BUILT for Impact Ep. 23: Why Your Emotions Won’t Go Away Until You Feel Them

Most of us were never actually taught how to deal with our emotions. We were taught how to manage them, how to control them or hide them. Anger, that's bad. Sadness, something wrong with you. Guilt, shame, anxiety. We treat these emotions like they're problems that we need to get rid of. But here's the irony. The reason those emotions stay stuck in your body is because you're trying so hard not to feel them. Emotions are not the problem, people. We're human beings. We're not robots. The resistance of them is. And what most people don't realize is that emotions are actually designed to move through the body. They're meant to be felt and then released, but that only happens when you stop fighting them. Today I want to talk about something that changes everything once you understand it: why getting comfortable feeling your emotions is actually what frees you from them. Welcome back to Built for Impact. I am Jake Burhans, and this is the podcast where inner peace meets high performance and where building your dream life starts from the inside out. I love that line. Building your dream life starts from the inside out, which is so true. It's all about the inner work first, and then we seek external things. But inside the BUILD Framework, a big part of the work is learning how your inner operating system actually works. Right? Your thoughts, your beliefs, your nervous system, and your emotional patterns. So this is in alignment with Module 4, Let Go of the Past. We talk about how emotions are stored in the body, and when things trigger us, that is an opportunity for us to release those emotions. What are we talking about there? We're saying those emotions are stored as a sensation in the body. When something triggers us, that emotion that's stuck is trying to move. It's trying to complete its physiological process, but every time that we suppress it and we label it, we're trapping it in the body. So today we're gonna focus on one really important shift, learning how to feel your emotions without resisting them so that they can actually release. This is one of the biggest things that increases your internal capacity and helps you to stop carrying so much emotional tension around all the time. First up, emotions are not the problem. Your suppression of them is. We've been conditioned to believe that certain emotions are bad, right? Isn't that interesting? Emotion is literally just an energy. It's a feeling of anger, sadness, guilt, fear. But because of the words that we have put on these feelings and our association with the word anger and sadness and guilt, right? When someone says anger, that means something to us because of the word. Not necessarily because of the feeling, but those words carry meaning and make us judge the feeling, basically. So we treat it like something is wrong with us. We feel anger, sadness, guilt. There's something wrong with us. There's nothing wrong with you. You're a human being. You're meant to feel emotions. So I want us to get comfortable just feeling our emotions, like feel the anger in your body and use your awareness to label it. Oh, there's anger in my body. And don't try to get rid of it. All we want to do is feel happiness, joy, love. That's only part of the emotional spectrum. We're meant to feel these other emotions. We're not meant to do is suppress it. But what happens? We feel anger, we feel guilt and sadness and doubt because of the words attached to them. We make up a story about why we have anxiety. We label as bad. I shouldn't feel this. So you resist it, you push it away. You try to get rid of it. You tell yourself there's something wrong with you cuz you're angry. And what does that do? Instead of just relaxing and feeling the emotion, you know, in your body, you suppress it because you're resisting it and you're labeling it, or you make up a story about it. You feel anxiety when you're getting on a sales call. So you feel that anxiety in your body, and because you think that it's bad to feel anxiety, you make up a story. Oh, I'm not ready yet. I can't do it. I don't have the ability to do sales. I suck at sales. Your mind's trying to make up a story to justify why you're feeling something. What if you could just feel it and not make up a story about it? This happened to me the other week. I was frustrated and angry about something that happened at work, but I noticed the anger. I was like, oh, that's anger in my body. But I just let it be there. And I know this is much easier said than done because the emotions can just engulf your body. It can be tough to move beyond that. But if you can just sit with the emotion and just let it be there, it'll just dissipate in 10 minutes, in 20 minutes, in 30 minutes, however long it is. But just get comfortable feeling all the emotions in the spectrum without trying to resist them. Just let them be there. Hey, and if you just let it be there and understand that it's normal to feel this, I think it removes so much guilt and shame around feeling emotions. And ultimately it lets those emotions process. Because again, things that trigger you, like what is a trigger? It's basically a past event that happened. You didn't like how it felt, so you suppressed that anger or that guilt or that sadness or that fear or that worry. You suppressed it. You fought it. So now every time that external event happens, the emotion is triggered before you can even think about it consciously, and it's trying to complete its process, but you keep resisting it and shoving it back down. So we gotta feel our emotions. We gotta get comfortable feeling our emotions. Understand it's normal to feel guilt, shame, doubt, worry, stress, whatever it is. So emotions aren't the problem. Your suppression of them is. Secondly, emotions are designed to move through the body. That is how they are designed to move. So when you feel these emotions of fear and doubt and worry and stress, I want you to start to look at them as just sensations in the body. They are not the word that you've associated with them. Like get fear outta your head, anxiety, stress. That's not what they are. They're literally just a feeling. They're a sensation in the body. It's a tight chest. It might be heat, heaviness, restlessness, tight shoulders, a pounding heart, whatever it is. Look at the emotion in that way and just let it be, right? And we can learn to regulate ourselves and all these things, but This is part of the art of letting go and the art of non-resistance. Being comfortable with these emotions allows them to move through. Emotional release doesn't happen through analyzing it or trying to fix it. It happens through presence. What does that mean, presence? It just means relaxing and feeling it and understanding it's normal. I think the idea that it is normal at least helps me feel the emotion and kind of let it move through. And then thirdly, ultimately the resistance is what's keeping the emotion stuck. Right? You're suppressing it. You're analyzing it or you're acting it out. You're doing one of those three things. Anger happens. You're trying to suppress it. I shouldn't feel this. Or you're analyzing it. Why am I angry? Oh, I'm angry because this person cut me off and da da da da da. And then it almost justifies the feeling of anger. Don't need to analyze it. Third thing is we act it out. We punch a hole in the wall. Okay. Probably not the best thing to be doing. Sometimes it can be good, I guess, but you, the problem with acting out is every time I'm angry, I punch a hole in the wall. I start to fire neurons in my brain that associates, hey, every time you're angry, go punch a hole in the wall. And that's not what you want to do. So again, you got to learn to regulate emotionally and just feel your emotions. Understand it's okay to feel sad. It's okay to be a little bit depressed, a little bit anxious. Hey, guess what? It's called being a human being and you're going to be fine. So let it move through. And the fourth thing is stop labeling the emotions as good or bad. Stop labeling them. It's not good or bad. They're just feelings. They're literally just energy in the universe. Like it's just a feeling. Like, think about the feeling of anger and fear and stress and worry. I'm gonna beat this point home. It's literally just the words that we have associated with those feelings that cause it to be a negative thing, because society tells us we shouldn't be angry, we shouldn't be sad, we shouldn't be guilty, we should be happy, we should be joyful, we should be excited. So when we feel those feelings of anger, doubt, worry, guilt, shame, fear, depression, whatever it is. We think it's bad and that signals further threat. We suppress it. So get comfortable feeling your feelings and you will open up a world of inner peace, folks, a freaking world of inner peace. Could you stop resisting life? You understand, hey, you're going to get triggered. You're going to get angry, sad, frustrated, whatever the case may be. You literally just sit with the emotions and you feel them. And that's what allows them to process and release. And then things do not have control over you anymore. You have true inner peace. True inner peace is, I call it inner freedom, and I think inner freedom is more important than financial freedom, than time freedom, than location freedom. Inner freedom is the ability to regulate your state of being no matter what is going on externally. Basically nothing externally can control your internal state of being. You may get triggered, you may fall out, but you always return. You're always in control. And every time you're doing that too, you're building that muscle of letting go and returning. So something that we can experiment with this week is the next time that you do feel a strong emotion, frustration, sadness, anxiety, whatever it is, instead of trying to fix it or push it away, I want you to just pause and notice like, what is the feeling in your body? And just kind of separate yourself. Don't make up a story. Don't suppress it. Don't analyze it. And just ask yourself one question. Can you let this sensation be here without fighting it? Don't have to analyze it. Don't have to solve it. Just feel it. Most of the time, especially in my experience, when you stop resisting an emotion, it starts to move, and that is the beginning of release. So in closing here, emotions aren't something you need to eliminate, folks. Okay? They're part of being human. The real skill is learning how to experience them without resisting them, without labeling them, without making them mean something about you. Because when you stop fighting your emotions, your system actually starts releasing them. That frees up so much internal space and energy and capacity. If this episode helped you see your emotions a little bit differently, share it with someone who might need to hear this right now. And if you want more conversations like this about building your life and success from peace instead of pressure, make sure you subscribe, whether it's on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Turn on notifications so you don't miss new episodes every single Monday. If you are not in the Built for Impact community, folks, we are live on school. We are building, we are growing. I'm putting an incredible amount of effort into that community right right now. If you go onto school and you search Built for Impact, it's free to join. You get in there, you can watch the orientation videos, the— take the Built Operating System assessment to see what your pressure type is. There's a few different modes. It's going to help you better understand your system and how to fix it. You can take the 7-Day Internal Reset Challenge, which again is free and allows you to start to practice some of these tools. And then if you want to go deeper, ultimately with the full Built for Impact Core System, that's going to be able to help you really install these tools so you can begin building your life from peace instead of pressure We are here for you. Till next Monday. All the peace, all the power.