Processing Emotions through Journaling | 52 Life Skills Everyone should Have

Hey there, everybody, and welcome to this video on processing emotions through journaling. This is part of the 52 Skills Everyone Needs series, and I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. Let's start out at the beginning. What are emotions? In order to process them, we ought to know what we're talking about. Every moment you're aware of stimuli in your environment, things that you feel, feel, smell, see, hear, you know, any of those stimulus, if you're happy, those stimuli are generally encoded as positive. So when you encounter them again, it triggers a feeling of happiness or contentment. If you are unhappy, or if those stimuli make you unhappy, they become associated with distress. So when you encounter them, it either triggers feelings of distress or. Or it triggers distressful memories, which triggers your feelings of distress. Emotions are simply surges of neurochemicals and physical reactions in response to those stimuli in a particular context based on prior learning and schema. So let's unpack that for a minute. Surges of neurochemicals, norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, gaba, acetylcholine, or all of those are neurochemicals. And depending on what balance your neurochemicals are in, you're going to feel different ways. Now, your body secretes those neurochemicals when the HPA axis is activated or when the vagus nerve is activated in response to your perception, in response to your awareness of stimuli in your environment. So if you see a snake, for example, in your environment, that stimuli is going to be registered and your body is going to secrete appropriate neurochemicals. The other day, my daughter was letting the dogs out, and this little rat snake or chicken snake, I don't know what you call it, just harmless little snake. But this little baby snake dropped off the door frame and about fell on top of her. Now, that triggered an anxiety response because it was unexpected. When she's outside on the farm, she expects to run into snakes, so it doesn't trigger a stress response in her, but which is why it's important to recognize that context is somewhat important. But those stimuli trigger what we call schema. And schema are shorthand. Schema are files that your brain has that allows you to anticipate what to expect based on prior learning. You have a schema about doctor's offices. For example, based on prior experiences, you've written this little CliffsNotes version of when I go to the doctor's office. Generally, this is what I can expect to have happen. Schema help us anticipate. Unfortunately, these schema that allow us to kind of go about our daily activities without having to think too much and help us be aware of what's going on. They form what we call our default mode. Network or other term for it is our autopilot. And when we're on autopilot, we are acting and reacting based on prior learning experiences, not necessarily based on what's going on in the present moment. Now, let's talk about this. We'll use a good example. For example, I love animals and I've always been around animals. I've always loved animals. And I'm the one that'll walk up to the dog on the street and go, oh, come here, little puppy. Not knowing him from Adam's house cat, but as long as he's not like foaming at the mouth and looking like Cujo, I'm probably going to try to figure out where it belongs. Now, those are my default schema. That's my autopilot. Because my interactions with dogs have always, almost always been very positive. However, I'm not taking into account the current context. You know, what's going on, do I know this dog? And so should I assume, you know, I'm making assumptions. I have expectations of how this dog is going to behave based on my prior experiences. But is it really realistic to expect that every dog is going to behave like Toto? Probably not. Once a schema is formed, it's written into your story. And I talk about our lives as being an ongoing narrative, ongoing story, saga, miniseries, whatever you want to call it. But once something has happened, it's sort of like an episode in a television series, and it stays there forever. And what happened in that series is likely going to impact the way that character reacts in future episodes. Each time you encounter stimuli in the future, it may trigger similar emotional responses and any new stimuli may also be integrated. So let's look at this from a trauma based perspective. Instead of the happy doggie example, you experience a trauma, whatever that trauma is, and the sights, smells, sounds, even sensations, you know, if it's cold or if it's hot, all of that your brain takes in. When you are in that fight or flight mode, your brain is more aware and hypervigilant and encoding stimuli. That way it can be more prepared to protect you in the future. Well, that's great, except a lot of those stimuli probably occur in multiple other very benign settings. So you've experienced this trauma, you have recovered from it, you know, you've moved past it, whatever you want to say, and you know, a few months later, you're in an old house and there's a similar smell to the smell that occurred during your trauma. All of a sudden, you start becoming acutely more aware of other similar stimuli. Like, I know that smell. Oh, this looks similar to what happened, what was going on when I was in the middle of my trauma. I'm hearing similar sounds, like creaking of boards. Oh, my gosh. So now old houses may make you anxious because it triggers the memories of that trauma and may trigger a flashback. So now trauma, that trauma has become associated with old houses. And, you know, later on you're in a store and encounter someone that reminds you of the offender that you know was involved in your trauma. Oh, my gosh. So now that triggers a flashback in that store. And it may not be potent enough to necessarily make you afraid to go back into that store, but it can make you more on edge or more uneasy when you go into that store the next time. And if you encounter that somebody that reminds you of the offender the next time, then it's probably going to be written into your schema that stores are now also unsafe places. And stores will trigger flashbacks. So you can see how very quickly stimuli can become generalized and you can start experiencing triggers and flashbacks and dysphoric or unpleasant emotions in multiple situations that seem somewhat unrelated to the trauma. You know, another example, and I've used this one before, so a lot of you will recognize it. Hawks. My mother used to be an avid bird watcher, and when she was in hospice care, she saw a hawk fly past her window, and she commented on it, and she couldn't remember the word hawk, and she thought she had just learned it. And so that was a very pivotal moment in my interaction with her towards the end of her life. And now I'll be out driving and I'll see a hawk flying off of a power line, and it throws me back to that moment, and I have that feeling of melancholy for half a second. You know, it's been a while since she passed, and I know that that feeling is related to, to that particular stimuli, to seeing that hawk. If the experience contradicts your schema, then you experience cognitive dissonance. So we'll go back to the dog example again, because that's a pretty easy one for most people to conceptualize if, you know, I'm expecting the dog to be all sweet and nice and want love and treats, and it actually starts growling at me and maybe even lunging at me. That doesn't fit with my expectations. So it causes confusion or what Psychologists call cognitive dissonance. This new information now must either be altered to fit the schema. I must find a reason for why the dog behaved the way it did. Not because it's mean, not because I scared it, but something else. Oh. Or I need to alter the schema to include new information. Not all dogs are friendly. To alter your response to stimuli. To alter that schema requires overriding your autopilot or your default mode network. And that's where journaling comes in. I'm getting to the point here. Becoming the editor of your own story, looking back over a situation and asking yourself, okay, this is what happened. You know you're narrating what happened in that episode. Was there actually a threat? And how do you want your character to respond in the future in similar situations? A few examples. We have responses to stimuli wherever we go. Unknown stimuli. You can encounter situations where there are unknowns that happen, and you actually have a schema for that. How you handle the unknown? Curiosity. Think babies and toddlers. Babies haven't experienced most of the things that you've experienced, so their world is a relative unknown to them. How do they respond often with curiosity? Toddlers, the same way. And we all have been around toddlers who've been going through the why stage. Why is the sky blue? Why do dogs bark? Why does this happen? They're curious. They hear a dog bark and they want to know why. It's an unknown stimulus, and they want to understand it. They want to figure out what to write. And in their little schema, Cliff Notes. Some people experience excitement. Now, remember, excitement and fear and anxiety or stress represent a very similar cocktail of neurotransmitters. However, your perception of the situation is what differs with excitement. Like starting a new job or a new school. If you're looking forward to it, if you feel safe going into it, then you're going to label that as excitement. If you are already feeling unsafe, then an unknown stimulus. Starting a new school may trigger fear or anger or irritability. And sometimes the other stimuli. Stimuli in the environment may be so dominating that you ignore unknown stimuli. Think about if you've ever gone into an environment, a school, a job, a church, a meeting, whatever, and you were so focused on what you were there for, you didn't notice the pictures on the wall, or you didn't notice something else, and you came back a week, two weeks, a month later, or something. When you were less stressed, when you were more relaxed, when the stimuli weren't unknown, your brain started picking up on all these things that you had missed before. You know, that's kind of the interesting thing. So we have different reactions to unknown stimuli. And again, a lot of it has to do with our underlying perception of safety. If we don't feel safe to begin with, if we don't feel secure to begin with, then when we're presented with something unknown, it's probably going to trigger fight or fleet. Known stimuli, things that you've experienced before, things that you have a schema for, like loss or failure or rejection, you're going to respond to that in a relatively predictable way. You know how you generally respond. For example, if you interview for a job and you don't get it, or if you take a test and you fail it. Likewise, there are other good stimuli like ice cream and rainbows. You know how you respond to those things, if you see those or you taste those or experience those, and they trigger happiness. So your default mode kicks in and goes, hey, ice cream, that's a good thing. Let's get excited. Or if you're lactose intolerant, you know, not the same reaction. But emotions, again, are labels that we assign to that neurochemical cocktail that our body produces as a response to stimuli in the environment based on our prior learning and sometimes our current interpretation of the situation. Why are emotions important? A lot of people want to get rid of their anger, their depression, their anxiety, their stress. All right, we don't want to feel that way all the time. But emotions are really important. We don't want to get rid of them. We want to learn how to live in harmony with them. Just like I don't love torrential rainstorms. However, if we didn't have rain, we wouldn't have plants, and that would be a big problem. So let's talk about seven general categories of emotions. Anger. And in this category, I put irritation, rage, disgust, resentment, guilt, which is anger at yourself, jealousy, and envy, which are often anger at somebody else for having something that you want. Anxiety. In this category, I put stress, worry, and fear. And there's probably others that can go in there. But anger and anxiety are the emotions that we assign to the fight or flee response. Why do we have them? In order to help us stay safe in their responses to threats. Now, they may not be actual threats. They may be things we perceive as threats. And I've used the example before of smoke alarms. Sometimes my smoke alarm in my house will go off, especially if we have the windows open. And it doesn't necessarily mean that there is even smoke. Definitely doesn't necessarily mean that there's a fire, but sometimes it goes off. It's a false positive. And our anger or our anxiety can be a false positive based on our prior learning, based on our schema. Cliff's notes for what to expect we may react to stimuli with anger or anxiety in order to protect ourselves because we expect that there is going to be a threat. We want to change that to we expect that there might be a threat, but we want to explore it. Anger and anxiety are there to keep us safe when they are accurate, when they're inaccurate, then we can work on reprogramming them. Depression can be considered sadness, grief, burnout, apathy. When somebody feels depressed, they are fatigued. Nothing really makes them happy. There's low motivation. We've all been there at one point or another. Depression is your body's way of saying you're helpless and hopeless to change something or you're out of gas, you've just been too stressed for too long and you know you're not going to continue throwing good energy after bad. But you want to explore what depression means to you. Depression is sending you a signal. As I've said before, all behavior has meaning. Well, all of our emotions are are trying to tell us something based on our prior learning. And those schema may need to be altered or rewritten for future encounters. But it's our brain's way of trying to help us predict the world. Happiness includes contentment, joy, elation. Again, you can probably add more to that category. But when we feel happy, our brain releases dopamine and endorphins and sometimes oxytocin, and it makes us want to do it again, whatever it is. And that's our body's way of saying that's a good thing that's involved in self preservation. So let's do more of that. Love, compassion, plutonic love, romantic love. All of those feelings are associated with the release of oxytocin and bonding and oftentimes safety. When we feel love, when we feel safe and comforted, it produces a certain neurochemical cocktail, desire. And that's a little bit different than love. I have in there lust, determination and motivation. So you may have a lust for life or a lust for another person, or a determination to get something or a motivation. So this is more active than love, which tends to be more passive. But desire helps get us up off the sofa. And curiosity. I couldn't figure out what category to put that, so I gave it its own category. Curiosity is one of those emotions that we feel that encourages us to look. We don't necessarily know whether it's going to make us happy or sad, but we're curious about it, and we need to be curious. That helps us learn about life. That helps us expand our awareness of what's going on. That helps us be more aware of what's going on around us. If you walk into a room, there's a certain innate curiosity. When you're walking to a room full of people, you're just kind of checking, how's everybody feeling? What's everybody doing? Okay, that's curiosity. That's your brain saying, all right, what schema do I need to pull out here in order to figure out how to best respond? So, processing emotions. The first step is becoming aware of your emotion or emotions. Very rarely do we experience emotions in isolation. You very rarely will experience only anger. It may be anger and depression and resentment and guilt. And, you know, you can have lots of stuff that occurs. Oftentimes the first emotion that we label is kind of the tip of the iceberg, and we want to look at what's underneath. But be aware of your emotions. Ask yourself, what am I feeling emotionally right now? What labels can I put down? Where am I feeling it physically? And this is an interesting question, but it tells us a lot. If you're feeling stress in your heart, if you're feeling anxiety in your gut, we feel our emotions in different places, and that can help us narrow down kind of what's going on. For me, when I get stressed, I feel it in my jaw and in my shoulders. So being aware of your physical demonstration or your physical symptoms of an emotion, as well as just kind of what you label the emotion, the next step is radical acceptance and compassion. It is what it is. Don't judge yourself if you're angry, okay? If you're anxious, okay? Even if you've been anxious about this situation six times before and you've told yourself not to get anxious about it and you do it anyway, okay? Radical acceptance and compassion. Fighting with it just uses up more energy. I've told you all before about how when the dogs bark, a lot of times it startles me and triggers my stress response. We've had dogs for as long as I can remember. We've only had wood floors for a few years. But when they get upset, when they start barking, it startles me. And even though I know as soon as that startle is over, I know everything's fine, I get frustrated about it sometimes. I'm like, why do I have to feel like I'm going to jump out of my Skin. That's not compassionate. That's judgmental. I need to remember it is what it is. I got startled, okay? So I can just let it go and say, all right, you know, better luck next time, Or I can fight with it. Stop trying to get rid of the feeling, though. Feelings are there to protect you or to encourage you to do things that are positive. Tell yourself, my body is trying to help me stay safe. Possibly based on outdated schema, inaccurate perceptions, or unprocessed big T or little T trauma, but it's your body's reaction. Then start exploring the first. The last slide is a lot of stuff that you're probably going to do mentally. Now comes the journaling. Start exploring. Write down the triggers for that emotion or those emotions. People. What people in your environment triggered that? Places, things, sights, smells, sounds, time of day or season in the present moment, when what triggered that emotion? Ask yourself, why is this coming up for me now? What triggered this emotion in this context at this time? Also known as where the heck did this come from? Or what do I associate this with? So once you identify what triggered it in the present, maybe you realize, oh, I smell that cologne. Then you can think back to, when have I smelled that cologne before? And what emotions did it trigger? What's it related to? You may smell the. I walked in the other day into a place and I smelled pipe tobacco. And one of my favorite professors from college, as well as one of my favorite uncles, both smoke Pilgrims pipes. And whenever you were in their vicinity, you could smell that pipe tobacco. So I smelled that, and I noticed that I got this little half smile on my face for no apparent reason. I'm like, well, what's that about? And then I started thinking, oh, that reminds me of Dr. Pennypacker and my Uncle Jack. And so I was associating what was triggering the that sort of automatic response. Take some time when you're writing this down to identify as many of the triggers as possible so you're more aware of what triggers particular emotions for you. Sometimes we will have feelings that are associated with memories, so you want to explore those memories and the associated expectations and beliefs. You stick with a smell, because that's an easy one. You smell a smell and it triggers this feeling of anxiety. Okay, sure. So then you ask yourself, why did that smell trigger that feeling of anxiety? Why? What memories is it bringing up? A lot of times we store trauma as reactions, not as necessarily verbal memories. Our brain does that during a traumatic experience. Glutamate actually makes it harder for us to encode memories. And store them and retrieve them at later times. But our brain and our amygdala and our body remembers what happened. So we may experience those feelings, but kind of be struggling for, you know, what's that associated with? I know I felt this feeling before, and it feels awful for me. I'll give you an example when people knock on the door. And I know that sounds really weird, but when people knock on the door, it can cause me to have a stress reaction. And I'm like, well, where did that come from? Well, when I was younger, I was home during home invasion. Okay, well, that makes sense. The perpetrator knocked on the door first, probably to make sure that no adults were there that were going to answer the door, and then came around and broke in through the sliding door. So now when I hear a knock on the door, there's a little bit of a stress response. And I've desensitized to it quite a bit over the years. But, you know, at least 20 years ago, there was a much stronger response. I've also had experiences where people have knocked on the door and have shown up to issue me subpoenas. And I hate going to court, and it's always stressful to be in court. So that's another thing that triggers that fight or flight response in me or both of them associated with knocks at the door. So now I'm like, okay, I'm starting to see why somebody knocking at the door might cause me a little bit of stress based on prior experiences. What about expectations about future distress? When somebody knocks at the door, what do I expect? Or have I had experiences where I expected the worst? And my husband was in law enforcement for his first career, and when he would be on patrol, there was always the chance that somebody could show up and knock on the door and say something bad happened. So it was always stressful when somebody would knock on the door. So in the past, I've had multiple experiences where there was a stressful situation and multiple experiences where or times when somebody's knocked on the door and I've expected a bad situation. So now I'm starting to understand a little bit more about why knocks at the door stress me out so much. What beliefs are associated with those thoughts and expectations? So then going back through each of those memories and asking myself, what beliefs do I have about being safe versus being a victim? What beliefs do I have about being in court? What beliefs do I have about my ability to be safe, to be empowered, versus hopelessness or helplessness? What beliefs do I have as a result of those experiences regarding rejection or failure, I had a couple of really bad times when I went to testify that it just, it felt really unpleasant and uncomfortable. So thinking back over those, I can understand a little bit more about situations that may have been written into my schema about door knocking that lead me to more stress. I've also never grown up in an environment where people just randomly dropped by and knocked on the door to visit. They always called first or nowadays text at first. So I associate any unexpected knock at the door with bad news. Or now Amazon. But what do we do? Now that you've identified the memories and the thoughts associated with those memories, then process each thought. So you're going to look back at each thought and go, okay, my thoughts about death or bad outcomes happening, what are the actual known facts for and against each belief in the current context? No assuming, no mind reading and check for extreme words either telling myself or implied. So if I say every time somebody knocks at the door, bad things happen, well, those are extreme words and I'm assuming that that's going to continue to be the case. But what are the facts? Encouraging myself remember, I've talked before about emotional valence and we remember the bad stuff, we remember the threats and tend to just kind of take for granted the good things. So thinking back over times that people have come to the door like Amazon, and it hasn't been a bad thing, and I start recognizing that, okay, there are some very clear times when there have been bad things. But more often than not, when people come to the door, it's benign. It's somebody that's campaigning for political office or somebody delivering a package or somebody that lost a dog in the neighborhood. So those are not bad things. So that helps me get more realistic awareness of what's going on. Embracing the dialectics. Yes, there are times when it's bad, but there's more often than not, it's going to be a very benign interaction. What's the probability of a distressing outcome? Well, I just kind of went over that. More often than not, the outcome is going to be benign or sometimes even good because you want whatever that's being delivered. What aspects of this situation can you control? In some situations you can change the situation, like leave now. This isn't so much the case if somebody's knocking on your door because you know you're not going to sneak out the back or something. But if you are in a social situation and you're feeling threatened, you're feeling uncomfortable, it's triggering bad memories. One of the things that you could do would be leave the situation. Don't go into situations where you're going to feel that vulnerable. You can change your reaction and this can be called desensitization or counter conditioning, however you want to call, whatever you want to call it. But basically it's setting up a situation so you encounter that stimulus. And in positive or benign circumstances for knocking at the door, I could encourage my friends to start coming over more often and knocking at the door. I could go through a variety of things so I have more instances of opening the door and it being a positive than being a stressful situation. Prevent or mitigate it in the future. I guess I could put a do not disturb sign on the door. That wouldn't be really helpful. But there are sometimes where you could prevent or mitigate the situation in the future or, and, or live in the, and accept that, okay, sometimes people are going to knock at the door, or sometimes this situation is going to happen and it will feel uncomfortable. And as soon as it's over, I can go on about my life. I may have anxiety for a moment, but it will pass. All of these things are things that you can, that you can journal. So what are you feeling? What triggered that feeling? What trigger what emotions? I'm sorry, what memories are those triggers associated with that are causing those emotions? What thoughts are associated with those memories? Thoughts of being powerless, unsafe, rejected, etc. And then processing those thoughts, going back over each thought and saying, okay, is this thought based in fact or is this thought based on, on my expectations and my assumptions for what was going to happen. And then what can I do to handle this situation? So the next time it happens, if it was in an inaccurate response, so the next time it happens, I don't react as strongly. There's also what I call present based beliefs. You may have a belief in the present that people cannot be trusted. And yes, that probably was formed from being betrayed in the past. But you may be thinking, people in my life right now cannot be trusted. Nobody can ever be trusted. Ever. Well, you hear the extreme words there. Same thing. Examine the facts supporting the thought in the present context. Is it true that nobody in my life is trustworthy? What are the facts against the thought in the present context? What aspects of this belief can I can control? Can I nurture particular relationships? Can I set better boundaries? What is the probability that this person cannot be trusted in this context? Some people are very trustworthy in certain contexts, but you wouldn't necessarily trust them to watch your dog for a week or Something. So what is the probability that this person can be trusted in this context? How does holding on to this belief in its current form, how does continuing to tell myself that people cannot be trusted impact my ability to have a rich and meaningful life? Another memory. This is that memory based beliefs. You may have the belief that my parent hated me or was never proud of me. What are the facts supporting that belief, supporting that memory? When you look back on it, we always say that hindsight is 20 20. Is there an alternative explanation for why your parent. You believe that your parent was never proud of you? Did they not tell you that they were proud of you enough? Okay, it happens. Maybe that's not how they were raised. Or maybe they were so overwhelmed with their own stuff that they couldn't even focus on you. It's not that they didn't love you, they just, they couldn't. So was it actually about you? What are the facts against the thought in the memory context now? What does that mean? So looking back to that time when you were a child, when you were living at home, when you felt like your parent was never proud of you, what are the facts against that? Did they ever give you any indication in their own way that they were proud of you or that they loved you? What impacts did having that belief have on you? Writing that down, you know, if you, if you grew up believing that your parent hated you, how did that impact your choices in the way you behaved, your career, your relationships, how you feel about yourself? How does holding on to this belief in its current form impact your ability to have a rich and meaningful life? A lot of times our memories that are formed when we're children, our schema that are formed when our children don't get modified. And a lot of times schema and the way we understand the world as children is not 100% accurate, but because we don't understand. And I've gone through this a lot with people that I've worked with and their parents were in active addiction as children. They didn't understand why the parent chose the addiction over them or why the parent was non responsive to them. As adults they were often able to look back and go, yeah, you know, my parent just was in agony, was struggling, didn't have it all together, whatever they want to say, but recognizing that it wasn't about them, it was about their parents deficiencies. It's also important, you know, I've talked up till now about processing stressful emotions, what triggers anxiety, what triggers anger, what triggers depression, what triggers grief. But it's Also important to process pleasant feelings. And I encourage you to do this in your journal with regularity. What are my triggers for happiness, for curiosity, for contentment, for love, and all those things? When I see those triggers or when I. When I feel those feelings, what triggers them and what memories do those triggers bring up? What are my expectations about future happiness based on those memories? What thoughts are associated with those memories or expectations? They may include thoughts about being safe, thoughts of hope and empowerment, thoughts of love, acceptance, success. We had a. Well, we have several. But we found a nest of baby bunnies on our property this weekend when we were working in the garden. And it made me happy. It was thoughts of hope that these little bunnies would grow up and stay around my yard so I could see their little cottontails. And yes, I'm back to the whole cottontail thing. I love little bunnies. Thoughts about being safe, about being able to provide an environment that's safe for them. Because seeing the wildlife, the squirrels and the rabbits and stuff in my yard is very calming to me. So it triggers feelings of happiness and contentment and joy for whatever reason. Now I know and I work harder on creating situations in my environment that promote feelings of happiness. So around our yard we have brush piles and things. You know, we have seven acres, so we've got a little room to move. But the brush piles are where a lot of critters will make their dens. And I've created an environment and I'm continuing to try to create a more hospitable environment for all wildlife, including honeybees and bumblebees and all those sorts of things. So I can experience that when I go outside, and that is good for me. So figuring out what works for you, what helps make you happy, and how can you integrate those triggers into your day to day life to help you feel safer, more empowered and just plain joyous? Emotions are neurochemical reactions prompted by your nervous system to help you stay safe. Often the causes are based on outdated schema that cause inaccurate perceptions or thoughts. A lot of times our stress reactions are based on things that may have been stressful in the past, in other situations or when we were younger. But we're different now. We're older, we're stronger, we're wiser. Reducing distress requires understanding what's causing your feelings and remembering you can't get rid of your feelings. You can change your reaction to situations that unnecessarily prompt distress. Likewise, processing positive feelings can help you identify ways to increase those and embrace the dialectics that means recognize that, yes, there is bad, but there's also good. And I want to live in a world that embraces the and recognizing that distress is inevitable.