Dr. Maya Shankar

What are the different emotions that I'm feeling?

And one technique that can be really helpful is to just label those emotions with as much specificity as you possibly can.

So what does that look like?

I'm feeling grief.

I'm feeling resentment.

I'm feeling frustration.

When you give emotions labels, you shift away from the perspective of being the emotion, of embodying the emotion, to someone who simply has the emotions.

And when we create that distance between ourselves and our emotions, it actually allows us to see them more clearly and to actually try and problem solve and develop more constructive solutions.

And the final one I wanted to share is something called self-distancing.

So this is where we try to step outside of ourselves and have more of a third party bird's eye view of our situation, okay?

Two things can happen in the aftermath of, for example, us losing our job.

The first is that we are losing some of our self-confidence and we might be self-berating and we're not exactly our best hype people in that moment.

If you're anything like me, you're not your best hype person.

So what you can do is pretend that you're coaching a friend.

Imagine you're just a fly on the wall observing this situation happening to yourself and you're giving yourself advice.

You're saying, you know, Maya, I do want to remind you, you have these incredible strengths.

I do want to remind you that there are so many other options you can explore right now.

And what research shows is that that will help you meet yourself with more self-compassion, which we know, by the way, is not just woo-woo, nice self-talk.

It actually leads to better, more productive outcomes in the longer term.

And it will help you to