What’s all the fuss about emotions…

Challenging emotions…. push them down, file them away and numb yourself into distraction….

Did you know that emotions are neither good nor bad, it’s the story we attach to an emotion that’s important. Much of the work I do with my clients, typically men in their 40’s and 50’s, is based around understanding and healing their emotions.

When you feel an emotion, it is of course real, it’s just not necessarily fact. Emotions are a way for your brain to make sense of the world around you. They can offer you information not necessarily the whole story.

How we identify and manage our emotions are based on our beliefs and experiences as well as how we were taught to manage our emotions during childhood. So for example if you witnessed your father ignoring and pushing down his emotions, it is only natural that you might do the same.

About our emotions

Imagine a life without emotion, no happiness, sadness, joy or surprise. Part of what makes us human is our ability to feel our feelings and process emotions.

The part of your brain responsible for controlling your emotions is the limbic system. When faced with a new situation, your brain takes existing memories and patterns to work out how to respond.

Here’s a simplistic example of how this works:

Let’s take the emotion fear, the first time you felt fear you would have been anywhere between the age of 0-24 months. Perhaps there was an occasion as a baby you didn’t get any milk.

Your unconscious mind hasn’t felt this emotion before and has to do something with the information, so puts it in a filing cabinet and labels it fear.

The next time you experience the same emotion, your unconscious mind thinks ‘that felt like the last event’ so I’ll file that in the filing cabinet under fear.

It continues this filing process throughout your life so you end up with this huge filing cabinet with all these different variations of fear.

When an event happens at 52 that has the same feeling, your unconscious mind has all these previous potentially unhelpful files in the filing cabinet it can refer to which it recognises and links to the emotion of fear.

This is why it’s important to lean in and process your emotions, because otherwise your unconscious mind is bringing up all these all files consistently throughout your life, which probably isn’t serving you.

I use a technique called Time Line Therapy with my clients which is a quick and long-lasting way of releasing the emotion that you are storing in your unconscious mind and probably your physical body.

My clients very quickly see the difference in the way they think and feel, finding conversations become easier, noticing a feeling of lightness as they start to gain more clarity about what they want in life.

Your 90 second emotion

Learning to really ‘feel’ your emotions is about getting deeply vulnerable with yourself and vulnerability takes enormous courage.

“Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.”
Brene Brown

Did you know that most emotions only last 90 seconds? According to Harvard brain Scientist, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor:

“When a person has a reaction to something in their environment, there’s a 90-second chemical process that happens in the body; after that, any remaining emotional response is just the person choosing to stay in that emotional loop.

Something happens in the external world and chemicals are flushed through your body which puts it on full alert. For those chemicals to totally flush out of the body, it takes less than 90 seconds. This means that for 90 seconds you can watch the process happening, you can feel it happening, and then you can watch it go away.

After that, if you continue to feel fear, anger, and so on, you need to look at the thoughts that you’re thinking that are re-stimulating the circuitry that is resulting in you having this physiological reaction, over and over again.”

What a thought, when you allow your body to experience an emotion fully and allow it to run through you without interruption, it will be done with its cycle within 90-seconds. After those 90 seconds any remaining emotional response is a choice.

So next time you’re feeling anger, sadness, guilt etc you may have physical symptoms in your body for example rapid breath, increased heartrate etc, and as long as you allow it to process and move through you the physiological experience will come and go within 90-seconds. Incredible!

The language of emotion

On a more practical note, one of the problems that arises when you haven’t been taught or encouraged to experience your emotions is a lack of vocabulary to describe them.

It’s no surprise as studies show there are an incredible 34,000 emotions, so no wonder it isn’t always easy to work out the emotion you’re feeling. It’s also been shown that the ability to accurately name our emotions can make a huge difference to how we experience them.

The feelings wheel, created by Gloria Wilcox is a great place to start expanding the words you use to describe your emotions. I’ve designed a chart based on the feelings wheel to help you identify the specific emotion you’re feeling.

Journaling is a wonderful first step to exploring your emotions. I like to describe it as ‘talking to yourself on paper’. The science really supports the benefits of journaling, showing that journaling creates higher productivity, better sleep, increased immunity, decreased blood pressure and fewer trips to the GP.

If you’d like to explore what journaling really is and how to do it, you can download my free 24 page guide or audiobook here. It’s written specifically for men over 40 who crave freedom and clarity, it’s practical, powerful and BS free.

Emotions are a powerful and integral part of the human experience. Being able to express them fully is a demonstration of strength, courage and self-awareness. By acknowledging, understanding, and expressing your emotions, you will lead a more authentic, fulfilling life and that’s got to be worth exploring….

Be courageous. I’m rooting for you.

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