March 24, 2025 • 41 mins
In a day and age when 7/10 of us are chronically stressed, living in survival mode, too busy intellectualising our feelings to actually feel them, unsure of whether we will ever feel great happiness again, sometimes we need to return to the basics: how do we actually FEEL our emotions. In this episode we break down:
- What emotional blunting really looks like
- The root in trauma + stress + childhood
- Why we intellectualise our feelings
- The consequences + risk of emotional breakdown
- How to reconnect to your emotions through the body
- The emotions-physical sensation map
- The 90 second rule + so much more
Happy listening :)
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast, new listeners, old listeners, Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here.
Back for another episode as we, of course break down
the psychology of our twenties this episode today, as so
many of my favorite episodes are, I was actually suggested
(00:24):
by a listener, a listener called Josephine, who sent me
this message, and she's given me permission to read it
out loud and see if any of you may relate.
This is what she had to say. Hi, Gemma, It's
been a while since I felt any kind of emotion,
and I'm not trying to sound dramatic. I mean truly happiness, sadness, excitement,
(00:46):
They've all disappeared. My childhood dog recently died and I
felt nothing. I got a big promotion that I've wanted
for a long time, also nothing. One emotion I am
feeling is fear. Fear that I'll never feel the same
way again. I link it back to some really bad
anxiety I had almost a year ago. Around that time,
I started to intellectualize almost all of my emotions before
(01:08):
I allowed myself to fully feel them, and now I
feel like I've ruined my brain by cutting off its
pathway to expression permanently. Please any advice I need, and
would love for you to do an episode on how
to actually feel my feelings. So I got this message,
and firstly, thank you Josephine for sharing. But I got
(01:28):
this message and I immediately knew I needed to talk
about this. In fact, I actually had a whole other
episode planned for this week, but this one just felt
so much more like important because Josephine, like me too.
I am here with you. I am experiencing the same
kind of emotional blunting and the same kind of poor
(01:51):
communication between me and my emotions. You know, I feel
happiness and I confuse it as something bad. I feel sadness, grief, anger, stress,
I push it down and say I'll get to that later.
I also, much like you, intellectualize my emotions as a
way of getting out of feeling them, you know, over
analyzing every possible cause, explanation, and consequence until I'm exhausted.
(02:16):
And you know what, I don't feel particularly good about it,
and I don't feel like it's a particularly great way
to live. The absence of any negative emotions doesn't necessarily
make your life a happy one because your emotions all
use the same systems. All thirty four thousand distinct emotions
we can feel are operating across the same neural pathways,
(02:40):
across all the same core texes of the brain. And
that's why nostalgia and regret feel so similar. Passion and anger,
trust and vulnerability, anxiety and excitement, grief and gratitude, they
feel very similar. So you turn off one, you turn
off regret, you turn off anger, vulnerability, anxiety, grief. You
(03:03):
also turn off nostalgia. You also turn off passion, trust, excitement, gratitude.
And I think a lot of us are fining ourselves
in that very position where we've tried to feel we've
tried to manage our negative emotions in a way that's
actually meant we've prevented any intense emotion at all. I
think a reason for that is that we're scared not
(03:25):
of our actual emotions, We're scared of our feelings about
our feelings. Like, let me explain this. I know it
sounds like a little bit strange, but you know, if
I feel sad, I feel like that's a bad thing,
and I feel like it's the end of the world.
If I'm angry, I worry that something is wrong with me.
So it's not that the sadness is bad. It's not
(03:46):
that the you know, the grief or the anger is bad.
It's that I believe that it's going to make me
feel miserable, have some further on consequence, this whole experience
is whole pattern. This is known as metacognition or better emotions,
my emotions, our emotions about the possibility of certain emotions.
And if that sounds complicated to you, in most certainly
(04:09):
is and it's complicated for our brain, and it's difficult
for us to work through that and feel like we
can actually feel our feelings. So the two big questions
we're really left with is why, you know, why does
this happen? And how how do I fix it? How
do I convince myself I'm not at the mercy of
(04:31):
my emotions and actually let them back in and feel
human and feel connected again. Well, my lovely listeners, we
are going to discuss exactly that. We are going to
explore the psychology behind all of this and so much more.
Be prepared to go deep, maybe shed a few tears,
because today I really want us to all leave feeling
(04:53):
in touch with at least one emotion we've been suppressing.
Just one. That's all we want at the end of
the day. So without further ado, let's get into it.
So we need to talk about this first. We need
to talk about what being detached from our emotions actually
(05:14):
looks like. I was literally I was about to say,
what does it feel like? But you know, that's the
actual problem we're dealing with. What does it look like?
Not being able to feel your feelings essentially means you've
put up some kind of wall between you and the
actual feeling. So it's not necessarily the absence of any
emotion at all. You are not broken. The emotions are
(05:37):
still there. It's just that when an emotion comes up,
you might feel it for just a second. Perhaps you
notice it and then you start over analyzing, or you
get freaked out that it's going to come out too
large and too loud, so you distract yourself or minimize
or adopt any number of coping strategies. After long enough,
(06:01):
you can no longer name what the sensation or emotion
even is, and in some extreme cases, you might also
take direct action to completely avoid the trigger. You know,
if someone has hurt you or broken your heart, you
would perhaps consider and tell yourself, well, they don't even
exist anymore, and I'm never going to think about them again,
(06:24):
meaning that a lot of the you know, deep grief
or portrayal, all the emotions that you should be working
through because of that experience, remain unhealed, remain untouched. Maybe
you're really struggling because you've got like a terrible grade
on a UNI assignment and you're such a perfectionist and
this is just like the most awful thing. You might
(06:46):
try and manage that and not feel the feeling by
completely disengaging with your studies or together, or completely ignoring
any upcoming assignments because you don't even want to give
the illusion of trying. So this is not as avoidance,
and it's often a precursor to not feeling your feelings,
not even putting yourself in the circumstances or these situations
(07:09):
in which that might even be possible. So when you
feel out of touch with your feelings, when you're experiencing numbness,
maybe a delayed emotional response, so something bad happens, you
don't really think about it until a month down the line,
when you are avoiding emotional situations when you're experiencing apathy,
(07:29):
when you know you feel like, yes, you may not
have been sad for a while, but you also haven't
been happy. There is a word for this. It's called
emotional blunting or in medicine, reduced effect display. The best
description I've heard of that describes what emotional blunting really is.
It actually came from a patient involved in a case
(07:52):
study on this experience, and this patient was experiencing intense
emotional numbing and blunting, and she's said, often, what this
makes me feel like is I feel invisible. I feel
like I'm a ghost. I watch my family engaging with
each other, but there is an invisible barrier that keeps
me from joining them. This was what another individual had
(08:13):
to say in a similar article. The world around me
often seems incredibly superficial, like I am simply going through
the motions and can't connect my environment. If I was
to reach out and touch that wall, or reach out
and swim in the ocean, I wouldn't be able to
feel it entirely. So that is what happens when you
cannot feel your feelings. You just feel like Both of
(08:37):
these descriptions from true different patients. Two different clients talk
about something between them and the real world, something that
has been put there a long time ago, or because
of a situation that they didn't feel like they can control.
So let's talk about the reasons why we may get
to a place of being unable to connect with our emotions.
(08:58):
The first one that is very very present is being
stuck in survival mode or experiencing chronic stress. Now you
may hear that and think, I'm not chronically stressed. I'm
gonna skip this section. I'm fine, I'm not burnt out.
I'm fine. You might not even realize that you are,
because recent research suggests that around seven out of ten
(09:18):
of us, seven out of ten of the people listening
are chronically stressed. I'm going to say that again, seventy percent.
When I heard that, and actually I heard it in
mel Robins's new book, I was, I was shocked, But
the more I thought about it, I wasn't surprised. Our
brains were designed for a very different world than the
(09:40):
one we currently live in. We were really designed for
a slower, less stimulating, less intense lifestyle, and now nowadays,
when we are constantly being debarded with information, with a
constant to do list, productivity, guilt, and then let's add
on financial instability, uncertainty about the future, and oh no,
you know, you're in your twenties, so you need to
(10:01):
have it all figured out right now. That sounds exhausting
because it is, and it takes a lot of mental
resources to ensure that we don't like just collapse in
on ourselves like a dying star. Something has to give
in those situations. It takes a lot of brain power
and willpower to keep up with that much mental activity.
(10:22):
And sometimes our brain thinks, well, if we can just
dull our emotions for a little bit, if we can
shut down our emotional processing systems, well amazing, that's great.
That's one less thing to worry about while we get
out of survival mode. Obviously, that's not sustainable. The reason
many people end up in this state even after the
(10:45):
stress has passed, is because when they do allow themselves
to feel their emotions, they are so intense after so
many months or years of not feeling them that we
kind of forget what it means to truly feel. And
it's yeah, the best what I can say is it's
intense and so we fall into a bad cycle of
(11:07):
feeling safer and our detached state because we are out
of practice. We are out of practice with feeling, and
so it's easier to revert to the other extreme of nothingness,
because you know, the whole system has now become disregulated,
where the presence of even a slight emotion feels so
profound after lack of exposure. So I just said this
(11:31):
one key word here, disregulated Again. Your emotional processing systems
are still there. It's not like someone has gone into
your brain and scooped out a part of your cortex
and been like cool, Now you can't feel anything anymore.
It's dysregulation of a system that is still present and active.
So why has this dysregulation occurred other than chronic stress. Well,
(11:54):
maybe it won't come as a surprise that it does
begin way back in childhood for many of us. Not
all of us, but I think the majority of you
can relate to the following series of events. So, as children,
when we were angry, frustrated, trying to be heard, trying
to get our point across, crying out of pain or
(12:17):
sadness or exclusion, we were often shut down, either in
subliminal or very obvious ways. We were hushed, we were scolded,
we were yelled at, even punished. I remember one time,
I think I must have been like six years old,
and I don't know. We were like on the playground
(12:38):
something someone like pushed me. I was like feeling excluded.
We were like playing some game and everyone kept running
away from me, and I was really really sad about it,
and I felt so lonely. And I went up to
a teacher and I'm sure I was annoying her, Like
I'm sure, I'm sure I was annoying her, But I
was crying to her, being like no one wants to
play with me, like no one wants to be my friend.
And she was like, ah, get over it, like just
(13:00):
go away and get over it, like life is unfair.
And that's like a distinct part of my memory. And
you know, those reactions, the reactions we have of parents, teachers,
adults in our lives is one of the primary ways
we learn what is and is inappropriate when it comes
(13:21):
to our emotional reactions, and unfortunately, we often end up
learning that big emotions aren't acceptable and may even result
in an uncomfortable outcome or you know, a bad outcome
for us from those repeated experiences, because if it happened once,
I'm sure it happened again and again. We actually begin
(13:42):
to deny those emotions ourselves, and over time that act
of suppressing our feelings becomes an unconscious, automatic process. We
don't need someone else to do it for us, and
eventually you don't even realize that you're doing it. Let
me give you some of those unconscious ways we still
revert to to suppress our emotions that you might not
(14:03):
even realize you're doing. The first one, and I think
this is massive, major, huge in our twenties, abusing alcohol
to dampen our anxiety, dampen our insecurity, our fear, or
our stress. This one is I think the most popular
for people in their twenties because drinking is so socially acceptable,
(14:24):
but alcohol is also you know, I'm gonna say this,
and I don't know what to be misconstrued. Alcohol is
a fantastic way to not feel your emotions, and it's
a fantastic way in the moment to feel less stressed
and to feel a little bit happier and to have
that buzz in the moment. Afterwards, you begin to associate
(14:47):
those happy, momentary feelings with the alcohol, and you start
pursuing the buzz over and over again, meaning that obviously
alcohol takes such a toll on your brain, such a
toll on your body, but also you have this huge
catalog of memories and experiences that just go untouched and unprocessed,
but don't go away. So alcohol is one of the
(15:09):
ways that we manage not feeling our feelings. The other
one is overworking. You know, you feel a negative feeling
come up, you immediately start working, you start working late,
you commit to more and more things that feels satisfying
in many ways, and is you know, well again socially
acceptable in today's hustle culture. Doesn't mean you process your emotions, No,
(15:32):
it doesn't. It's just a distraction. This next one is
also one that probably a lot of you can relate to,
especially during this generation, and it's escapism through TV shows
or social media. I was having a conversation with someone
recently where well, we were talking about death, and we
were talking about grief, and as it was getting rather heavy,
(15:53):
we were both sharing, you know, we were both bonding.
She picked up her phone and she started like aimlessly
scrolling and like playing TikTok's out loud and I was
like it wasn't rude. I was just like, oh, I'm
so sorry, you know, let's stop talking about this, like
if you want to talk about something else, I totally
get it. And she like looked up from her phone
and she was like really surprised, and she was like
(16:13):
partn and I was like, oh, you know, like I
just I didn't want to be weird about it, but
I was like, oh, you know, you're on your phone,
like you probably don't want to talk about it. And
she looked at her phone and she was like, I
honestly had no idea I was even doing that. She's like,
I had no idea I was even on my phone.
And she was still like kind of semi engaging in
the conversation, but at the same time she was like
scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, and I was like we
(16:36):
both like were sitting there being like wow, Wow, that's
just like a complete Like the presence of social media
is just like dulled your emotional response, and in some ways,
perhaps you're leaning on that in many situations without even realizing.
Our phones are like an emotional shield because they can
(16:57):
pull us in with all their dopamine offerings and make
us feel great and distracted in the moment, but disconnected
in the long run. Finally, one of the ways that
we avoid feeling our feelings, my personal favorite over intellectualizing.
Over intellectualizing every emotion and rationalizing it to the ninth
degree so that we never have to feel it. So
(17:20):
let me explain the psychology behind why we do this. Psychologically,
intellectualizing is linked to something called cognitive avoidance, where our
brain is essentially trying to bypass distressing emotions by shifting
focus to logic and reason, creating that kind of sense
of detachment because our emotions are not sensations, they're not
(17:43):
things that are happening to us. They're ideas, they're abstract concepts.
I'll give you some examples of this. Going through like
a big breakup or your first heartbreak, and instead of
grieving it, you might be obsessing over the psychology of
attachment styles. You might be over analyzing the entire history
of your relationship, rationalizing exactly why it wasn't meant to be,
(18:06):
being quite scientific, and dissecting every little moment that you
had together. You may also find that you overthink any
kind of emotion that you're experiencing by saying why do
I feel this way? What's the psychological explanation, what's the science,
what's the neurobiology? When is it going to go away?
What's the timeline? Instead of just saying this is uncomfortable,
(18:29):
Who cares why it's happening? I'll get through it. I'll
say it again. I am very guilty of this. In fact,
I think my podcast is a reflection and is evidence
of how guilty I am of this, because you know,
I really did start the Psychology of your twenties to
break down the emotions I was experiencing in a rational,
logical way. I was over intellectualizing them, and I've definitely
(18:51):
gotten better. But I do find it's quite an interesting
thing that often people who are overthinkers and who feel
really big emotions really lean into intellectual resources or research
or articles or fact or science as a kind of
emotional crutch so they don't actually have to feel the
thing so intensely. And by doing this, what's actually happening
(19:15):
is that our prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for reasoning,
is dominating over our limbic system, which processes emotion, basically
dulling our emotional response and providing temporary release from emotional pain.
Let's quickly talk about some other reasons for this detachment.
Trauma is one of them. The emotions of the past
(19:38):
are scary and terrifying and big, and sometimes we are
afraid that if we open that door you may not
be able to close it ever again, especially since we
are not taught, really in any capacity in school in
life how to handle big, uncomfortable emotions. We can also
experience emotional numbness because of our current environment or context.
(20:01):
Maybe it's a particularly stressful period at work, at school,
you're experiencing grief, heartbreak. Even when a situation is dangerous,
people often emotionally shut down. It's why you see a
lot of people experiencing long term shock, even amnesia during war,
during natural disasters, our brain is like, we cannot handle this.
(20:24):
If we were to feel this all at once, we
would surely break. So to survive physically and mentally, let's
just shut this off for a little bit. Finally, the
reason you might be experiencing emotional blunting is because of
certain medications that also can create this sensation, one of
them being antidepressants. Now, this is not to fear monger
(20:46):
or scare you, especially if you are on any kind
of antidepressant or considering it. I'm currently on twenty milligrams
of laxaproa day and we have a complicated relationship, but overall,
my lexipro has helped me tremendously. But I have, however,
noticed that whilst it makes those hard, distressing emotions less
(21:08):
sharp and painful and biting, it does also make the
good emotions feel a little bit less fulfilling. Like I
remember being in Paris last year and being like, Wow,
I've never been to Paris before, and this is beautiful
and there's the Eiffel Tower, and I was like, I'm
trying to get there. I'm trying to get there, like
maybe I should be more excited, and I just couldn't
get to the point of excitement that I knew maybe
(21:30):
three years before I could have gotten to. It also
means I don't get to the levels of depression I
could have gotten to. So a win is a win,
But for some people they do find this quite difficult.
So what exactly are the consequences of not being able
to feel our feelings? The thing is, and I am
going to sound like a broken record. But our emotions
(21:50):
haven't disappeared, we just aren't listening to them. All the
systems that make emotions possible are still there. It's still
firing as usual. We have just wrapped them up in
bubble wrap and layers of tape and said, okay, well fixed.
You know it's better this way. We're just gonna leave
it as it is. But if you suppress something for
too long, have a guess what's on the other side.
(22:13):
It's a huge eruption. It's like a volcano. Perhaps we
would even experience what we would classify as an emotional
or mental breakdown, where one day there's that final straw,
that final thing that cracks you, or your defense's slip,
or something so intense happens you can't cope, and again
(22:34):
all the stuff that you have pushed behind the wall
comes flooding in. We do not want to get to
that point, not just because it's paralyzing, but also because
when that happens, it doesn't matter what you're doing, who
you are, where you are, Your whole world stops. It's
like that quote, you know, take a break before your
mental health chooses when to take one for you. That's
(22:57):
exactly what I'm describing here. So you know you're a life,
You're human. This is part of the experience is to
feel and feel very very deeply. I think life is
meaningless without that. So I want that for you, even
if it's scary, I really do. I want you to
have a full rainbow of human emotional experiences. So what
(23:18):
exactly should we be doing to slowly get back to
our emotions and feel them deeply, inaccurately. I'm so glad
you asked. Thanks for asking. Stay with us. We're going
to talk about it very very soon. I think we
need to begin this section by mythbusting what feeling our
(23:39):
emotions is and is not, because if you haven't done
it for a while, I think there can be a
lot of hidden misconceptions that aren't particularly useful about the
truth around emotional expression and emotional connection. Feeling your feelings
it is not being a slave to your emotions. It
is not being excited massively emotional in a way you
(24:01):
cannot control. It is not a sign that you are
weak or too sensitive. It is not a reflection of
your strength or worth as a person. Feeling your feelings
does not mean the end of peace and serenity. That
is what your brain is trying to convince you, but
we have to ignore it. Emotions do not equal unbridled chaos.
(24:26):
Here's what feeling your feelings actually means. It means you
are more connected to others. The love that you may
feel for people is deeper, and you can fall deeper
into your relationships with them. It means more joy and
moments of real, deep contentment. It means you can make
beautiful art, write beautiful things, create beautiful things. Feeling your
(24:50):
feelings also means more energy and focus in general, because
you're not constantly using your finite cognitive resources to force
something down that doesn't need to be suppressed. It also
means you get to be more human. That's the biggest
selling point for me in my mind. I think accepting
this and being like, okay, I'm prepared to feel my
(25:11):
feelings is like the moment you're in these huge waves
in this huge storm out at sea, and you've been
fighting and fighting and fighting, and you are so tired
from fighting and being rocked back and forth, and you
slip under the water and you think you've failed, only
to realize like, oh my god, I can breathe under
here this whole time, I could breathe under here and wow,
(25:33):
look at all this cool stuff, like it's beautiful under
the water. That's really the metaphor that I love for this.
So enough of that normal metaphors. Here are my actual
tips for feeling your feelings. Firstly, it goes without saying,
go to a mental health professional if this is really
really intense, because they are going to dive into this
forew in ways you cannot imagine, and just give you
(25:55):
so many fantastic, individualized, personalized recommendations and help and assistance.
So that's your first step. But if you just want
some more daily practices that you can do at the
same time, well, I think firstly, you've got to stop
telling yourself that you're just an emotionless person. There is
(26:15):
literally no good that can come from that. No one
is born that way. Seriously, tell me about a child
who was born and didn't cry and didn't giggle or
get fussy. Emotional reactions are hard wide into us. It's
just that you maybe can't recall a time when your
emotions were permitted, and considering many of us can't remember
(26:38):
anything before the age of three because of something called
infantile amnesia if you started, if your emotions started being
hushed and put down and scolded around that age or
even earlier. Of course, you cannot remember a time when
you had a serious connection to your emotions, because by
the time you were making conscious memories, the damage was
already done. So when you hear yourself saying, I'm just
(27:00):
I don't feel my feelings that deeply. I'm just I'm
not that sensitive. I'm quite cold. I'm just a cold,
cold person, I need you to ask yourself, how did
you come by this realization? Who told you about that
about yourself? Like, who made you believe that? And also
the fact that you're listening to this episode my friend,
(27:22):
that shows that you know it isn't true, because you
and your emotions obviously have a more nuanced and complicated
relationship than that. So after acknowledging yes, you are an emotional, feeling,
deeply feeling person and that's okay, we need to get
back in touch with the physicality of our emotions often,
(27:44):
and this is according to research at Columbia University which
I love to quote. The first way we feel our
emotions is physically. Think about when you were a child,
before you were taught to suppress these parts of you.
You felt your emotions all over in your body, in
your nerves, in your fingers, in your face before you
ever had a word for it. And there is this
(28:05):
amazing study from the University of Alabama that talks about
how most of us can name a physical sensation better
than an emotion. So we need to start there. Try
first by leaning into the embodied sensation of an emotion,
by asking yourself where in your body on your body
this emotion tends to make itself known. There is an
(28:29):
amazing resource that I personally love called the emotion Sensation Wheel,
and it was created by someone called Lindsey Brahman. Personally like,
I cannot recommend it enough. Basically, if you're feeling tense,
if your hands a numb, your foot is tapping, your
lip is coled, you're hot, you're shivering, you feel electric,
(28:50):
whatever it is, where you feel something in your body,
which is often what we notice first, you can trace
that back to a feeling. So this is actually called
a somatic check in and it's really an incredibly important tool. Honestly,
when an emotion comes up, when you feel it in
your body, give it a name. But also treat it
(29:13):
like a game. Treat it like a challenge to collect
your emotions, to feel as many of them as possible,
like Strava. I know this sounds strange to talk about,
like a running app that tracks your miles in an
episode about emotion, But sometimes when I'm like, oh, I
shouldn't be feeling that it's a bad feeling. I want
to avoid this, I think, no, No, It's like I've
(29:34):
got some cool like stamp book or like a passport
where I'm trying to collect all the emotions, like this
is a game. I'm learning here. I'm collecting experiences that
remind me that I'm human and that I'm alive, and
that my environment impacts me, and that I can reach
out and touch and feel everything. It Now, you know,
(29:54):
I am here and I don't know. It's moving and
shifting into a place of wonder, but also having a
beginner's mindset about it as well. If you're not at
that stage yet, that's totally okay. If you're not at
the stage but you still want to feel something, I
want you to try a practice called a sematic release.
(30:15):
I recommend a whole lot of tips on this podcast.
You know, I do two episodes a week. There's a
whole lot of advice being given, but this one has
to make my top three of the things I personally use.
Sematic release. I'm going to use the Harvard definition here
because I like it the best. Somatic release allows your
body to express deeply painful emotions and experiences by using
(30:39):
your body as a medium. If trauma is stored in
the body, that's where it should be targeted. And somatic,
by the way, I should say, is the Greek word
for body, So yes. Essentially, it's the release of emotion
through the body. Sematic release could include something I like
to call crazy dance. I love crazy dance, and if
(31:02):
I'm feeling like really down or crap or numb, I
like put on a song in my headphones and I
just like move my body ridiculously, and I mean, like,
that's the aim of the game for it to look
like crazy dance. The song I'm loving for this right
now is I was like, should I make something up? No,
I'm gonna tell you the truth. It's Tambourine by Eve
(31:26):
And I need to listen to that song and understand why.
If you know what it is, you'll understand why. I'm
a bit like, Oh, that's a bit of an embarrassing
song to say, but I love like early two thousands
music for my crazy dances, and I just find that
anything I'm feeling in my body is so much better
represented for me right now through that kind of expression.
(31:46):
For other people, it's stretching, it's yoga, it's a practice
movement or pattern of movements that they've made themselves whilst
they're breathing to really connect with an emotional state and
to really flow through the intensity of an emotion. It's running,
it's anything that makes you feel in touch with your body.
You know, if your favorite way to avoid feeling your
(32:09):
emotions is to over intellectualize them, like me, talk therapy
sometimes just isn't useful anymore because it just gives you
further opportunities to do that. This is what I've found.
I just don't need to talk about my problems at
this stage in my life. I don't need to dig
any deeper into the past. I don't need to talk
(32:30):
through it anymore with the therapist. Like I've done it.
I've done the work, and I'm at a stage where
anything a therapist says, I promised you I've already overthought
it at two am in the morning. I've already rationalized
every single dimension and way of seeing this thing. And
that's not arrogance, like truly, these people are a lot
smarter than me. It's just that, you know, that's how
(32:52):
my brain likes to think about things, and it puts
in a whole lot of time to try and trying
to help me avoid feelings by rational them away. Really
wish it wasn't that way, But what I found is
that the best way to counteract the plateau that I
had reached in my therapy journey was to start actually
(33:14):
getting into where my emotions felt physically and providing or
pushing for emotional release and catharsis through exercise, through dance,
through movement, swaying with an emotion. It really really helps.
My third strategy for feeling your feelings is one that
I think will hopefully stop you from being afraid of
what that would mean, and it's called the ninety second rule.
(33:38):
So this was created by the neuroscientist doctor Jilbolt Taylor.
She's pretty well known for having a major stroke when
she was in her thirties and she was already a
neuroscientist and basically using herself as like a test subject
to you know, understand the brain better through her experience.
(33:58):
She also did some pretty amazing research looking at how
long our emotions actually last, and she found that most
of the time, an emotional reaction cannot last longer than
ninety seconds unless we keep retriggering it with our thoughts
i e. By overthinking or not letting it go or
(34:19):
not allowing ourselves to feel it properly, so it keeps
returning again and again and again. But basically what that
means is that when an emotion arises for you, set
a timer for ninety seconds and just sit with it,
find a cozy spot, breathe, feel it's going to feel
scary and like the emotion's going to take over, and
(34:41):
then you realize that it won't end. Suddenly ninety seconds
is up and it's past. You cannot be frightened, anxious,
in the depths of grief, sad, whatever it is. You
cannot be like that forever, not even continuously for more
than a few hours, even if it feels that way.
You know, according to doctor Jill, not even for more
(35:03):
than ninety seconds. So because of that it's okay to
let yourself, to let yourself feel knowing that this emotion
isn't going to consume me because it just has no
way of doing that. Again, make your mission here. Your
mission here right now is to explore every emotion like
some great traveler who's able to come back and tell
(35:24):
people about what they found and make great art and
write about it and tell us stories about it. This
emotion cannot hurt you. There's a fantastic ted talk I
love called you are not at the mercy of your emotions.
Your brain creates them that I love to watch when
I need this reminder as well, this reminder that you
can tap into your emotions and let them give you
(35:46):
a rich, sensational, emotional, interpersonal experience without losing control. My
final big tip for getting back in touch with your
emotions is to voice, memo or film yourself when you
were having a particularly intense emotional experience, but keep it
just for you. I'm going to explain why that's important
(36:09):
and why I love doing it. When I went through
my first major breakup when I was in my early
twenties late teens, maybe even I can't even remember it at
this stage. Obviously, I was devastated. I was so so
sad and just torn apart, and I couldn't sleep and
I couldn't eat, and everything was a mess. And I
started filming myself in those moments. I started filming myself,
(36:34):
you know, walking around my campus, going on a hike,
crying and talking about where I was at in this
like journey to get over this person. It was so
raw and it was so real, and it was just
for me. That's the important part. It was just for
me that it really just allowed me to be like this, Actually,
this is kind of beautiful. This is kind of beautiful,
(36:57):
and I'm really just giving myself permission to feel this
with no shame and no blame. And I'm watching it
back and I'm seeing exactly where this is touching me
and exactly where this is impacting me. I actually still
have those videos, and I know it sounds really, really bizarre,
but I think the beginning stages of feeling your feelings
is like grabbing onto any glimmer or shimmer or instance
(37:21):
of the possibility of the possibility of an emotion and
just grabbing it and letting it take you wherever it
needs to take you. Like I think about tinker bell
in a weird sense. And I know that's a weird
thing to bring in here, But this like flash of
light and this like flutteriness of this fairy thing and
this small thing, and that's your emotions. And in the
early stages, if it's sitting with you, if it's passing through,
(37:45):
grab it. Even if it's not an emotion you particularly
want to feel, grab it, document it, make it known,
Let yourself sink deeply into the experience because it is
a human one. And remember, please of avoid distracting yourself
when this comes up. Avoid distracting yourself through escapism, through alcohol,
(38:07):
through work, through the need to rationalize your emotions, through
you know, endlessly keeping yourself busy. It is such a
you know what. The reason that we want to do
it is because for a while it is such an
effective strategy to do that. That's why you're doing it
because it does actually help. It helps you right now.
It will not help you in the future. And I
(38:28):
see a lot of people the older they get lose
more and more of who they are because for so
long they've suppressed their emotions that as they get older,
it none of it just feels as special anymore. And
they just don't really know. I just feel like they're
just not really having the depth of experiences and they're
not really searching for emotions and sensations the way that
(38:51):
people really should be in this life. So it's not
so much a psychological perspective, it's more of a spiritual
value based perspective or belief based perspective that I have
that anytime you try and convince yourself and say this
feels terrible, this feels awful, I shouldn't be feeling this,
ask yourself, well, if I shouldn't be feeling this, why
(39:12):
is this emotion even around? Then? Why does this emotion
even exist? Because if it wasn't useful or helpful, if
there wasn't some specialness to it, it wouldn't be here.
And yet it is. So I'm going to honor it.
I'm going to feel it. That's all I have time
for in this episode. I really hope that it helped you.
(39:32):
I hope that this like dissection of this dissection of
this experience of emotional blunting and emotional numbness. I don't
hope that you can relate to it, but I hope
that if you can relate to it, you got something
out of it, and you can implement these strategies and
that you feel seen and that bringing it back to
the very first thing I said at the start of
(39:52):
this episode, I hope that you're leaving this feeling in
touch with just one emotion that you're going to be
having today. Make sure to send this episode to a friend,
a family member, or a colleague, a partner, whoever who
may need to hear it. If you've made it this far,
my loyal listeners, I know there's like a group of
like fifty of you, fifty to one hundred, and always
(40:13):
make it this far. I want you what's the emoji
for today? What's an emoji that represents feeling your feelings?
Or I think you should do a crazy dance emoji.
Whatever you think like crazy dance looks like, drop it
in the comments so I know you've made it this far.
Leave your questions, your episode suggestions down there as well.
I love engaging with you in that space because you know,
(40:34):
it's not like Instagram or TikTok where anyone can jump
on board. It's just the listeners of the show. So
I'll see you down there. But until next time, please
make sure to follow along, give us a five star review.
Pre order my book because it comes out in less
than a month, which is wild, and we will talk
about that a whole lot more. But until next time,
stay safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself, and we
(40:56):
will talk very very soon.
Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to
the podcast, new listeners, old listeners, Wherever you are in
the world, it is so great to have you here.
Back for another episode as we, of course break down
the psychology of our twenties this episode today, as so
many of my favorite episodes are, I was actually suggested
(00:24):
by a listener, a listener called Josephine, who sent me
this message, and she's given me permission to read it
out loud and see if any of you may relate.
This is what she had to say. Hi, Gemma, It's
been a while since I felt any kind of emotion,
and I'm not trying to sound dramatic. I mean truly happiness, sadness, excitement,
(00:46):
They've all disappeared. My childhood dog recently died and I
felt nothing. I got a big promotion that I've wanted
for a long time, also nothing. One emotion I am
feeling is fear. Fear that I'll never feel the same
way again. I link it back to some really bad
anxiety I had almost a year ago. Around that time,
I started to intellectualize almost all of my emotions before
(01:08):
I allowed myself to fully feel them, and now I
feel like I've ruined my brain by cutting off its
pathway to expression permanently. Please any advice I need, and
would love for you to do an episode on how
to actually feel my feelings. So I got this message,
and firstly, thank you Josephine for sharing. But I got
(01:28):
this message and I immediately knew I needed to talk
about this. In fact, I actually had a whole other
episode planned for this week, but this one just felt
so much more like important because Josephine, like me too.
I am here with you. I am experiencing the same
kind of emotional blunting and the same kind of poor
(01:51):
communication between me and my emotions. You know, I feel
happiness and I confuse it as something bad. I feel sadness, grief, anger, stress,
I push it down and say I'll get to that later.
I also, much like you, intellectualize my emotions as a
way of getting out of feeling them, you know, over
analyzing every possible cause, explanation, and consequence until I'm exhausted.
(02:16):
And you know what, I don't feel particularly good about it,
and I don't feel like it's a particularly great way
to live. The absence of any negative emotions doesn't necessarily
make your life a happy one because your emotions all
use the same systems. All thirty four thousand distinct emotions
we can feel are operating across the same neural pathways,
(02:40):
across all the same core texes of the brain. And
that's why nostalgia and regret feel so similar. Passion and anger,
trust and vulnerability, anxiety and excitement, grief and gratitude, they
feel very similar. So you turn off one, you turn
off regret, you turn off anger, vulnerability, anxiety, grief. You
(03:03):
also turn off nostalgia. You also turn off passion, trust, excitement, gratitude.
And I think a lot of us are fining ourselves
in that very position where we've tried to feel we've
tried to manage our negative emotions in a way that's
actually meant we've prevented any intense emotion at all. I
think a reason for that is that we're scared not
(03:25):
of our actual emotions, We're scared of our feelings about
our feelings. Like, let me explain this. I know it
sounds like a little bit strange, but you know, if
I feel sad, I feel like that's a bad thing,
and I feel like it's the end of the world.
If I'm angry, I worry that something is wrong with me.
So it's not that the sadness is bad. It's not
(03:46):
that the you know, the grief or the anger is bad.
It's that I believe that it's going to make me
feel miserable, have some further on consequence, this whole experience
is whole pattern. This is known as metacognition or better emotions,
my emotions, our emotions about the possibility of certain emotions.
And if that sounds complicated to you, in most certainly
(04:09):
is and it's complicated for our brain, and it's difficult
for us to work through that and feel like we
can actually feel our feelings. So the two big questions
we're really left with is why, you know, why does
this happen? And how how do I fix it? How
do I convince myself I'm not at the mercy of
(04:31):
my emotions and actually let them back in and feel
human and feel connected again. Well, my lovely listeners, we
are going to discuss exactly that. We are going to
explore the psychology behind all of this and so much more.
Be prepared to go deep, maybe shed a few tears,
because today I really want us to all leave feeling
(04:53):
in touch with at least one emotion we've been suppressing.
Just one. That's all we want at the end of
the day. So without further ado, let's get into it.
So we need to talk about this first. We need
to talk about what being detached from our emotions actually
(05:14):
looks like. I was literally I was about to say,
what does it feel like? But you know, that's the
actual problem we're dealing with. What does it look like?
Not being able to feel your feelings essentially means you've
put up some kind of wall between you and the
actual feeling. So it's not necessarily the absence of any
emotion at all. You are not broken. The emotions are
(05:37):
still there. It's just that when an emotion comes up,
you might feel it for just a second. Perhaps you
notice it and then you start over analyzing, or you
get freaked out that it's going to come out too
large and too loud, so you distract yourself or minimize
or adopt any number of coping strategies. After long enough,
(06:01):
you can no longer name what the sensation or emotion
even is, and in some extreme cases, you might also
take direct action to completely avoid the trigger. You know,
if someone has hurt you or broken your heart, you
would perhaps consider and tell yourself, well, they don't even
exist anymore, and I'm never going to think about them again,
(06:24):
meaning that a lot of the you know, deep grief
or portrayal, all the emotions that you should be working
through because of that experience, remain unhealed, remain untouched. Maybe
you're really struggling because you've got like a terrible grade
on a UNI assignment and you're such a perfectionist and
this is just like the most awful thing. You might
(06:46):
try and manage that and not feel the feeling by
completely disengaging with your studies or together, or completely ignoring
any upcoming assignments because you don't even want to give
the illusion of trying. So this is not as avoidance,
and it's often a precursor to not feeling your feelings,
not even putting yourself in the circumstances or these situations
(07:09):
in which that might even be possible. So when you
feel out of touch with your feelings, when you're experiencing numbness,
maybe a delayed emotional response, so something bad happens, you
don't really think about it until a month down the line,
when you are avoiding emotional situations when you're experiencing apathy,
(07:29):
when you know you feel like, yes, you may not
have been sad for a while, but you also haven't
been happy. There is a word for this. It's called
emotional blunting or in medicine, reduced effect display. The best
description I've heard of that describes what emotional blunting really is.
It actually came from a patient involved in a case
(07:52):
study on this experience, and this patient was experiencing intense
emotional numbing and blunting, and she's said, often, what this
makes me feel like is I feel invisible. I feel
like I'm a ghost. I watch my family engaging with
each other, but there is an invisible barrier that keeps
me from joining them. This was what another individual had
(08:13):
to say in a similar article. The world around me
often seems incredibly superficial, like I am simply going through
the motions and can't connect my environment. If I was
to reach out and touch that wall, or reach out
and swim in the ocean, I wouldn't be able to
feel it entirely. So that is what happens when you
cannot feel your feelings. You just feel like Both of
(08:37):
these descriptions from true different patients. Two different clients talk
about something between them and the real world, something that
has been put there a long time ago, or because
of a situation that they didn't feel like they can control.
So let's talk about the reasons why we may get
to a place of being unable to connect with our emotions.
(08:58):
The first one that is very very present is being
stuck in survival mode or experiencing chronic stress. Now you
may hear that and think, I'm not chronically stressed. I'm
gonna skip this section. I'm fine, I'm not burnt out.
I'm fine. You might not even realize that you are,
because recent research suggests that around seven out of ten
(09:18):
of us, seven out of ten of the people listening
are chronically stressed. I'm going to say that again, seventy percent.
When I heard that, and actually I heard it in
mel Robins's new book, I was, I was shocked, But
the more I thought about it, I wasn't surprised. Our
brains were designed for a very different world than the
(09:40):
one we currently live in. We were really designed for
a slower, less stimulating, less intense lifestyle, and now nowadays,
when we are constantly being debarded with information, with a
constant to do list, productivity, guilt, and then let's add
on financial instability, uncertainty about the future, and oh no,
you know, you're in your twenties, so you need to
(10:01):
have it all figured out right now. That sounds exhausting
because it is, and it takes a lot of mental
resources to ensure that we don't like just collapse in
on ourselves like a dying star. Something has to give
in those situations. It takes a lot of brain power
and willpower to keep up with that much mental activity.
(10:22):
And sometimes our brain thinks, well, if we can just
dull our emotions for a little bit, if we can
shut down our emotional processing systems, well amazing, that's great.
That's one less thing to worry about while we get
out of survival mode. Obviously, that's not sustainable. The reason
many people end up in this state even after the
(10:45):
stress has passed, is because when they do allow themselves
to feel their emotions, they are so intense after so
many months or years of not feeling them that we
kind of forget what it means to truly feel. And
it's yeah, the best what I can say is it's
intense and so we fall into a bad cycle of
(11:07):
feeling safer and our detached state because we are out
of practice. We are out of practice with feeling, and
so it's easier to revert to the other extreme of nothingness,
because you know, the whole system has now become disregulated,
where the presence of even a slight emotion feels so
profound after lack of exposure. So I just said this
(11:31):
one key word here, disregulated Again. Your emotional processing systems
are still there. It's not like someone has gone into
your brain and scooped out a part of your cortex
and been like cool, Now you can't feel anything anymore.
It's dysregulation of a system that is still present and active.
So why has this dysregulation occurred other than chronic stress. Well,
(11:54):
maybe it won't come as a surprise that it does
begin way back in childhood for many of us. Not
all of us, but I think the majority of you
can relate to the following series of events. So, as children,
when we were angry, frustrated, trying to be heard, trying
to get our point across, crying out of pain or
(12:17):
sadness or exclusion, we were often shut down, either in
subliminal or very obvious ways. We were hushed, we were scolded,
we were yelled at, even punished. I remember one time,
I think I must have been like six years old,
and I don't know. We were like on the playground
(12:38):
something someone like pushed me. I was like feeling excluded.
We were like playing some game and everyone kept running
away from me, and I was really really sad about it,
and I felt so lonely. And I went up to
a teacher and I'm sure I was annoying her, Like
I'm sure, I'm sure I was annoying her, But I
was crying to her, being like no one wants to
play with me, like no one wants to be my friend.
And she was like, ah, get over it, like just
(13:00):
go away and get over it, like life is unfair.
And that's like a distinct part of my memory. And
you know, those reactions, the reactions we have of parents, teachers,
adults in our lives is one of the primary ways
we learn what is and is inappropriate when it comes
(13:21):
to our emotional reactions, and unfortunately, we often end up
learning that big emotions aren't acceptable and may even result
in an uncomfortable outcome or you know, a bad outcome
for us from those repeated experiences, because if it happened once,
I'm sure it happened again and again. We actually begin
(13:42):
to deny those emotions ourselves, and over time that act
of suppressing our feelings becomes an unconscious, automatic process. We
don't need someone else to do it for us, and
eventually you don't even realize that you're doing it. Let
me give you some of those unconscious ways we still
revert to to suppress our emotions that you might not
(14:03):
even realize you're doing. The first one, and I think
this is massive, major, huge in our twenties, abusing alcohol
to dampen our anxiety, dampen our insecurity, our fear, or
our stress. This one is I think the most popular
for people in their twenties because drinking is so socially acceptable,
(14:24):
but alcohol is also you know, I'm gonna say this,
and I don't know what to be misconstrued. Alcohol is
a fantastic way to not feel your emotions, and it's
a fantastic way in the moment to feel less stressed
and to feel a little bit happier and to have
that buzz in the moment. Afterwards, you begin to associate
(14:47):
those happy, momentary feelings with the alcohol, and you start
pursuing the buzz over and over again, meaning that obviously
alcohol takes such a toll on your brain, such a
toll on your body, but also you have this huge
catalog of memories and experiences that just go untouched and unprocessed,
but don't go away. So alcohol is one of the
(15:09):
ways that we manage not feeling our feelings. The other
one is overworking. You know, you feel a negative feeling
come up, you immediately start working, you start working late,
you commit to more and more things that feels satisfying
in many ways, and is you know, well again socially
acceptable in today's hustle culture. Doesn't mean you process your emotions, No,
(15:32):
it doesn't. It's just a distraction. This next one is
also one that probably a lot of you can relate to,
especially during this generation, and it's escapism through TV shows
or social media. I was having a conversation with someone
recently where well, we were talking about death, and we
were talking about grief, and as it was getting rather heavy,
(15:53):
we were both sharing, you know, we were both bonding.
She picked up her phone and she started like aimlessly
scrolling and like playing TikTok's out loud and I was
like it wasn't rude. I was just like, oh, I'm
so sorry, you know, let's stop talking about this, like
if you want to talk about something else, I totally
get it. And she like looked up from her phone
and she was like really surprised, and she was like
(16:13):
partn and I was like, oh, you know, like I
just I didn't want to be weird about it, but
I was like, oh, you know, you're on your phone,
like you probably don't want to talk about it. And
she looked at her phone and she was like, I
honestly had no idea I was even doing that. She's like,
I had no idea I was even on my phone.
And she was still like kind of semi engaging in
the conversation, but at the same time she was like
scrolling and scrolling and scrolling, and I was like we
(16:36):
both like were sitting there being like wow, Wow, that's
just like a complete Like the presence of social media
is just like dulled your emotional response, and in some ways,
perhaps you're leaning on that in many situations without even realizing.
Our phones are like an emotional shield because they can
(16:57):
pull us in with all their dopamine offerings and make
us feel great and distracted in the moment, but disconnected
in the long run. Finally, one of the ways that
we avoid feeling our feelings, my personal favorite over intellectualizing.
Over intellectualizing every emotion and rationalizing it to the ninth
degree so that we never have to feel it. So
(17:20):
let me explain the psychology behind why we do this. Psychologically,
intellectualizing is linked to something called cognitive avoidance, where our
brain is essentially trying to bypass distressing emotions by shifting
focus to logic and reason, creating that kind of sense
of detachment because our emotions are not sensations, they're not
(17:43):
things that are happening to us. They're ideas, they're abstract concepts.
I'll give you some examples of this. Going through like
a big breakup or your first heartbreak, and instead of
grieving it, you might be obsessing over the psychology of
attachment styles. You might be over analyzing the entire history
of your relationship, rationalizing exactly why it wasn't meant to be,
(18:06):
being quite scientific, and dissecting every little moment that you
had together. You may also find that you overthink any
kind of emotion that you're experiencing by saying why do
I feel this way? What's the psychological explanation, what's the science,
what's the neurobiology? When is it going to go away?
What's the timeline? Instead of just saying this is uncomfortable,
(18:29):
Who cares why it's happening? I'll get through it. I'll
say it again. I am very guilty of this. In fact,
I think my podcast is a reflection and is evidence
of how guilty I am of this, because you know,
I really did start the Psychology of your twenties to
break down the emotions I was experiencing in a rational,
logical way. I was over intellectualizing them, and I've definitely
(18:51):
gotten better. But I do find it's quite an interesting
thing that often people who are overthinkers and who feel
really big emotions really lean into intellectual resources or research
or articles or fact or science as a kind of
emotional crutch so they don't actually have to feel the
thing so intensely. And by doing this, what's actually happening
(19:15):
is that our prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for reasoning,
is dominating over our limbic system, which processes emotion, basically
dulling our emotional response and providing temporary release from emotional pain.
Let's quickly talk about some other reasons for this detachment.
Trauma is one of them. The emotions of the past
(19:38):
are scary and terrifying and big, and sometimes we are
afraid that if we open that door you may not
be able to close it ever again, especially since we
are not taught, really in any capacity in school in
life how to handle big, uncomfortable emotions. We can also
experience emotional numbness because of our current environment or context.
(20:01):
Maybe it's a particularly stressful period at work, at school,
you're experiencing grief, heartbreak. Even when a situation is dangerous,
people often emotionally shut down. It's why you see a
lot of people experiencing long term shock, even amnesia during war,
during natural disasters, our brain is like, we cannot handle this.
(20:24):
If we were to feel this all at once, we
would surely break. So to survive physically and mentally, let's
just shut this off for a little bit. Finally, the
reason you might be experiencing emotional blunting is because of
certain medications that also can create this sensation, one of
them being antidepressants. Now, this is not to fear monger
(20:46):
or scare you, especially if you are on any kind
of antidepressant or considering it. I'm currently on twenty milligrams
of laxaproa day and we have a complicated relationship, but overall,
my lexipro has helped me tremendously. But I have, however,
noticed that whilst it makes those hard, distressing emotions less
(21:08):
sharp and painful and biting, it does also make the
good emotions feel a little bit less fulfilling. Like I
remember being in Paris last year and being like, Wow,
I've never been to Paris before, and this is beautiful
and there's the Eiffel Tower, and I was like, I'm
trying to get there. I'm trying to get there, like
maybe I should be more excited, and I just couldn't
get to the point of excitement that I knew maybe
(21:30):
three years before I could have gotten to. It also
means I don't get to the levels of depression I
could have gotten to. So a win is a win,
But for some people they do find this quite difficult.
So what exactly are the consequences of not being able
to feel our feelings? The thing is, and I am
going to sound like a broken record. But our emotions
(21:50):
haven't disappeared, we just aren't listening to them. All the
systems that make emotions possible are still there. It's still
firing as usual. We have just wrapped them up in
bubble wrap and layers of tape and said, okay, well fixed.
You know it's better this way. We're just gonna leave
it as it is. But if you suppress something for
too long, have a guess what's on the other side.
(22:13):
It's a huge eruption. It's like a volcano. Perhaps we
would even experience what we would classify as an emotional
or mental breakdown, where one day there's that final straw,
that final thing that cracks you, or your defense's slip,
or something so intense happens you can't cope, and again
(22:34):
all the stuff that you have pushed behind the wall
comes flooding in. We do not want to get to
that point, not just because it's paralyzing, but also because
when that happens, it doesn't matter what you're doing, who
you are, where you are, Your whole world stops. It's
like that quote, you know, take a break before your
mental health chooses when to take one for you. That's
(22:57):
exactly what I'm describing here. So you know you're a life,
You're human. This is part of the experience is to
feel and feel very very deeply. I think life is
meaningless without that. So I want that for you, even
if it's scary, I really do. I want you to
have a full rainbow of human emotional experiences. So what
(23:18):
exactly should we be doing to slowly get back to
our emotions and feel them deeply, inaccurately. I'm so glad
you asked. Thanks for asking. Stay with us. We're going
to talk about it very very soon. I think we
need to begin this section by mythbusting what feeling our
(23:39):
emotions is and is not, because if you haven't done
it for a while, I think there can be a
lot of hidden misconceptions that aren't particularly useful about the
truth around emotional expression and emotional connection. Feeling your feelings
it is not being a slave to your emotions. It
is not being excited massively emotional in a way you
(24:01):
cannot control. It is not a sign that you are
weak or too sensitive. It is not a reflection of
your strength or worth as a person. Feeling your feelings
does not mean the end of peace and serenity. That
is what your brain is trying to convince you, but
we have to ignore it. Emotions do not equal unbridled chaos.
(24:26):
Here's what feeling your feelings actually means. It means you
are more connected to others. The love that you may
feel for people is deeper, and you can fall deeper
into your relationships with them. It means more joy and
moments of real, deep contentment. It means you can make
beautiful art, write beautiful things, create beautiful things. Feeling your
(24:50):
feelings also means more energy and focus in general, because
you're not constantly using your finite cognitive resources to force
something down that doesn't need to be suppressed. It also
means you get to be more human. That's the biggest
selling point for me in my mind. I think accepting
this and being like, okay, I'm prepared to feel my
(25:11):
feelings is like the moment you're in these huge waves
in this huge storm out at sea, and you've been
fighting and fighting and fighting, and you are so tired
from fighting and being rocked back and forth, and you
slip under the water and you think you've failed, only
to realize like, oh my god, I can breathe under
here this whole time, I could breathe under here and wow,
(25:33):
look at all this cool stuff, like it's beautiful under
the water. That's really the metaphor that I love for this.
So enough of that normal metaphors. Here are my actual
tips for feeling your feelings. Firstly, it goes without saying,
go to a mental health professional if this is really
really intense, because they are going to dive into this
forew in ways you cannot imagine, and just give you
(25:55):
so many fantastic, individualized, personalized recommendations and help and assistance.
So that's your first step. But if you just want
some more daily practices that you can do at the
same time, well, I think firstly, you've got to stop
telling yourself that you're just an emotionless person. There is
(26:15):
literally no good that can come from that. No one
is born that way. Seriously, tell me about a child
who was born and didn't cry and didn't giggle or
get fussy. Emotional reactions are hard wide into us. It's
just that you maybe can't recall a time when your
emotions were permitted, and considering many of us can't remember
(26:38):
anything before the age of three because of something called
infantile amnesia if you started, if your emotions started being
hushed and put down and scolded around that age or
even earlier. Of course, you cannot remember a time when
you had a serious connection to your emotions, because by
the time you were making conscious memories, the damage was
already done. So when you hear yourself saying, I'm just
(27:00):
I don't feel my feelings that deeply. I'm just I'm
not that sensitive. I'm quite cold. I'm just a cold,
cold person, I need you to ask yourself, how did
you come by this realization? Who told you about that
about yourself? Like, who made you believe that? And also
the fact that you're listening to this episode my friend,
(27:22):
that shows that you know it isn't true, because you
and your emotions obviously have a more nuanced and complicated
relationship than that. So after acknowledging yes, you are an emotional, feeling,
deeply feeling person and that's okay, we need to get
back in touch with the physicality of our emotions often,
(27:44):
and this is according to research at Columbia University which
I love to quote. The first way we feel our
emotions is physically. Think about when you were a child,
before you were taught to suppress these parts of you.
You felt your emotions all over in your body, in
your nerves, in your fingers, in your face before you
ever had a word for it. And there is this
(28:05):
amazing study from the University of Alabama that talks about
how most of us can name a physical sensation better
than an emotion. So we need to start there. Try
first by leaning into the embodied sensation of an emotion,
by asking yourself where in your body on your body
this emotion tends to make itself known. There is an
(28:29):
amazing resource that I personally love called the emotion Sensation Wheel,
and it was created by someone called Lindsey Brahman. Personally like,
I cannot recommend it enough. Basically, if you're feeling tense,
if your hands a numb, your foot is tapping, your
lip is coled, you're hot, you're shivering, you feel electric,
(28:50):
whatever it is, where you feel something in your body,
which is often what we notice first, you can trace
that back to a feeling. So this is actually called
a somatic check in and it's really an incredibly important tool. Honestly,
when an emotion comes up, when you feel it in
your body, give it a name. But also treat it
(29:13):
like a game. Treat it like a challenge to collect
your emotions, to feel as many of them as possible,
like Strava. I know this sounds strange to talk about,
like a running app that tracks your miles in an
episode about emotion, But sometimes when I'm like, oh, I
shouldn't be feeling that it's a bad feeling. I want
to avoid this, I think, no, No, It's like I've
(29:34):
got some cool like stamp book or like a passport
where I'm trying to collect all the emotions, like this
is a game. I'm learning here. I'm collecting experiences that
remind me that I'm human and that I'm alive, and
that my environment impacts me, and that I can reach
out and touch and feel everything. It Now, you know,
(29:54):
I am here and I don't know. It's moving and
shifting into a place of wonder, but also having a
beginner's mindset about it as well. If you're not at
that stage yet, that's totally okay. If you're not at
the stage but you still want to feel something, I
want you to try a practice called a sematic release.
(30:15):
I recommend a whole lot of tips on this podcast.
You know, I do two episodes a week. There's a
whole lot of advice being given, but this one has
to make my top three of the things I personally use.
Sematic release. I'm going to use the Harvard definition here
because I like it the best. Somatic release allows your
body to express deeply painful emotions and experiences by using
(30:39):
your body as a medium. If trauma is stored in
the body, that's where it should be targeted. And somatic,
by the way, I should say, is the Greek word
for body, So yes. Essentially, it's the release of emotion
through the body. Sematic release could include something I like
to call crazy dance. I love crazy dance, and if
(31:02):
I'm feeling like really down or crap or numb, I
like put on a song in my headphones and I
just like move my body ridiculously, and I mean, like,
that's the aim of the game for it to look
like crazy dance. The song I'm loving for this right
now is I was like, should I make something up? No,
I'm gonna tell you the truth. It's Tambourine by Eve
(31:26):
And I need to listen to that song and understand why.
If you know what it is, you'll understand why. I'm
a bit like, Oh, that's a bit of an embarrassing
song to say, but I love like early two thousands
music for my crazy dances, and I just find that
anything I'm feeling in my body is so much better
represented for me right now through that kind of expression.
(31:46):
For other people, it's stretching, it's yoga, it's a practice
movement or pattern of movements that they've made themselves whilst
they're breathing to really connect with an emotional state and
to really flow through the intensity of an emotion. It's running,
it's anything that makes you feel in touch with your body.
You know, if your favorite way to avoid feeling your
(32:09):
emotions is to over intellectualize them, like me, talk therapy
sometimes just isn't useful anymore because it just gives you
further opportunities to do that. This is what I've found.
I just don't need to talk about my problems at
this stage in my life. I don't need to dig
any deeper into the past. I don't need to talk
(32:30):
through it anymore with the therapist. Like I've done it.
I've done the work, and I'm at a stage where
anything a therapist says, I promised you I've already overthought
it at two am in the morning. I've already rationalized
every single dimension and way of seeing this thing. And
that's not arrogance, like truly, these people are a lot
smarter than me. It's just that, you know, that's how
(32:52):
my brain likes to think about things, and it puts
in a whole lot of time to try and trying
to help me avoid feelings by rational them away. Really
wish it wasn't that way, But what I found is
that the best way to counteract the plateau that I
had reached in my therapy journey was to start actually
(33:14):
getting into where my emotions felt physically and providing or
pushing for emotional release and catharsis through exercise, through dance,
through movement, swaying with an emotion. It really really helps.
My third strategy for feeling your feelings is one that
I think will hopefully stop you from being afraid of
what that would mean, and it's called the ninety second rule.
(33:38):
So this was created by the neuroscientist doctor Jilbolt Taylor.
She's pretty well known for having a major stroke when
she was in her thirties and she was already a
neuroscientist and basically using herself as like a test subject
to you know, understand the brain better through her experience.
(33:58):
She also did some pretty amazing research looking at how
long our emotions actually last, and she found that most
of the time, an emotional reaction cannot last longer than
ninety seconds unless we keep retriggering it with our thoughts
i e. By overthinking or not letting it go or
(34:19):
not allowing ourselves to feel it properly, so it keeps
returning again and again and again. But basically what that
means is that when an emotion arises for you, set
a timer for ninety seconds and just sit with it,
find a cozy spot, breathe, feel it's going to feel
scary and like the emotion's going to take over, and
(34:41):
then you realize that it won't end. Suddenly ninety seconds
is up and it's past. You cannot be frightened, anxious,
in the depths of grief, sad, whatever it is. You
cannot be like that forever, not even continuously for more
than a few hours, even if it feels that way.
You know, according to doctor Jill, not even for more
(35:03):
than ninety seconds. So because of that it's okay to
let yourself, to let yourself feel knowing that this emotion
isn't going to consume me because it just has no
way of doing that. Again, make your mission here. Your
mission here right now is to explore every emotion like
some great traveler who's able to come back and tell
(35:24):
people about what they found and make great art and
write about it and tell us stories about it. This
emotion cannot hurt you. There's a fantastic ted talk I
love called you are not at the mercy of your emotions.
Your brain creates them that I love to watch when
I need this reminder as well, this reminder that you
can tap into your emotions and let them give you
(35:46):
a rich, sensational, emotional, interpersonal experience without losing control. My
final big tip for getting back in touch with your
emotions is to voice, memo or film yourself when you
were having a particularly intense emotional experience, but keep it
just for you. I'm going to explain why that's important
(36:09):
and why I love doing it. When I went through
my first major breakup when I was in my early
twenties late teens, maybe even I can't even remember it at
this stage. Obviously, I was devastated. I was so so
sad and just torn apart, and I couldn't sleep and
I couldn't eat, and everything was a mess. And I
started filming myself in those moments. I started filming myself,
(36:34):
you know, walking around my campus, going on a hike,
crying and talking about where I was at in this
like journey to get over this person. It was so
raw and it was so real, and it was just
for me. That's the important part. It was just for
me that it really just allowed me to be like this, Actually,
this is kind of beautiful. This is kind of beautiful,
(36:57):
and I'm really just giving myself permission to feel this
with no shame and no blame. And I'm watching it
back and I'm seeing exactly where this is touching me
and exactly where this is impacting me. I actually still
have those videos, and I know it sounds really, really bizarre,
but I think the beginning stages of feeling your feelings
is like grabbing onto any glimmer or shimmer or instance
(37:21):
of the possibility of the possibility of an emotion and
just grabbing it and letting it take you wherever it
needs to take you. Like I think about tinker bell
in a weird sense. And I know that's a weird
thing to bring in here, But this like flash of
light and this like flutteriness of this fairy thing and
this small thing, and that's your emotions. And in the
early stages, if it's sitting with you, if it's passing through,
(37:45):
grab it. Even if it's not an emotion you particularly
want to feel, grab it, document it, make it known,
Let yourself sink deeply into the experience because it is
a human one. And remember, please of avoid distracting yourself
when this comes up. Avoid distracting yourself through escapism, through alcohol,
(38:07):
through work, through the need to rationalize your emotions, through
you know, endlessly keeping yourself busy. It is such a
you know what. The reason that we want to do
it is because for a while it is such an
effective strategy to do that. That's why you're doing it
because it does actually help. It helps you right now.
It will not help you in the future. And I
(38:28):
see a lot of people the older they get lose
more and more of who they are because for so
long they've suppressed their emotions that as they get older,
it none of it just feels as special anymore. And
they just don't really know. I just feel like they're
just not really having the depth of experiences and they're
not really searching for emotions and sensations the way that
(38:51):
people really should be in this life. So it's not
so much a psychological perspective, it's more of a spiritual
value based perspective or belief based perspective that I have
that anytime you try and convince yourself and say this
feels terrible, this feels awful, I shouldn't be feeling this,
ask yourself, well, if I shouldn't be feeling this, why
(39:12):
is this emotion even around? Then? Why does this emotion
even exist? Because if it wasn't useful or helpful, if
there wasn't some specialness to it, it wouldn't be here.
And yet it is. So I'm going to honor it.
I'm going to feel it. That's all I have time
for in this episode. I really hope that it helped you.
(39:32):
I hope that this like dissection of this dissection of
this experience of emotional blunting and emotional numbness. I don't
hope that you can relate to it, but I hope
that if you can relate to it, you got something
out of it, and you can implement these strategies and
that you feel seen and that bringing it back to
the very first thing I said at the start of
(39:52):
this episode, I hope that you're leaving this feeling in
touch with just one emotion that you're going to be
having today. Make sure to send this episode to a friend,
a family member, or a colleague, a partner, whoever who
may need to hear it. If you've made it this far,
my loyal listeners, I know there's like a group of
like fifty of you, fifty to one hundred, and always
(40:13):
make it this far. I want you what's the emoji
for today? What's an emoji that represents feeling your feelings?
Or I think you should do a crazy dance emoji.
Whatever you think like crazy dance looks like, drop it
in the comments so I know you've made it this far.
Leave your questions, your episode suggestions down there as well.
I love engaging with you in that space because you know,
(40:34):
it's not like Instagram or TikTok where anyone can jump
on board. It's just the listeners of the show. So
I'll see you down there. But until next time, please
make sure to follow along, give us a five star review.
Pre order my book because it comes out in less
than a month, which is wild, and we will talk
about that a whole lot more. But until next time,
stay safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself, and we
(40:56):
will talk very very soon.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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