156. 3 things to know about feeling negative emotions

We spend much of our days avoiding the emotions we don't want to feel and panicking when we do feel those negative emotions. But then what happens is we give control over to the emotions and build up our lives hustling away the 'bad'. Over the years I have learned a lot about emotions that has personally brought me freedom from fearing emotions. This is something I have also coached many women on over the years. A big hurdle we have is knowing what we feel, and then struggling with the fact that we don't WANT to feel that emotion. In this episode I cover: The three big insights that have changed my relationship to my feelings What the work of Dr. Candace Pert reveals about what emotions ARE How we learn what we are feeling How we are conditioned to view feelings What makes an emotion 'negative' or 'unacceptable' Being aware of our tolerance of emotions The real problems with emotions Understanding the role of emotions How to tap into the intuition emotions can offer us rather than running from the emotions Collaborating with our emotions rather than competing with them Related links you might like: The Spotify playlist for all episodes on Emotional Intelligence 139. Are you TOO comfortable? And what is it costing you? 66. Are you stuck in the hustle for happiness? Finding contentment in momlife How to really start showing up for your life Four steps to manage overwhelm in motherhood The Enneagram and Motherhood Series Book: The Molecules of Emotion by Dr. Candace Pert Aritcle: The Physics of Emotion Simple Pleasure of the Week: Benefit cheek and lip stain Full transcript (unedited) 0:06 Hey friends is Shawna, your nerdy girlfriend and life coach from simple on purpose. Welcome to the Simple on Purpose podcast. My aim here is to share with you thoughts, ideas, stories that will help you let go of the old ways, the useless stuff, the heavy stuff, the unnecessary stuff in your life in your space in your brain, so that you can get into the driver's seat of your life, and steer that car, steer that ship to where you want it to go. 0:36 What do you want more of more fun, more passion, more purpose, more presence, because that's what I signed up for. And that's what I'm here to share with you. 0:48 But it doesn't all come without the shedding part, right without the letting go. Letting go of what doesn't work, what doesn't help you live on purpose. And this is the part that needs to be addressed. Because life on purpose is not just like Instagrammable, magical confetti and balloons. Life on purpose comes with friction and discomfort. 1:11 And so today, I want to dig into that a little bit and talk about the F word, feelings. And a lot of this content is some I had drafted up back in the fall. And I came across it when I was doing a school project this week. 1:25 And let me tell you school was my only focus this week, because your girl was home sick on the couch with COVID. And I know many of you have had it, it finally hit us here it finally hit our home, I was the only one that had it though. Everyone else thoroughly avoided me and seemed to skirt it. 1:44 But I was sick in I see a lot of different people on social media sharing their experiences with COVID. And I was comforted by those who told me that they were really sick too. Like I was exhausted just making toast. I needed to nap a couple times a day. And I am not a Napper. 2:03 But I had also gotten to this place where I was kind of comparing my experience with others because I had heard that there were others who had only a cough or a scratchy throat. And here I was just like rolling from the couch to the bed to the couch day after day. And it was definitely getting into my head, feeling like I should be tougher. I should get over this sooner. Like they say five days, but it's been more than five days. And it's just ironic, really, because I had just told my sister, my little sister a week earlier, that she shouldn't feel that way that she should be resting. 2:37 But man when you're in it, I know I've said this before, it's hard to give yourself the grace and the hope. I was running low on hope. Because I think when our bodies are depressed, we get depressed. And I was definitely getting into a funk thinking like When will I ever feel normal again? 2:56 So all this to say, long story short, I was really grateful that I came across these old notes in the Google Docs, because that depressed part of me was like, Will I ever podcast again? Will they ever have the energy? What will my life be like, you know, just run of the mill spiraling that we go through. Here we are. On the other side of that. 3:19 One thing that I'm really most excited about side note about getting back into is the mom's 30 for 30, where we're spending the month of February, or in 30 items for 30 days. I know February is 28 Whatever, we're not gonna we're not gonna nitpick over it. I'm going to extend my challenge into March to get all 30 days in. And just a reminder, if you're joining along, make sure to be sharing that in the Facebook group. 3:43 Alright, so let's get into it, shall we? Let's talk about uncomfortable emotions. 3:49 And I want to teach you three things I've learned over the years about emotions, and emotions isn't feelings, it's something that is a big part of coaching, why we feel this, how to feel it, what to do with the feeling how to create feelings that we want to have. And just in my time coaching and my own personal reflection, I know that a lot of us don't know what we feel, or we don't want to feel that way. Or we feel overpowered by our feelings. 4:21 And I want to share with you some big aha thoughts that I had around feelings and just hope that it brings some insight and freedom, freedom to you today because these are three things that really changed my relationship to my feelings. 4:33 Because I think that looking back I was someone who just chase down simply feeling good, whatever that looked like I probably wasn't even sure. And when I felt bad, I panicked that there was something wrong with me with my life probably with my husband probably definitely his fault. And my relationships to feelings were that they were an indicator of how right or wrong my life was, which is just a really fragile way to set up your life. Right. 4:59 So The first thing that I want to talk about is what are feelings? What are they? And when I first heard this question posed, I was really taken aback because I had never really thought about it like what are even emotions? Inside note, I'll use this term interchangeably, emotions and feelings. 5:18 How do you know you're having a feeling? You just feel it right in your body? Well, you probably first notice it in your body, and then you name it in your head. Even if this happens, like snapping my fingers automatically don't even really realize you've made that connection. But how do you know you feel sad? Because our physical experience of the emotion of what we feel in our bodies, we feel different things like our stomach tightens, or we hit a red face or we breathe shallowly, or we cry, or we laugh or we feel a weight in our chest. 5:48 So let's nerd out for a minute and I will tell you about an interesting book by Dr. Candace pert, called the Molecules of Emotion is she has done so much work in the field of neuroscience in she is credited with discovering the opiate receptor in our brains. So really, really amazing woman, I'm going to link an article about her and her work in the show notes. 6:11 But what she explains is that emotions are caused by the release of neuro peptides and we know some neuro peptides, dopamine, oxytocin, adrenaline, these neuro peptides are electrochemical signals that carry messages throughout the body. So these electrochemical signals, they are received at different parts of our bodies, they change the chemistry and the electrical frequency of the receptor cells. So she essentially says we're like vibrating tuning forks, because these neuro peptides release throughout our body, they change the chemical and physical state of the cells. And that's what gives us a sensation of emotion. 6:51 But why then do we have a problem with emotions, because of what we make them mean? When we have the sensation, we learn to label the feeling. So let's say we have a tightness in our chest, we learn to label that as panic, or our face heats up, and turns red, we learn to label that isn't embarrassment. And we think some of these things are okay to feel. And some are bad, depending on what we've been taught and our past experiences with them. 7:18 So what is wrong with emotion? Why is emotion positive or negative. And this is the second thing I want to dig into an emotion is bad if we label it bad. And we all have emotions that we determine are negative or positive for, for instance, some of us feeling delighted is an uneasy feeling. For some of us feeling resentful is a really uneasy feelings. Some of us feel quite comfortable without feeling. 7:45 We each have our own essentially map of the world. And we've got this legend at the bottom that tells us which feelings in this world are okay and which ones are not. And this is all designed and generated over our years of programming, 8:01 Programming, what we've been taught what we've experienced. We've all kind of taken this all internally and created a program of how we approach the world. And this includes our culture at home, what was acceptable to feel and how to cope. What did you learn to do as a child with anger or with doubt? Also, we've been influenced by our culture on what emotions are acceptable and how they get to be expressed. What are we told to do with jealousy? What are we told to do with shyness, especially as women, our personal experience also shapes this what has hap