How To Move Through Difficult Emotions

Coming up on this mini episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

If we accept the emotions that are there, the natural process with emotions is that they come and they go. The problem is when we don't let that happen.

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Hi, I'm Kaya Perowich, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy Podcast. Our emotional wellness is directly connected to our overall health and well-being. But when we are focused on attending to the demands and responsibilities of our daily lives, it can be easier to push aside unpleasant feelings and emotions rather than allowing them to move through us. The mind and the body are inextricably linked, and so it is necessary for our overall health that we develop practices to attend to our emotional well-being. In his recent conversations with impact theory's Tom Bilyeu and trauma expert Dr. Jim Gordon, Dr. Hyman discussed strategies for moving through difficult emotions.

When you change your physical state, you change your mental state. So, whether it's going for a run, whether it's taking a steam, or whether it's jumping up and down, or whether it's dancing, whatever you can do to change your physical state, it'll change your mental state. and I've learned how to do this because, you know, if I have a really tough day and, you know, got stressed, like, I had a really challenging, you know, few situations at work recently, and I, you know, I. It was really upsetting me. So I just went to a hot yoga class and I came out completely transformed. And I didn't change my thinking. I just changed my body, which then changed my thinking, dude. Right.

Like, if people really hear what you just said, because then you know that it can go either way. So if you can't get yourself there with reason and logic, jump in an ice bath. laugh out loud, watch a comedy, go for a run, lift weights. Like there is this feedback loop that you get into with your thoughts and your body and your body and your thoughts. So the vagal nerve, of course you're gonna know this, but the vagal nerve is something like 80% telling the body telling the brain what's going on versus the brain just instructing the body what to do. Like as a kid, you think, oh, the brain tells the body, breathe, digest, blah, blah, blah. But in reality, it's like the brain is getting more input from the body. And I am so grateful that there's this reciprocal feedback loop. So I know when I'm in a like a negative place that I all I need to do is smile. Like literally I can even think smile without actually smiling and it makes me feel different. It is so weird.

Yeah.

So that's super useful. Music can shift your state channeling aggression, which is something I do to like do hard things like there are all these feedback loop. So I try to get people to understand that. But the most important thing, the thing I always lead with, is humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. So we are the ultimate apex predator for one simple reason. We adapt to change better than any other animal.

In their conversation, Dr. Hyman and Dr. Gordon dive into why it's essential that we confront our trauma and feelings head.

On in order for true healing to occur. You talk about this concept of befriending your emotions. and how important that is in making them your partners in healing trauma. So can you explain that?

Sure. You know, fighting against our emotions is a fool's errand and trying to suppress them, which of course our culture too often tells our parents, the society, no, suck it up, go ahead, forget about it, the show must go on, don't cry, I'll give you something you'll really cry for. All the things that are told to children and adults make us shut down our emotions. And when we shut down our emotion, when we shut down one emotion, we shut down the others as well. So if we shut down fear, we also tend to shut down joy. We're not fully ourselves. Whereas if we can accept the emotions, and also if we shut them down, if we try to avoid them, they stay around forever. And they're always there, they're inside us. They're disturbing our digestion, they're disturbing our brain on an ongoing basis. If we accept the emotions that are there, the natural process with emotions is that they come and they go. The problem is when we don't let that happen. So there are essentially, as I see it, there are three stages in the cycle of accepting and moving through the emotions. The first is just to recognize that they're there.

Yeah, sort of like it reminds me of my mother. She said, Whenever I get the urge to exercise, I lay down till it goes away. So if you have a negative emotion, Give it a little time and it can pass.

But that's, she's right.

I don't know about that.

It will pass. It will pass if you allow yourself to feel it. I think, you know, even when the research that was done long ago on supposedly correlating the anger of the type A personality with heart disease, well, it really wasn't the anger so much. It was the resentment. It was the anger that was held inside and you couldn't let go and you were feeling it all the time. If you just get angry and you hit a punching bag for a while, it's gonna go. So acceptance, relaxation, so techniques like soft belly, you're feeling something, relax, be aware of it, or you're doing shaking and dancing, you're loosening up your body and you're noticing the emotions come up, let them come and let them go. And then expressing the emotion, whether you're expressing it physically, And if you're a really angry person, it's great to hit a punching bag. It's great to hit pillows to get the anger out. And then you come back to relaxing again. If you try, you try, I try, anybody who's watching, spend 10 minutes going like this and pounding some pillows when you're feeling frustrated and angry. After that, you're going to be relaxed.

It's true. So it's a- Just don't hit somebody else.

Yeah, don't hit somebody else. But that's the temptation when people have been traumatized. I work with vets so much, they're coming back from combat, they're still so often in that state, that fight or flight state, so somebody brushes up against them in a store or a bar, they're ready to kill. They've gotta bring that out in a way that's safe, and all of us do. Same with sadness. If sadness comes, let it come, accept it, Relax with it, express it as you need to.

That's so powerful. Is there anything else from your work that you want to share? Any stories, any techniques, anything that really matters that you want everybody to know about?

Well, one of the techniques that we should share with people who are watching that I use all the time is shaking and dancing. And this is really important. We talked about when we're traumatized, we're either in fight or flight and we're really tense, or we're shut down, we're numbed out, we're holding the tension in our bodies, our minds are kind of frozen. What I do is I get people up shaking their bodies. You close your eyes, you put your feet shoulder-width, and you shake up and down for five or 10 minutes, and you relax for a couple of minutes and have some music that you can move your body to. What happens is you begin to break up the fixed patterns physical as well as mental patterns that trauma creates. If you have experienced trauma, you need to you not only need to befriend your emotions, you need to re-friend your body. Because when we're traumatized, often our body becomes an enemy. I'm sure you've seen this with people with serious illnesses. You feel like, no, it's alien. I don't want to deal with it. If we've been assaulted, if we've been raped, If we've been sexually harassed, our bodies are uncomfortable for us. So the shaking and dancing brings us back into our body. And it also brings up emotions that we've shut down. I'm constantly amazed at what human beings are capable of in terms of helping and healing themselves and reaching out to others. We have the capacity to change our brain chemistry, to change the way our GI tract works, to change the way we look at the world, So why not mobilize that capacity first?

Another tool Dr. Gordon shares is called soft belly breathing, which is simply taking a few moments to breathe in deeply through the nose and out through the mouth. Because trauma and emotion is kept both in the mind and the body, these simple tools allow us to tap into the mind-body connection to produce long lasting healing. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to check out Dr. Hyman's full full-length interviews with Tom Bilyeu and Dr. Jim Gordon. Until next time.

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