A short YouTube monologue (by Vishen Lakhiani) about healthy coping mechanisms for expressing emotions. The speaker recommends simple somatic techniques—placing a hand over the heart, taking deep belly breaths—to catch oneself and shift from fight/flight/freeze to rest-and-digest by activating the vagus nerve. Vocalization (singing/chanting) and using music (e.g., playlists) are presented as practical ways to transmute and regulate emotional tension.
Chapters
Are there ways of coping mechanisms and healthy coping mechanisms to actually express our emotions in a healthy way? Because if you're going to. When you're feeling the urge of sadness or overwhelm or frustration or anxious, and if you're expressing it in a way where you're, you know, jittery or walking all over the, you know, the office or maybe screaming and yelling at people, that is what you're actually doing to express. It's probably not the healthiest way, right? I have a whole list of ways where there's healthy ways to express. What are some of the healthy ways? Well, some of the healthy ways could just be putting your hand over your heart, for one. This is a perfect example. And this is actually a physical sign, it's a physiological sign that you're actually catching yourself. So when you're feeling hurt, when you're feeling that tinge of ooh, okay, there they go again. They're triggering me. And you're feeling this, like, triggering response, and you want to react, you want to say something. You put your hand over your heart and you. You know that you're breathing shallow because you're in fight flight or freeze, and your nervous system is going wacky and you want to respond right away. But actually, this is your physical representation of saying, I got this, I got this, and taking a deep breath and literally reminding yourself that we're going to move this, this breath that's here in my chest all the way to my belly and saying, I got this, I got this. And just allowing ourselves to actually breathe. That's the simplest thing that we can do to catch ourselves, to change our state from fight, flight and freeze to rest and digest. That's a healthy coping mechanism, because what are we actually doing? We're activating our vagus nerve. Now, for all the science nerds in the room, we know that our vagus nerve is the one nerve throughout our entire body that connects our mind and our gut, as well as it's responsible for resting and digesting, which is why a lot of the chants and the mantras are activating our vocal cords, are activating our throat chakra to open ourselves up, which is why singing is such a beautiful thing that we can actually do. And in fact, it's one of the ways. Healthy coping mechanism. Put on a playlist. Get your Beyonce on. Because that's how we can not only lessen the tension in a situation, but we can also start to not just feel our feelings, but then transmute them.
