What are you feeling? It’s kind of funny to be posting this on Super Bowl Sunday. It’s a day filled with all kinds of ‘feels’: maybe it’s excitement, joy, fun, and amazement but perhaps also frustration, angst, worry, disapproval, disappointment, guilt or indifference.
But part of the truth: many of us are completely out of touch with what we are feeling. (Or only in touch with a very few core feelings: sad, angry, frustrated…) We either learned to not pay attention to or to actively suppress what we are feeling. In medicine, that can look like 12 + hours without bathroom breaks or food or drink. It can look like 30 hour shifts as interns and beyond. It can be missing important family events or holidays. If the system doesn’t care if you are exhausted, hungry, devastated, etc — why should you? You then roll forward a few too many years of doing this and you’re not even sure what you are feeling anymore.
I really came face-to-face with this when it came to weight loss. I would catch myself opening the cabinet because I was bored, annoyed, sad, happy… a whole lot of things other than Hungry.
It became a practice when I opened the fridge or cabinet, I would ask: am I hungry? Or am I << insert any other emotion here>> ? I learned to close the door and walk away if I wasn’t feeling hunger.
Hunger is generally an involuntary physical sensation.
But often there’s a whole lot of emotion wrapped up in it.
Emotions or feelings come from our thoughts.
Ignoring or repressing our feelings is often a coping skill learned when we didn’t have alternative or healthy ways of processing emotions. But ignoring and repressing doesn’t help, especially long term.
I love the analogy of a beachball here: if you hold a beachball in the pool on the surface and allow it to be: this is easy. If you hold it under water, at some point this becomes difficult and eventually erupts to the surface… creating a much bigger wave than if it just sat on top.
For years, I’ve been a pretty excellent bottler of emotions. And I would erupt from time to time; it was often after something little and would leave people around me swimming in a tidal wave they had no way to anticipate. I realize now that there’s an easier way.
What’s the alternative? Processing emotions in healthier ways.
Few simple steps I’ve learned that I’d love to share:
Developing awareness of your feelings. Know that feelings are simply results of biochemical reactions in our brains and bodies.
How to process feelings?
- Describe it. By describing it, you can become the observer, and start to look from a place of curiosity. What am I feeling? Where do I feel it? What’s specific about this one?
- Name it.
- Allow it: can I relax into it? Can I breathe into it? Is it changing? Can you observe it with compassion?
- They say most feelings last about 90 seconds in the body when processed. If you can acknowledge it, sit with it, and let it be: it often passes.
Last note: we want to feel negative emotion. We also want to feel the positive. When you bottle or suppress, you often limit your capacity to feel both ends of the spectrum.
The goal of coaching is not to eliminate all the negative emotions in our lives, but rather to be able to process them and not add additional suffering: often in the form of overeating/ over-drinking/ over-spending/ doom scrolling etc. These are what we call buffering. Buffering is something we do to avoid painful or negative emotions, procrastinate, or just hide from reality. It’s not a healthy or helpful long-term strategy. Eventually that beachball becomes too hard to hold.
I hope that some of these concepts can be helpful. They were truly life-altering for me in a variety of ways.
Perhaps you have something you are struggling with and wondering if coaching can help? Setup a free session today to see what we could work on together; I’d love to teach these skills and more.
Are you a doctor and want to be part of a small community with weekly coaching sessions? Join here: https://calendly.com/empoweredcoachingha/30minute/group-coaching-1
