body, your prefrontal cortex, the part that's responsible for your rational thoughts and decision making, is partially offline. And Dr. Daniel Siegel calls this flipping your lid. The emotional brain takes over. Rational thinking becomes genuinely harder. And this is not weakness. This is actual biology. and it means that the most useful thing you can do in the middle of a strong emotion is not to immediately try to think differently. It's to let the chemistry move through your body. Breathe. Move your body. Give it 90 seconds minimum. And then from a more regulated, composed state, examine the thought that generated that feeling. And that's the sequence. Thought generates feeling. Feeling is a physical event. And then that physical event needs to be processed physically and not just mentally. And then once you're regulated, you can go back to the thought and do the work there. Here's the other thing I want to say about feelings because I think that the personal development world sometimes can get this wrong. Feelings are not problems to be solved. Period. They are information to be understood. We have been given feelings for a reason. anxiety is not a malfunction. It's your nervous system telling you that it sees a threat, whether real or imagined. And grief is not a weakness. It's love with nowhere to go. And anger's not bad. It's often a signal that a boundary has been crossed or a value has been violated. And sadness is not something to push through. It's a signal worth listening to. And you guys, the goal is not to feel good all the time. The goal is to feel your feelings fully and to understand what they're telling you. And then choose your response from that awareness. And that is emotional intelligence. And research by Dr. Mark Brackett at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence shows that people with higher emotional intelligence have better relationships, better physical health, better work performance, and greater overall well-being. And not because they feel fewer negative emotions, but because they can process them more effectively. So you are not too emotional, you are not broken because you feel things deeply. You're human. And your feelings, all of them, are part of the information system. And that system is trying to help you live well. To wrap it up, remember that feelings are not the enemy. They're not a problem. They are messengers. And when you learn to feel them fully rather than suppress them or escape them or let them run the show, you gain access to one of the most powerful sources of self-knowledge that you have. Once again, you're not too emotional. You're not broken. You are human. And your feelings are doing exactly what they were designed to do. The question is whether you're listening to them wisely or not. one more episode to go And this is the one where everything clicks into place. Up next, we have actions and results. How everything we've talked about this series is literally creating the life you're living. and how to change it on purpose. I'll see you there. Brynne Erickson (09:12) Hey, really quick, whether your faith is shifting or you've already done a lot of that work, I built something for you. It's called Faith in Process and is a private online community for Latter-day Saints who want to explore and expand their beliefs through real open-minded conversations about gospel topics and principles. Think that like Facebook and Sunday school had a baby, but you never have to see anyone in person. Drop in whenever works for you, leave a thought, read what others are sitting with. No calls, no meetups, just good conversation. Twelve dollars a month at Brynarikson.com. Click join Faith and Process for more information and I hope to see you there.