Podcast Appearances
And this is something I call the self-regulation paradox, in that if you're just using journaling or CBT or breathwork to kind of ground yourself, but ultimately avoid feeling whatever the emotion is,
you're not gonna make progress over time.
Because I view these practices as a purely a means to get back into our window of tolerance, and then to allow the emotion to actually move through.
Because if we're still moving through the world in a way that we are,
avoiding feeling sadness or anger or grief or whatever the thing is then we will always be making these predictions that like oh that's that's bad we're not going to go near that and so the the intensity of our in which they present in our bodies will just get worse and worse over time and we'll have to do like more and more of these interventions in order to kind of self-regulate and um the third kind of pillar or category is emotional fluidity and that is
It's the one that probably takes the longest to learn, but it's learning to welcome the full spectrum of human experience.
And beneath anxiety, for a lot of people, it's either like frustration or anger or sometimes sadness.
And once there's that sense of kind of safety and calmness that's created from the self-regulation, then the emotion can kind of come through.
And it's actually, it's the resistance to feeling the emotion that is the bit that sucks, basically.
Emotions themselves don't last for more than 10 to 20 seconds.
It's the way that we constrict and tense against them and try to resist feeling them that is the bit that causes the challenge.
Because like- It is wild.
We don't think about that normally.
And the other thing that I want to bring this back to is this idea of emotions or avoided emotions and specifically emotional debt, because
the more that we go through life and our nervous systems have this amazing capacity to buffer our emotional responses, which in many, many situations is super useful.
Like let's say someone on the street just like shout to me or I'm in a boardroom meeting and I get really angry.
It's actually good for me to be able to like suppress that and kind of save it for later.
But
If I do that, you know, repeatedly over many days or weeks or months, that builds up this emotional debt is what I call it.
And in the nervous system, this is a buildup of allostatic load.