Feel in Control Again: Emotional Regulation Made Simple

Transcript

hi guys and welcome back to another video today we're going to be talking about how we can be mindful towards our body our emotions and how can mindfulness lead to nervous system regulation and make us feel more comfortable in our bodies and mind have you ever wondered what does the term emotional regulation mean what does it mean to have emotional awareness or emotional intelligence there are so many of these terms that are out there and it really kind of boils down to a couple of things that I'd like to kind of explain in this video so let's get into it hi there and welcome I am Aisha danani and I'm so glad you found your way to this challeng if you're here chances are you're looking to learn more about managing stress and improving your health and you're in the right place I'm an naturopathic doctor practicing in Toronto and like many of you I've faced my own health challenges and have experienced firsthand how stress can affect your well-being now let's get into the discussion of what is emotional regulation while a lot of us might think emotional regulation is the ability to regulate emotions that is actually the second step to the first part to be able to regulate your emotions you first need to be able to be aware of what emotional response you're having and this is often the first learning point for a lot of you we've never been told to recognize our emotions ever since we were young so if you have no way of knowing what you're experiencing how are you then going to regulate it so it's it's kind of like if you have an issue in your laptop or your phone and you don't know what could go wrong how would you be able to fix it so we want to First be able to understand what is it that I am experiencing from a body or somatic sematic perspective so this is where you want to be able to use your body to understand what is it that I'm experiencing what emotion am I holding in so first comes the awareness part and this is okay so I'm aware one that I'm not feeling okay okay what am I feeling and can I be more in my body to understand where is it in my body this is where we can hold space for the emotion and this quite literally is what regulation is it's about holding space for the emotion without intellectualizing it or logical ising it so you know often we can go into oh you know what I'm not feeling okay because emotions don't necessarily have logic attached to them in the initial phase we can extrapolate some logic however for us to be able to allow our body to self-regulate we need to just have the capacity to hold so what does it feel like in your body for you to feel sad to feel angry to feel irritated to feel overwhelmed and so I will have that direct question asked to a lot of patients because often we don't know what it feels like and that was certainly true for me as well so for example a lot of us might experience anger either in in our head or in our shoulders for some people it might be in other places so you want to figure out where is it in your body that you often tend to feel certain emotions and you can work with just five Prime emotions that can be anger sadness guilt shame fear and joy maybe even and this is kind of where you're developing a relationship with your emotional body and it will now be able to feel safe to express itself so instead of suppressing them we want to be able to bring it forward and look at it so just for example like on our phones when we look at our notification panel and we see a whole bunch of notifications you now have an ability to be aware okay I have these many notifications coming from here here and here that's the first step the Second Step would then be so that's the awareness piece the Second Step would then be regulating okay I don't need to get to this right now this I can get to later okay this needs my intention and that's where you can now engage and regulate those emotions so I'd like to also offer this piece um it said the emotions actually only last 90 seconds and when we create stories out of them we can really extend them and create thought Loops or beliefs out of them but we can look at emotion as a wave so it's going to start suddenly start to rise it reaches its peak and then it comes down and I think a lot of us Fe are experiencing emotions because we perhaps only become aware when we're at the peak of the emotion right now the anger has been subtly there and then it it gets to the point where it is now really in your body and you really have to pay attention to it part of emotional regulation is how can we identify before the wave Peaks these emotions are built into your system for you to know and they have messages for you and if you can pay attention to the cues in your body before it reaches the peak you might not have to experience the peak and we don't have to terrified from them so for example when I'm angry I will notice that I can get a little bit quick in my Pace my thoughts you know in terms of my actions I might be like you know I don't want to sit still uh and that's how it presents in me in the early stages so you want to know how what anger present in you kind of right before it reaches or moments before it reaches a peak and then do something about it so this is the piece which is called mindfulness I'm mindful that right now I'm feeling agitation saying no perhaps uh I'm feeling irritated and this is this conversation is going in a direction that I'm not comfortable so building these skills are important if we've never built this skill how do we expect people to regulate themselves um for example if you're feeling sad I know for me I start to shut down so I start to feel slow and sluggish and heavy and sometimes also just want to do nothing and just kind of you know take a nap and that that's how you could identify sadness um perhaps in terms of anxiety or fear what tends to happen for me is you know my hands are go cold I might start to feel numb in my body I might uh start to get you know um palpitations my voice might get constricted I'm tuning out of conversation so we want to understand how do you experience your emotions before they get to the height so I really do emphasize on doing this exercise and jotting down kind of maybe with anger how you feel in your body with sadness with fear with guilt with shame and hopefully that will give you a little bit more body awareness okay now that you've accomplish the first two steps which is to be aware and then to be able to regulate the emotion by holding space first we can then move into kind of that understanding phase so this is where we can do a little bit of um reflection this is where now you're regulated enough the emotion will not be deriving your stories your thoughts your perception of that situation and this is often where we hear you know let the emotion pass and then make a decision Don't Make It In the Heat of the Moment and this is really what that is so if after you've done holding space for the emotion and sometimes you might to revisit it uh a couple of times um you can then move into uh the decision-making phase or perhaps comprehending what exactly is that emotion telling us so as adults we we we jump one uh loop forward and so we go into let's intellectualize it and then understand the emotions so we go up to the head okay I want to understand why I'm feeling this way without actually feeling the emotions for your emotions to be able to kind of move through you they need to be felt first and you cannot think your way through a feeling so you want to be able to First regulate feel it in your body this is how I'm feeling be with it 30 seconds 60 seconds 90 seconds longer if needed and then you'll be able to move in from a neuroscience perspective when we're at the turbulent time of our emotions so when we're in the thick of it we actually engage we're more engaged with our fight ORF flight system and so here we're more quick thinking I want fast action I want a solution now or I want to run away so what we call the fight ORF flight and phe some of us shut down you're not able to look at bigger picture expansive thinking um maybe even get get to understand where the other person was coming from where you truly were coming from you actually disengage with that part of your brain so you will not be able to gain access to it and that's why you want to regulate the emotion first and then move into being able to access that part of your brain to have that kind of expansive uh view now in the kind of analysis part of your emotions this is where you're now okay so this is there are a couple of tools that you can use I love to use a pen and a paper so just as simple as that you don't have to go into a long journaling session but even just putting some words down on paper has been shown to be really effective certainly is for me highly recommended um other things that you could do would be talking it out so often we need just a bouncing mirror someone who can U practice active listening hear you out um without kind of you know giving uh in their input sometimes that might help because it might help you understand you know what I don't I didn't perceive it the way you think that is um so talking that really helps as well but really all these uh different ways of analyzing it comes down to more of self-reflection it comes down to how am I reflecting what happened once you've dealt with the emotions so um you know I often like to use the body as well as I'm doing this so I want to be more in my body and I often find that we are very quick to run from our body so maybe something like a quick walk maybe something like shaking maybe something like just moving my body in a more expansive open way will help the nervous system calm down further to then kind of get the insights from the emotions I want to say this your emotions are your friends they're not here to attack you and um a lot of us have not learned to understand their messages so if you're new on this journey I offer you a lot of empathy and you can learn these through kids are really in tune with what they feel and they're so um affirmative in their needs and so if they're not feeling well they'll say no we have started to rationalize a lot of what we feel and that's kind of where a lot of our suffering tends to come in so now you've done the awareness the regulation you've got the messages this is all now leading up to where you can then make an informed consent or informed decision so now you have kind of all the pieces of the puzzle and this is where you can now look at things with Clarity you can look at okay how do I want to move forward um how do I want to maybe self-correct and there again another bunch of tools that you can use there you can you know get on an expert um you can go learn about that topic perhaps or have an open dialogue conversation with the other person and this is going to happen more from a regulated state of your nervous system which is called rest digest repair State here the choice of your words your tone your body language all those non-verbal cues will signal safety to the next person so let's say you had an argument uh with a cooworker at work and you know it got really heightened if you were to start to make decisions here your tone the way you know choice of words your body language is probably going to be a little bit more defensive or aggressive and there's a reason for that because your fight or fight is activated it needs to feel calm and sooth it as you move through the processes that we explained here you're going to be able to be a much more safe person not just to others but to yourself because often I find that when I am acting out of myself which is my anger or my shame um or guilt I don't feel good about myself and that's the hurt that stays with me uh I want to be a better person in terms of how I can put my needs on the table but also receive the needs of another person and as you are able to practice these steps you're able to do it better you will find the words because your brain is able to engage with that part um so I know it can be difficult it can be hard but it's an exercise and it's a muscle as you use it you get better so a myth that I also want to dispel is we think of emotional regulation or emotional awareness as these moments of sitting on a yoga mat or meditating um and it's not it really is just being aware of what you're experiencing or being mindful so for example I am not feeling that I am able to connect in this conversation start to be curious okay what emotion might that be and connect in that way in my body you know what I'm feeling I'm taking shallow breaths I'm not able to um pick the words that I would have liked to and again if you want to work with those five basic emotions you can pick it okay is it guilt no not really is it anger no is it sadness ah it's anxiety it's fear and that's where you strengthen your connection with each of those emotions of course it helps to have someone walk you through this um therapy is needed where it's needed I'm not opposing the need for counseling and all uh the beautiful experts that you can have on your team but hopefully this is a place that you can start and you can build on in your time and space now just before we end off to recap things we discussed how emotions are kind of like a wave there's a wave approach we want to be able to get the cues from our body much early on before we reach kind of the top of that wave and that's where that emotion is going to be a little bit more louder right and the steps to that would be first to be aware that you're feeling off okay I'm not feeling okay in my body with response to what's going out externally and then we move from the awareness into dropping into the body and trying to Fig find or connect where is it that I'm feeling it can I hold space for it possibly labeling the emotion too so working with those five emotions okay I might be experienced sadness I'm having this heavy chest sensation staying with it sitting with it experiencing it or holding space for it and then as we feel that we've wrote that wave and it's kind of come down moving into kind of get gathering information and messages from that emotion so this is where self-reflection can come in talking it out with someone journaling it out now you have all the pieces of the puzzle and then you can make an informed decision as to what you want to do next I hope you found this video helpful to stay updated with more helpful education I'll see you in another video