How to Stop Suppressing Your Emotions

If you're constantly detaching and denying from your feelings, you don't know yourself anymore. If you feel numb emotionally, it means enough has happened in your life and we'll talk about why. That you've denied and detached from some emotions. In the short term feels like a good strategy. In the long term, we don't know ourselves. We start to feel numb. We've blocked out any sense of feeling. Well, guess what? You're also blunting the flow of the positive. This is why there has to be a better way. The first D in the 4D framework is we deny our emotions. The second D is detach. The third one is we can debate the emotion. The fourth D that you do when those emotions hit your inbox is an emotion. You either drive from it or you don't. When we have emotions in our life, the things that we have to realize is we get to do something with them. I like to use this. I know you'll hate the metaphor, but stick with me. When you think about productivity, I'm going to use a totally separate metaphor just to grasp everyone here. When an email comes into your inbox, what happens? Well, an email just landed in your inbox. You might not have controlled that email. The email is there, isn't it? Well, when you get an email, you can choose, okay, am I going to open it and look at it? Am I going to respond to it? Am I going to delete it? Am I going to file it? Am I going to delegate it? Like an inbox email shows up and you get to choose what to do with it. That's how I feel about my emotions. It's like, oh, this emotion hit me. What do I want to do with this thing? Right? Just like an email, I might say, not important right now. File it. Very important. Deal with it. Not important. Delegate it. Not something I want to ever see again. Delete it. Right. Those are our inbox examples. Well, the four Ds are what you're already doing. You just might not know that you've been doing it. The first D in the 4D framework is we deny our emotions. You want to live the opposite of having emotional freedom. Just deny everything that comes in that in a box, just deny it. It's not there. I don't have to deal with it. Not important. Or if it's negative, pretend it's not there. It's kind of like when I was starting my entrepreneurial endeavor and I was quickly going broke and I was racking up all these bills on my credit cards and these bills would come in and I wouldn't even open them. It was negative news. It was. Was a negative thing. I would not open the bills. I would literally go stack them in this corner and not open my bills. Anyone ever. Not open your bills? That's just denying it. You know, it's there, but you're going to deny it. Here's the issue. The more we do that with our emotions in our life, the more miserable we are, the less an abundant and good life we get to live. And lots of people run around denying their emotions all the time. Well, you know, I shouldn't be mad at him. Oh, well, I didn't really feel that. Oh, well, that's not important. And I'm here to say, like, your emotions are information, right? They're coming on. They're coming in the inbox of your mind, right? And here's the thing. You or human nature or God, we're delivering those right to your brain. Why pretend they're not there? I was somebody who used to pretend that my emotions weren't there. When I got impatient or angry or I felt vulnerable and scared about connecting with other people, I would kind of shut off a little bit. I was like, ah, I don't have time to deal with this discomfort. I have things to achieve. And so I just deny the emotional range. But those things that you deny, they tend to build up. And then one day, you actually look at your inbox and you're overwhelmed by all that's going on there, and you don't know how to handle it because you never faced it in the first place. This is what happens to most teenagers. You know, teenager, as you go into school or high school, all of a sudden things start feeling uncomfortable. You just don't want to deal with it. It's awkward, it's weird. And you just pretend you don't have these feelings. And unfortunately, we live in a culture where it's become the opposite of that. We've said every emotion is so important, you should drive your life based off of it. And so there is a happy middle I hope we can find today. But I think the first thing is to recognize that sometimes we just pretend it's not even there. Oh, you know what? I'm not even mad at my husband anymore. And we just pretend it's not there, and then we act out, right? Oh, I'm not even mad at my husband. You say that to yourself, and then you become kind of like you're doing those actions to kind of get at the person because you're not even Sitting with the emotion about it and processing that. So you punish somebody else. A lot of people who have spent a long time denying their emotions punish others. Let that one sit for a second. I promise we get a little more advanced as we go. I don't want you to deny your emotions anymore. I want you to become vitally aware of them and curious about them. You don't have to act from all of them. We'll get to that. But don't deny that they exist. Become more familiar with them. Be curious about them. Go to Google and type in what are the top 30 emotions humans feel? And just learn other language to describe things. Because there's more than just happy and sad. Shocking. Okay, so sometimes we deny it. That's the first D. And sometimes, by the way, that is important to understand because the second D is detach. We detach from a feeling. We say, you know what, this emotion, I don't want to feel it right now. So I detach from it and I go, hey, I have more important things to do. I'm not going to sit in that sadness. I'm not going to react from that fear. I felt it, but I'm not going to be driven by it. I felt it, but I'm not going to be driven by it. I'm going to detach from it in the moment so I can handle this thing. That's important. Sometimes you might feel really mad at your kid. You're really mad at your kid and like the feeling is there, but you realize what they need right now is sensitivity. And so you're like, okay, I'm really mad. I'm going to detach from that anger so I can be present with this person and serve them. That's okay, right? A lot of military members have to learn in moments of very high stress, fear and anxiety, they got to understand that they can't connect to that in that moment. Just like a lot of athletes, they'll feel a certain level of emotion. That's not going to be helpful in the ring or on the field. Now here's the important thing though. These are short term adjustments from an emotion. I'm going to detach from that so I can handle this. But if you live detached from your emotions over a period of time, you actually enter suffering, not higher functioning. If you're constantly detaching and denying from your feelings, you don't know yourself anymore. You can't sense the world. A lot of people I've worked with in the past, they're just like, Brendan, I don't Even I don't even know myself anymore. I don't even feel myself anymore. I've lost all sense of any range of emotion. In other words, you start to feel numb. If you feel numb emotionally, it means enough has happened in your life and we'll talk about why that you've denied and detached from some emotions. And the funny thing is, the reason that we deny and detach from our reasons is because we want more freedom in the moment, right? It's like, I want to be free from that pain or that discomfort. In the short term, feels like a good strategy. In the long term, we don't know ourselves. We start to feel numb. We've blocked out any sense of feeling. I know if you've ever been a victim of trauma or very dramatic circumstances or harm, you know this, that eventually one of the coping mechanisms of ptsd, of lots of different types of difficulties. Again, I'm not a therapist, but a lot of these different types of difficulties and discomforts that we have in our lives, the more we deny or detach, the more we start to feel numb. Our coping mechanisms can steal away the positive range even as we're trying to block out the negative range. Does that make sense? Because remember, an emotion is an impulse, but as you shut down the negative impulses, you also affect the same stream of intelligence that is the positive emotions. Does that make sense? It's like it's the same stream and you shut down the negative. Well, guess what? You're also blunting the flow of the positive. This is why there has to be a better way. And I hope this is opening up your mind just a little bit. I really want you to understand, like, oh, wow, if I'm not feeling the day, if I'm not feeling life, if I'm not feeling my relationship with this person anymore, if I'm not experiencing joy or happiness at the positive ranges I want. It's not always just a hack like they teach you on, you know, Instagram or Twitter or TikTok. Like, oh, just, you know, just get a better night's sleep. It's like, no, you need better practice processing and dealing with emotion. You want to experience more abundant emotion in your life. You need to stop turning it off all the time and not allowing yourself to see, sense, experience, or process some of these emotions. This is why I will recommend many of you. If you're in that place where you're like, ben, I've been numb for a long time. This is where I'm going to say, hey, get yourself a therapist. Learn to Talk this out, learn to work it out, learn to process it with somebody else. It's incredibly helpful. Yes, I'm a high performance coach, but if you've ever studied anything I've ever said related to mental health, it's always like, yeah, get a therapist. Let's make that normal. Everyone should have a therapist at some point in their life and a coach at some point in their life. Lots of people have both at the same time. They're very different functions. But I really feel like if you're in a place of, you've sensed a lot of trauma or drama and it's led to a disassociation with your own sense of self or emotions, and you're just not. You're doing all the biohacking, you're eating clean, you're doing your cold plunges, and you still don't feel and sense and experience life and a nice emotional range of it and a positive emotional range, then let's talk about that as a mental health reality and get some help. So, okay, we're in two parts into the four Ds. We can deny it, we can detach from it. And by the way, as I've given examples, doesn't mean any of those are bad. Sometimes there are great coping strategies for the moment. Long term, bad strategy, short term can help us deal with the situation ahead. The third one is we can debate the emotion. Debate it and we can argue with it. We can question it, we can ask Socratic questions of it. When you think of like cognitive behavioral therapy, that's all about learning to question and examine your thoughts and use your thoughts better to understand your emotions, but also ultimately to direct them over a period of time. Obviously, when we use our cognition to question or deal with our emotions, what that does is it doesn't change the emotion right away, it changes the feeling. Remember, the emotion happened to us usually, but now we're going to process that a little bit. We're going to ask why is this happening? Is this true? Is this helpful? Is this emotion fair? Is this emotion something I should act on or not? Is this emotion coming from a strong self, a weaker self? Is this emotion something that should get my focus right now? If this emotion felt the opposite, what would I do? If this emotion was true for now, what would I do? If it was true three years from now, what would I do? We get all these ways to process how we sense an immediate feeling, to create a different feeling. This is how you can take someone who feels really sad and you can move that emotion into A feeling of gratitude, of presence, and, yes, even of joy, happiness, and love. It's incredible. It's about learning to question your immediate sensations. It's learning to ask, are they helpful? Are they fair? Are they true? It's incredibly powerful to use your thoughts to examine how you feel and ultimately to cultivate better feelings. And yes, I do believe there are better feelings. There are worse feelings, and there are better feelings. And a lot of people don't like that judgment. It's just how people talk and how they really feel. I think this is one of the most powerful things you'll ever be able to do in your life, is to learn to be able to debate how you're feeling. Like, why am I feeling this? Notice I'm not saying fight. Most people don't understand. A debate doesn't mean a fight. A debate means you inquire and you look at the other side. You look at things from multiple angles to see what's true, what's most helpful, what should the resolution be? Right. That's all we're doing in a debate. It's not about making it wrong or fighting or being. It's just about exploring it and looking at different angles of that. It's like, oh, I sense that I'm sad. Why do I sense that? Okay, well, this thing happened. Oh, when that thing happened, what did you think that made you feel? Or sense sadness? Oh, well, that thing is terrible and awful. Is it? And if it is terrible and awful is the right emotion or sense or feeling, I want to be sadness. Because maybe what I just want is really, I don't need to be sad. What I really desire is connection. Oh, that wasn't called sad. That was called desiring connection. Oh, wow. What a reframe. I can do something about that. I can reach out. I wish I knew I wanted that. But see, without the nuance of understanding, of debating the emotions and the circumstances of our life, what we end up doing is, I'm sad. I guess I'm sad. Just happens. Of course I feel sad. Everyone would feel sad. If you ever hear yourself saying, everyone would feel this, you need to go, probably not true, right? Well, everyone would feel angry. I'm justified. Lots of people experience that all the time. Never feel anger. You would be shocked if you ever drove with me. I never experienced road rage ever. Ever. I just thought, that's a completely unhelpful emotion. That's a completely unhelpful thought pattern. It's completely unhelp because I have to drive all the time. I don't want to be driving around angry all the time. Who's making me angry? I'm making me angry. I don't want to be an angry driver. I don't even like feeling that anger. So why now in our modern culture? No, no, no, Brendan, anger is a natural response to someone cutting you off. You should really explore that. I'm sure that it stems from, you know, your childhood. Of course. I mean, let's talk about your childhood. That's why you're angry about the car. No, I'm angry about the car because I haven't taught myself emotional management. Let's just be honest, present conscious adults I chose, I'm like, I don't need to be angry about a car cutting me off. There's no utility in that. I'm not going to do anything about it. I'm just gonna drive around angry and stewed. This doesn't make any sense to me. Let me debate whether or not I even feel this. Does that make sense? I'm not denying it. I'm saying it's not useful. Why even experience it? So we can be conscious in that way too. I want you to learn though. The most important secret to improving your relationships with other people is learning to debate your own emotions versus trying to debate it with them. Let me say it again. Learning to debate your own emotions versus trying to debate it with them. We live in a justified culture where it's like, I'm angry, you deal with it and we project our emotion onto somebody else before we've even processed it. I want you to process it. Find what's useful, find what's true. Be conscious of your next actions. Act with integrity. Not just have an emotion and volley it to people. Don't make your emotion everybody else's issue. People who make their emotions everybody else's problem tend to be not only just high drama people. We know that they're less happier, less productive and have poor long term life outcomes because they don't have emotional regulation. They don't have self control. Instead they go into immediate victim and attack mode and that's not what you want. That's why I think this third D is so important, to learn to debate and to dance with our emotions. If you don't like the word debate, use the word dance. It's like, oh, I'm going to dance with it. I'm not going to just accept it for what it is. I'm going to see where I can take it. I think that's really important. Okay, the fourth D that you do when Those emotions hit your inbox is an emotion. You either drive from it or you don't drive. An emotion happens to you and you drive with it, you take it and you act from it. Does that make sense? Now, emotions, again, when they happen to us as an automatic impulse, we often our body is driven a certain way. Our heartbeat speeds up. If the emotion is something, that is fear as an example. So something physically does happen, but our next actions are driven from it or not. Let me give an example. If I'm angry with my wife, I can feel the anger and I can act out on that anger. I can act out because I'm justified about the anger. I can act out and argue, scream, fight, walk out. But my behavior was driven from the emotion. Does that make sense? I had an impulse and my behavior followed it. This is ultimately the real difference between human beings as a species and what we experience with other average animals on the planet. Right? Right. They are instinctive and they are slave to the impulse. The impulse happens, the dog runs. Right. There's not a moment. Well, some dogs are really smart, but let's just use the example of other animals. Feel, impulse, take action. They're driven by all of their nature and their circumstances, and it's automatic reaction. They're reactive. What you have is this incredible prefrontal cortex that you can say, hey, yeah, I felt the amygdala, but not today. I don't have to fight or flee or freeze. I can sense it, but I can choose differently. That ability to actually drive our behavior from our intention versus our immediate impulse is what gives us command in life. It gives us self control in life. It gives us the ability to actually architect the range of emotions, but also the experiences and the relationships that we want. Imagine if every day, you know, in the middle of the day, you just had the emotion of. You kind of felt discouraged about your progress. You sense the emotion and feelings of discouragement, and it kind of puts you in a mood for an hour or two. And because you're living in discouragement and acting from discouragement, you pick up your phone and you scroll for an hour. You go watch that video randomly, whatever YouTube serves up, you detach from your mission, from the day. And now you're acting. Your behaviors are being driven from a state, a feeling of emotion, of feeling, maybe even a mood, and you just detach from what you actually want. Anyone ever done that before? Like, it's a midday, and you're just like, all right, I'm not feeling it. So you're acting from your emotions. And when we do that, that's why, you know, it's three o'. Clock. Your three bags of Doritos in and watching Netflix, your self control went out the window. You haven't activated the four part of your brain and you're just like, eh, you know, it just, it's how I felt. And now you're victim to your emotion, meaning you're being driven by your emotion. I want you to feel intimately connected and aware and present of your emotions. I want you to even be accepting of what they are and where they're coming from. But I don't want you to forget your accountability and your ability to decide and your ability to take action for them. I think what most people do is they're being driven by negative emotions and they haven't been taught themselves to be driven from and toward positive emotion, right? That we can also say, oh yeah, I can be driven by discouragement, or I can also be driven by passion, I can be driven by joy, I can be driven by love. Let me take and experience those things and let me follow them with actions that amplify them. You can amplify and enlarge positive emotions, but you don't have to amplify and enlarge every emotion. You don't have to amplify and enlarge every negative emotion. You get to choose and most importantly, you get to choose the next step. There's nothing in this training today that is about the right or the wrong emotion based on the circumstance. But there is right and wrong action. Right? Your behavior in those next seconds serves you or does not serve you. And that is relatively binary. Right? What you do next is either from a place of integrity and intention, or it is impulsive and reactive, driven by an emotion that you haven't even understood yet. And this is the problem in our world today. So many people are driven by their emotion and they haven't even checked in with it yet. They didn't hear it, sense it, understand it, and now they're driving from it. And that's very, very, very dangerous. And I really want you to think about that just for a moment, is that you always have this question. I teach all my high performers this. You guys will recognize this question. The question is, what's the right next action of integrity for me? It's one of my dominant questions in my life. Okay, this happened. What's the next right action of integrity for me? Okay, I got an argument with my wife. What's the next right action of integrity? Apologize, make up, listen to her, serve okay, great. That's the next right action of integrity. Not fight, scream, get mad, leave. It's not going to serve me. You all follow. What's the next right action of integrity for me? No matter what happens, whatever the circumstance, the emotion, the feeling or the mood, I'm still back in that forward lean back in that prefrontal cortex, back into conscientiousness to ask, okay, what should I do now? What makes most sense now to honor myself, others in life? Let me make that decision here. And we know that people who are conscientious like that, not only are they happier, have greater life satisfaction, tend to live longer, tend to earn more money, are more promotable, are more experiencing of the positive range of emotions in their life, and less stressed. But you and I both know when you're conscientious and you're driving like that, there's a sense of confidence that comes in, right? It's not that I don't feel emotions. It's I'm confident in handling them and taking the next action. Many of you know, I speak to arenas of people. Like an arena tends to be, you know, anywhere between 7,000 people to 30,000 people on average. So I gotta go out to seven to 30,000 people. Most of them don't know me. I'm backstage. The emotion comes up of fear, the emotion comes up of enthusiasm. I mean, I'm getting a whole world of emotions coming up. It doesn't matter what all those emotions are ultimately going to be. It's going to be a swirl of them. The question is, can I take the next right action of integrity and go do the thing? And so we can transfer this idea that all emotions are so important and go, but what's my intention? Okay, what do I need to do now? Let me be connected to that just as I'm wanting to feel connected or justifying the emotions. Okay, four Ds. You can deny it, you can detach from it, you can debate it, and you can drive from it. And in all of those we talked about some positive or negative, and so there's not a right or wrong there, but ultimately there's probably a next right choice for you. And being more conscious of what's my next right choice can change your life. It puts you into intention. And the consciousness versus being slave to impulse changes your life forever. How do you get emotional freedom? You stop being slave to impulse and you start being more conscientious and intentional about what you want to do and experience, create and, yes, feel in life.