101. Rest Rewind: Allowing Emotions
Over the next couple of weeks, we are doing a Rest Rewind, where I bring up some of the most impactful episodes from the archive to celebrate the milestone of hitting 100 podcast episodes! Today we kick off the series by talking about allowing emotions and unpacking the messages we were taught as children about what to feel, who can emote, and why we express ourselves. We look at the societal roots and the social impact of the messages we receive that suggest that emotions are bad.
Resistance intensifies our emotions and takes up precious time, time that could be used in celebration. When we allow ourselves to express emotions without shame, there is more space, more joy, and more ease in our daily experience.
In this episode, I invite you to begin feeling the sensations within your body and show you how to welcome these physical responses, allow emotions, and understand the way you greet your daily experience. We explore the importance of allowing emotions, and what can change when we make space for negative and positive emotions.
If you’re not as happy as you want to be, feel like you’ve lost your purpose, or want to have more free time and feel less overwhelmed, I can help. My one-on-one coaching program is about to open up, and it is designed to help women just like you change the way you currently feel in your life. Meeting with me one-on-one every week for 12 weeks will help you trust yourself, feel confident in your decisions, and get your time back without hindering your career. It will change everything. Click here to sign up for the waitlist or join the program now.
If you want to take this work deeper and learn the tools and skills to feel better, all while having my support and guidance each step of the way, I invite you to set up a time to chat with me. Click here to grab a spot on my calendar, and I can’t wait to speak to you!
What You Will Discover:
What emotions are and how to allow them.
The purpose of emotions and how to identify them.
How to change your relationship with your emotions.
What the results of suppressing emotions are.
Tools for identifying physical sensations and emotions in your body.
The importance of both positive and negative emotions.
Resources:
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Full Episode Transcript:
Hey you all, I’m Marissa McKool, and you’re listening to the Redefining Rest Podcast for Public Health Professionals. Here we believe rest is your right. You don’t have to earn it, you just have to learn how to take it and I’m going to teach you. Ready? Come along.
Hello everyone, happy spring. I know technically it's not spring but it is April. So is it springing where you’re at? I’m glad you're here because over the next couple weeks we are going to be doing a rest rewind where I bring up episodes from the archive, from the beginning of the podcast to celebrate hitting the milestone of 100 podcast episodes. These podcast episodes I’m resharing with you today and the next couple weeks are some of the most foundational, transformational impactful episodes you can listen to.
And for many of you who have joined our podcast community over the past year or even year and a half you might have missed them because they were in the very beginning. So don’t worry, you’re not going to have to dig through. We’re bringing them up to the forefront just for you. Now, if you’ve been listening since the beginning, I see you all. I appreciate you. I really encourage you to listen to these episodes again because listening to them today you’re going to have different aha moments and different realizations because you're in a different place.
So today we’re talking about allowing emotions. This is a short but important and impactful episode to really help you think about the purpose of emotions and allowing them and notice where you’re resisting them. I've done a lot of other episodes on emotions but this really is the core foundational piece to all of them, to all of the understanding. I think one of, if not the most important skills I have learned in my coaching experience and all my students who come through my coaching program learn is allowing emotions, changing our relationship with emotions.
Anything you want in life, whether it’s to achieve a goal or take different actions or create a new habit or anything else, get more rest. It requires you to change your understanding and your relationship with emotions. I cannot emphasize enough how powerful this work alone is. So with that I’m going to let you get into it. Here we go.
Hey, you all, so happy to have you come back to join me for episode two. Today we’re going to be talking about allowing emotions. And I know for some of you, you might be like, “Wait, last week you talked about how thoughts are the root cause of our feelings. Shouldn’t we talk more about that?” Yes, our thoughts are what creates our emotions. However, we’re not taught anything really growing up or in traditional schools about emotion.
We are not taught what emotions are. We’re not taught what we should do with emotions. We’re not taught where they come from, how they impact us, how to deal with them, so on and so forth. So because of that we’re actually going to start with talking more about emotions and allowing emotions. Even though the set of tools I’m going to be teaching are generally called thought work, one of the biggest tools in that body of work is learning how to allow and accept any and all emotions. So let’s start with the basic. What is an emotion?
An emotion is just a physical sensation in your body. It’s the hotness in your chest. It’s the redness in your cheeks. It’s the tightness in your stomach. And then we as humans with language, label those sets of emotions with a name or a feeling such as anxiety, anger, fear etc. Emotions can feel different in everyone’s body. Anger for one person may show up as tightness in their chest and a fast beating heart. And for another person may show up as tears welling up and clammy hands. Emotions are just physical sensations in our body. They are completely natural.
We as humans are designed to have emotions, to have these physical sensations. However, we have been taught over and over indirectly and directly that emotions are bad, particularly that negative or emotions labeled as negative are bad. We are taught that showing emotion is bad, even showing positive emotions. And messaging from the oppressive systems of white supremacy, capitalism and the patriarchy further reinforces those messages for everyone but particularly oppressed communities under those systems.
Explicitly this may sound like boys don’t cry or girls are too emotional or crying is unprofessional. And here’s a really good example of why the patriarchy is also bad for men. The messaging ‘boys don’t cry’ is harmful for men. That’s just one example. Less explicitly it might sound like telling someone, “Don’t be too excited or you might jinx it.” Or, “It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it.” These messages have an impact.
Let’s go through a specific one. Some of you might remember in 2018 when Serena Williams, the greatest athlete of all time, was playing in the US Open. She was frustrated and angry with the umpire and ended up throwing her tennis racket after which she was not only fined and suspended but a racist and sexist cartoon from an Australian outlet depicted her having a ‘tantrum’ and published it.
In comparison across sports, including tennis now athletes, particularly white male athletes have been given permission to express their anger and frustration in any way without repercussion. And what message does this send? In this specific example it tells women and girls of color that they are not entitled to their emotions. They’re not allowed to express them, that they will get in trouble and that it’s a problem. And this is just one example.
Women, women of color, men of color, individuals in the LGBTQ community and many other communities have received messages directly and indirectly their whole lives reinforcing the belief we must suppress our emotions, even positive ones. For example, as a woman when you’ve had a really good first few dates with someone how often do women think or are told not to get too excited? Somehow them being happy will run someone off or be a problem. Then that person does not get to allow themselves to actually get to experience that happiness.
So what’s the result of suppressing and resisting our emotions? The result is that we do not allow our emotions. We do anything we can to avoid them, suppress them or numb them. We binge watch TV, we overdrink or overeat, we tell ourselves that something’s wrong with us for having our feelings. We avoid emails, we work until 9:00pm, we don’t speak up in meetings and so much more. And doing this does not make the feelings go away, it only elongates them and intensifies them.
Our body is designed to have emotions but our brains create the resistance to our emotions and that’s what creates a lot of the suffering we experience for ourselves. Because we have been taught emotions are bad, our brains believe emotions are bad. So when we start to feel something in our body our brains go into overdrive trying to avoid that feeling.
So for example, maybe you had to email someone at work that you’ve had a negative experience with in the past. And when you see they replied, to avoid the feelings you have of anxiety about what they may have said, your brain thinks, if you just don’t open the email or if you don’t even go into your inbox the anxiety is going to go away and the fear is going to go away and you do something else to distract. But does that feeling go away? No, it lingers and gets worse. Resisting an emotion intensifies that emotion and adds additional stress and even shame on top and elongates the whole process.
Allowing and processing our emotions is so important in order for us to be able to show up in our own lives. When we suppress, when we resist our emotions we are creating suffering versus when we allow ourselves to have an emotion, when we don’t resist it, we don’t judge ourselves for having an emotion then we are much better able to go through the world navigating all the challenges, all of the adversities and enjoying all the accomplishments and all of the celebrations.
When we resist emotions we are resisting our lives. We are not living our lives. We are missing out, like my coach always says, life is 50/50, which means life will always be 50% good and great and 50% not good and challenging and hard. We can’t avoid that. The full human experience is having all of the emotions. So when you are running from your emotions, when you are avoiding them, when you’re suppressing them, what you’re actually doing is running from your own life. You’re actually suppressing your own lived experience.
When you tell yourself that having an emotion is bad you’re telling yourself that you are bad, because emotions are a normal natural part of being human and this is not shame. We have been taught these unhelpful and even harmful beliefs about emotions. It takes time to undo those beliefs, takes time to truly allow yourself to feel any emotion, it’s a practice but you can start it right now and you can see amazing changes in a short amount of time. And what does it look like?
Allowing an emotion looks like allowing it to be in your body, concretely it’s helpful to describe what are the physical sensations in your body. I like to go from head to toe. What am I feeling in my head, in my jaw, in my throat and describe the physical sensations. For example, tightness in my head right in the front part, I have some tightness in my jaw, I have some sweaty hands. And then name the emotion with one name such as anxiety or happiness or fear.
Doing that and sitting with the feeling for a minute or three or five, and it may subside or it might not, it might come along for the rest of the day and that is not a problem. If you catch yourself telling yourself you shouldn’t have the emotion, just gently remind yourself that it’s normal to have emotions and your body is designed to experience emotions. Allowing and processing emotions helps you move through life.
What would work be like if every time you felt anxiety when you opened your inbox instead of going to Facebook or Twitter for 20 minutes, to try to avoid that knot in your stomach, you breathed, you closed your eyes for two minutes, you describe the tightness in your stomach, the fast beating heart. And notice the thought in your head saying, “I have too much to do.” Then what if you said to yourself, “Just one email at a time.” And you opened your eyes and opened one email and responded. How different would your daily experience be?
Or what if when you got that paper accepted for a publication instead of having one moment of pride and just moving on to something else, you stopped, gave yourself five or 10 minutes to feel that pride and happiness in your body, what would it feel like? What would you do? Maybe you would take a break. Maybe you would remind yourself how amazing you are. Maybe you would figure out a way to celebrate small or big. If we suppress and resist the negative emotions in life we do the same for positive emotions.
Telling our brains emotions are bad no matter the emotion tells our brains all emotions are bad. So as long as you resist negative emotions, you will not truly enjoy the positive ones either. It’s about learning how to experience both parts of life. Why do we enjoy the sun so much after weeks of rain or why do we enjoy a rainy day after months of drought? Because in order to really appreciate something we need the contrasting experience of something else. So my ask to you all this week is what emotion are you truly going to let yourself feel even if just for five minutes?
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
Hello everyone, happy spring. I know technically it's not spring but it is April. So is it springing where you’re at? I’m glad you're here because over the next couple weeks we are going to be doing a rest rewind where I bring up episodes from the archive, from the beginning of the podcast to celebrate hitting the milestone of 100 podcast episodes. These podcast episodes I’m resharing with you today and the next couple weeks are some of the most foundational, transformational impactful episodes you can listen to.
And for many of you who have joined our podcast community over the past year or even year and a half you might have missed them because they were in the very beginning. So don’t worry, you’re not going to have to dig through. We’re bringing them up to the forefront just for you. Now, if you’ve been listening since the beginning, I see you all. I appreciate you. I really encourage you to listen to these episodes again because listening to them today you’re going to have different aha moments and different realizations because you're in a different place.
So today we’re talking about allowing emotions. This is a short but important and impactful episode to really help you think about the purpose of emotions and allowing them and notice where you’re resisting them. I've done a lot of other episodes on emotions but this really is the core foundational piece to all of them, to all of the understanding. I think one of, if not the most important skills I have learned in my coaching experience and all my students who come through my coaching program learn is allowing emotions, changing our relationship with emotions.
Anything you want in life, whether it’s to achieve a goal or take different actions or create a new habit or anything else, get more rest. It requires you to change your understanding and your relationship with emotions. I cannot emphasize enough how powerful this work alone is. So with that I’m going to let you get into it. Here we go.
Hey, you all, so happy to have you come back to join me for episode two. Today we’re going to be talking about allowing emotions. And I know for some of you, you might be like, “Wait, last week you talked about how thoughts are the root cause of our feelings. Shouldn’t we talk more about that?” Yes, our thoughts are what creates our emotions. However, we’re not taught anything really growing up or in traditional schools about emotion.
We are not taught what emotions are. We’re not taught what we should do with emotions. We’re not taught where they come from, how they impact us, how to deal with them, so on and so forth. So because of that we’re actually going to start with talking more about emotions and allowing emotions. Even though the set of tools I’m going to be teaching are generally called thought work, one of the biggest tools in that body of work is learning how to allow and accept any and all emotions. So let’s start with the basic. What is an emotion?
An emotion is just a physical sensation in your body. It’s the hotness in your chest. It’s the redness in your cheeks. It’s the tightness in your stomach. And then we as humans with language, label those sets of emotions with a name or a feeling such as anxiety, anger, fear etc. Emotions can feel different in everyone’s body. Anger for one person may show up as tightness in their chest and a fast beating heart. And for another person may show up as tears welling up and clammy hands. Emotions are just physical sensations in our body. They are completely natural.
We as humans are designed to have emotions, to have these physical sensations. However, we have been taught over and over indirectly and directly that emotions are bad, particularly that negative or emotions labeled as negative are bad. We are taught that showing emotion is bad, even showing positive emotions. And messaging from the oppressive systems of white supremacy, capitalism and the patriarchy further reinforces those messages for everyone but particularly oppressed communities under those systems.
Explicitly this may sound like boys don’t cry or girls are too emotional or crying is unprofessional. And here’s a really good example of why the patriarchy is also bad for men. The messaging ‘boys don’t cry’ is harmful for men. That’s just one example. Less explicitly it might sound like telling someone, “Don’t be too excited or you might jinx it.” Or, “It’s not what you said, it’s how you said it.” These messages have an impact.
Let’s go through a specific one. Some of you might remember in 2018 when Serena Williams, the greatest athlete of all time, was playing in the US Open. She was frustrated and angry with the umpire and ended up throwing her tennis racket after which she was not only fined and suspended but a racist and sexist cartoon from an Australian outlet depicted her having a ‘tantrum’ and published it.
In comparison across sports, including tennis now athletes, particularly white male athletes have been given permission to express their anger and frustration in any way without repercussion. And what message does this send? In this specific example it tells women and girls of color that they are not entitled to their emotions. They’re not allowed to express them, that they will get in trouble and that it’s a problem. And this is just one example.
Women, women of color, men of color, individuals in the LGBTQ community and many other communities have received messages directly and indirectly their whole lives reinforcing the belief we must suppress our emotions, even positive ones. For example, as a woman when you’ve had a really good first few dates with someone how often do women think or are told not to get too excited? Somehow them being happy will run someone off or be a problem. Then that person does not get to allow themselves to actually get to experience that happiness.
So what’s the result of suppressing and resisting our emotions? The result is that we do not allow our emotions. We do anything we can to avoid them, suppress them or numb them. We binge watch TV, we overdrink or overeat, we tell ourselves that something’s wrong with us for having our feelings. We avoid emails, we work until 9:00pm, we don’t speak up in meetings and so much more. And doing this does not make the feelings go away, it only elongates them and intensifies them.
Our body is designed to have emotions but our brains create the resistance to our emotions and that’s what creates a lot of the suffering we experience for ourselves. Because we have been taught emotions are bad, our brains believe emotions are bad. So when we start to feel something in our body our brains go into overdrive trying to avoid that feeling.
So for example, maybe you had to email someone at work that you’ve had a negative experience with in the past. And when you see they replied, to avoid the feelings you have of anxiety about what they may have said, your brain thinks, if you just don’t open the email or if you don’t even go into your inbox the anxiety is going to go away and the fear is going to go away and you do something else to distract. But does that feeling go away? No, it lingers and gets worse. Resisting an emotion intensifies that emotion and adds additional stress and even shame on top and elongates the whole process.
Allowing and processing our emotions is so important in order for us to be able to show up in our own lives. When we suppress, when we resist our emotions we are creating suffering versus when we allow ourselves to have an emotion, when we don’t resist it, we don’t judge ourselves for having an emotion then we are much better able to go through the world navigating all the challenges, all of the adversities and enjoying all the accomplishments and all of the celebrations.
When we resist emotions we are resisting our lives. We are not living our lives. We are missing out, like my coach always says, life is 50/50, which means life will always be 50% good and great and 50% not good and challenging and hard. We can’t avoid that. The full human experience is having all of the emotions. So when you are running from your emotions, when you are avoiding them, when you’re suppressing them, what you’re actually doing is running from your own life. You’re actually suppressing your own lived experience.
When you tell yourself that having an emotion is bad you’re telling yourself that you are bad, because emotions are a normal natural part of being human and this is not shame. We have been taught these unhelpful and even harmful beliefs about emotions. It takes time to undo those beliefs, takes time to truly allow yourself to feel any emotion, it’s a practice but you can start it right now and you can see amazing changes in a short amount of time. And what does it look like?
Allowing an emotion looks like allowing it to be in your body, concretely it’s helpful to describe what are the physical sensations in your body. I like to go from head to toe. What am I feeling in my head, in my jaw, in my throat and describe the physical sensations. For example, tightness in my head right in the front part, I have some tightness in my jaw, I have some sweaty hands. And then name the emotion with one name such as anxiety or happiness or fear.
Doing that and sitting with the feeling for a minute or three or five, and it may subside or it might not, it might come along for the rest of the day and that is not a problem. If you catch yourself telling yourself you shouldn’t have the emotion, just gently remind yourself that it’s normal to have emotions and your body is designed to experience emotions. Allowing and processing emotions helps you move through life.
What would work be like if every time you felt anxiety when you opened your inbox instead of going to Facebook or Twitter for 20 minutes, to try to avoid that knot in your stomach, you breathed, you closed your eyes for two minutes, you describe the tightness in your stomach, the fast beating heart. And notice the thought in your head saying, “I have too much to do.” Then what if you said to yourself, “Just one email at a time.” And you opened your eyes and opened one email and responded. How different would your daily experience be?
Or what if when you got that paper accepted for a publication instead of having one moment of pride and just moving on to something else, you stopped, gave yourself five or 10 minutes to feel that pride and happiness in your body, what would it feel like? What would you do? Maybe you would take a break. Maybe you would remind yourself how amazing you are. Maybe you would figure out a way to celebrate small or big. If we suppress and resist the negative emotions in life we do the same for positive emotions.
Telling our brains emotions are bad no matter the emotion tells our brains all emotions are bad. So as long as you resist negative emotions, you will not truly enjoy the positive ones either. It’s about learning how to experience both parts of life. Why do we enjoy the sun so much after weeks of rain or why do we enjoy a rainy day after months of drought? Because in order to really appreciate something we need the contrasting experience of something else. So my ask to you all this week is what emotion are you truly going to let yourself feel even if just for five minutes?
If you found this episode helpful then you have to check out my coaching program where I provide you individualized support to create a life centered around rest. Head on over to mckoolcoaching.com, that’s M-C-K-O-O-L coaching.com to learn more.
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