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The Psychology of your 20s

419. How to ACTUALLY process your emotions

21 May 2026

Transcription

Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

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This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Hey, it's Edwin Castro, also known as Castro1021. And I'm Konky, his best friend and business manager. And we've got a new show called The 1021 Podcast. I'm taking you behind the scenes on how I became one of Twitch's most popular streamers. We also love sports.

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And with the World Cup right around the corner, we'll be breaking down the biggest storylines ahead of the big tournament here in the USA. Listen to the 1021 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The story I told myself can then shape my behavior, and that can lead me to sabotage the possibility of connection.

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This Mental Health Awareness Month, tune into the podcast Deeply Well with Debbie Brown. If you've been searching for a soft place to land while doing the work to become whole, this podcast is for you. To hear more, listen to Deeply Well with Debbie Brown from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests, like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. David Oyelowo.

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I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction, or you just go straight for the guts. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Joey Dardano, and on my new podcast, Hope from a Hypocrite, I'll be changing lives, helping people in need with thoughtful solutions. Psych!

125.829 - 147.15 Unknown

I'm a comedian. I'm not qualified to give good advice. Join me and my comedian friends as we riff, rant, and recommend some of the most legally dubious advice known to man. This is Help from a Hypocrite, the worst advice from the dumbest people you know. Listen to Help from a Hypocrite Wednesdays on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Why are we all so obsessed with romance? On the Radio 831 podcast, join us, Sanjana Bhaskar, and Tyler McCall as we unpack all the trending tropes, buzzy adaptations, book talk drama, and celebrity love stories with hot takes and sharp guests. Each episode digs into what these stories reveal about desire, fantasy, identity, and how we love now.

170.741 - 176.867 Unknown

Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

182.72 - 212.119 Gemma Spake

Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Spake and welcome back to The Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our 20s.

Chapter 2: What are the signs that we are detached from our emotions?

2101.002 - 2117.273 Gemma Spake

doesn't have a complex relationship with their father or their mother or their families only one of them and there's like 10 people he interviews and the anger and the control they feel towards women and sometimes towards themselves i think just conceals a deeper fear of being lonely

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2117.253 - 2134.131 Gemma Spake

or of a loss of respect or social standing, a fear of not having control over one's own life or being seen as unworthy because they've gotten all this rejection from their parents, like not to psychoanalyze them, but I really do think that's an explanation.

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2134.111 - 2158.826 Gemma Spake

The inability to correctly identify and accept these feelings of anxiety and fear is why this movement has gained so much notoriety and so much following amongst people who are similarly confused. And they're like, cool, this is a great way that I don't have to ever feel any of that. I can just be mad and mean. this is something a psychologist friend of mine said to me a few weeks back.

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2159.566 - 2179.052 Gemma Spake

I was talking to her about this episode. She says, she said to me, so often our emotions pair up, like they come in pairs. There's the real emotion and then there's, it's like bodyguard who we see and feel first. Like the thing we have to do is push past the bodyguard to see what's actually behind what

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2179.032 - 2202.821 Gemma Spake

the bodyguard and see what the true emotion is, which often is quite a vulnerable emotion and quite a weak emotion, hence why it needs the bodyguard. So I think part of processing our emotions is just initially asking ourselves, is this what I'm really feeling? It's like this anger, this jealousy, this outrage, this shame, is this really what I'm feeling or what am I trying to hide from here?

2202.881 - 2224.59 Gemma Spake

What's the bodyguard covering up for? Another good way to do this is just a quite simple, expand your emotional vocabulary beyond just happy, sad, angry, even just fine. We all use these words a lot. I use these words a lot, but I bet you like quite often these words don't actually properly describe the emotional state that you are in.

2225.251 - 2237.929 Gemma Spake

Giving yourself more words to work with to correctly identify what it is you're actually feeling is so helpful. Literally, you can go online right now, find a massive list, copy it into your notes app,

2237.909 - 2262.745 Gemma Spake

When you're angry before bed, whenever you need it, find the word that you actually think best matches what you are sitting with rather than just, I'm not good or I have to be numb because I don't have the words. Psychologically, this is tied to a concept known as emotional granularity, which is your ability to identify and label emotions with precision.

2263.486 - 2285.974 Gemma Spake

Emotional granularity is actually, it's a really new term. I think it was only written about a couple years back by this woman called Lisa Feldman Barrett. She wrote this book, How Emotions Are Made, in like 2017. Don't quote me on that. It may have been earlier. It may have been later. And she basically realized whilst writing this book that emotions fall across a four-point spectrum.

Chapter 3: Why do we struggle to process our emotions effectively?

2668.805 - 2688.627 Unknown

I'm Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things. I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain. In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers, and adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner landscapes and life experiences that informed and inspired their extraordinary feats.

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I also bring a bit of advice into the mix so we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to pull out what you already have inside. We're coming into this world fighting for our lives. All I'm going to do is pull out what you already got inside.

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Chapter 4: What hidden strategies do we use to avoid feeling our emotions?

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We're there to support and celebrate each other. And that's not like a your story versus my story. You're going to walk up and over that dang mountain. You're not just going to put your mind over it. Yep, yep, exactly. And if I can't walk up and over it, I'm going to go through it.

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Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents Soccer Moms. So I'm Leanne. Yeah. This is my best friend Janet. Hey. And we have been joined at the hip since high school. Absolutely. Now a redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip.

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Just a little bit bigger hips, wider. This is a podcast, we're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Sidebar, why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? Well, they had a BOGO. Well, then you got them. Do you want a white claw or something? Here, just take it. What are y'all doing? Microphones?

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Are you making a rap album? Oh, I wish. I would buy it. Cuts through the defense like a hot knife through sponge cake. That sounds delicious. Oh, you're lucky I'm not a drug addict. You're lucky I'm not an alcoholic. You're lucky I'm not a killer. I love this team, and I'm really trying to be a figure in their lives that they can rely on.

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Listen to Soccer Moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why is everyone obsessed with romance right now? Like everyone. Your coworker who quote unquote doesn't read is reading romance. Your mom, book talk, the entire internet. I'm Sanjana Bhaskar. I'm Tyler McCall. And this is Radio 831, a romance podcast.

2812.84 - 2839.136 Unknown

The books, the tropes, the adaptations, the drama, the discourse. And what all of it says about how we actually love, yearn, and obsess. We're going to Wuthering Heights. Which, for the record, is not a romance novel. And yet it has haunted the romance genre for 200 years. We're getting into dark romance, Age Gaps. Certain Russian hockey players. And sentient objects in love, which is a thing.

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That's the kind of conversation we're having every episode. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos Podcast. And for Mental Health Awareness Month, we're dedicating a series to understanding the mind when it struggles.

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I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks.

Chapter 5: How can maladaptive coping mechanisms impact our emotional health?

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I was agoraphobic. and making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill and it's hard to be present. We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that procedure made me happy because I'm disease free.

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And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety and John Hirshfield about obsessive compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it.

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Listen to Inner Cosmos on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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2927.388 - 2952.13 Gemma Spake

So giving your emotions a standing appointment definitely works. Putting them in your diary, great technique. You know what also works? Just freaking, just screaming. Literally just screaming, crying, ripping something, punching something, dancing through something, chanting through something. running through something, whatever it is, in a physical, expressive way.

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2953.391 - 2975.535 Gemma Spake

Let me explain that because I know, like, how can you expressively run? You're probably thinking, let me explain the whole principle behind this. What we're basically talking about is somatic release. Lots of us will know Wessel van der Boek's or Vandal Coke's famous book, The Body Keeps the Score. Classic these days. It's a classic.

2975.515 - 2996.325 Gemma Spake

If you haven't heard of it or if you want a summary, it basically shows that trauma and emotion and pain register within our bodies on a cellular level. So your breakup, your self-doubt, your loneliness, your anger at your parents, your anxiety is as much physical as it is emotional. And the tensions or the tension of those emotions not being released is

2996.305 - 3020.271 Gemma Spake

Impacts our muscles, impacts our limbs, impacts our cells in a dangerous way. Somatic therapy is basically a way of processing that through kinetic movement and turning the tap back on and processing it through output and sensation and making like something, making a feeling tangible, putting it into a physical form when it normally sits in a very untouchable, unconscious form.

3020.291 - 3040.5 Gemma Spake

A really simple example of somatic healing is just shaking. I don't know if you have a dog, you'll see animals do this. Like after they experience a threat or they're stressed, they'll like shake. That's the nervous system discharging excess energy. And humans have the same mechanism. Like we've just learned to suppress it.

3040.941 - 3057.794 Gemma Spake

We've just learned to not look weird in front of people, even though our body needs something from us to process what we've been through. I know when I went through like a really, really sad time a couple of years back that, let's be real, like manifested in a lot of just like anger at the world. That is when I picked up boxing.

Chapter 6: What role does emotional numbing play in our lives?

3386.281 - 3398.187 Gemma Spake

I think a lot of us are sitting at this central frequency of emotion. We feel every emotion, but we feel it at like 50% or we kind of only feel the emotions that influence us to a

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3398.167 - 3425.71 Gemma Spake

a mid-range we want to see and feel every single peak and trough and again to summarize what that involves is understanding your coping mechanisms what are the ways that you are detaching from your emotions through work through escapism through intellectualizing and then also understanding your emotional bodyguards for every deep emotion that feels painful or maybe shameful to feel

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3425.69 - 3436.226 Gemma Spake

there's going to be a corresponding emotion that feels more appropriate to feel like anger, like jealousy, like shame, like nothing, like numbness.

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3437.568 - 3460.506 Gemma Spake

You process your emotions by being able to identify what that feeling actually is, which is a distraction and being able to move through that primary feeling through somatic release, through art, through whatever means so that you can really get to the deep core of Why do I feel this way? And beyond an explanation, can I feel this way?

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3460.586 - 3482.407 Gemma Spake

Can I just let myself sit in the discomfort of being alive and know that sometimes that doesn't need an answer? I feel like this is the thing we've been getting to all day. What does it mean to process your emotions? It means being okay with not knowing why something is happening, but just knowing that you are feeling it and letting that be kind of part of your experience. That's my opinion.

3483.048 - 3504.809 Gemma Spake

That's my opinion, at least. You can disagree. Maybe it means something else to you, but I think that's all I have time for. I feel like I've said the word feeling about 50 million times, so I need to take a breath after that. But I do hope that this episode has been informative. When I learned about like emotional bodyguards, my life changed.

3505.049 - 3522.901 Gemma Spake

I genuinely was like, oh my God, I have so much about who I am as a person is explained because I used to be so angry. And I was like, why am I such an angry, irritated person at times? I was like, oh, because that's like the only way I know how to feel anything. So maybe that's a realization you've had from this episode as well.

3523.342 - 3540.181 Gemma Spake

I want to thank our researcher, Lucy Davidson, for her help looking at some of these studies and research for this episode. As always, if you want more of the psychology of your 20s, you can go to our Instagram, you can go to our Substack, and you can watch us on Netflix, wherever you are in the world.

3540.261 - 3562.009 Gemma Spake

If you want to watch future episodes on your TV, on your laptop, if you just want to see what it looks like. that is available to you now worldwide i'll leave a little link in the description but again i hope you enjoyed it thanks for thanks for visiting us here thanks for staying till the end till next time be safe be kind be gentle to yourself we will talk very very soon so

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