May 21, 2026 • 45 mins
When we’re detached from our emotions, things can feel a little… flat. But though our brain might be trying to protect us from harm, emotionally detaching stops us from being able to appreciate the true richness of life. In this episode, we’ll unpack why emotional blunting occurs, the ways we might be avoiding our true emotions, and look at some ways to actually start to process your emotions.
We explore:
• Why we’re bad at feeling what we’re feeling
• The hidden strategies we use to push our emotions away
• How maladaptive coping mechanisms can cause us long-term harm
• Why most emotions are actually driven by fear
• How we can more effectively process our emotions
Watch on Netflix: HERE
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For business: psychologyofyour20s@gmail.com
Our favourite sources:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12916575/
https://positivepsychology.com/maladaptive-coping/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/basics/intellectualization
The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the
Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through
the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and
what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back
(00:26):
to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is
so great to have you here. Back for another episode
as we, of course break down the psychology of our twenties. Today,
let's talk about something I think many of us believe
we are doing but probably aren't doing very well, which
is processing our emotions. This is something that I've come
(00:47):
to find. If you are a very self aware, smart individual,
of whom I know many of you are, and you
cry occasionally, and you get sad occasionally, and you're happy occasionally,
and you have every word under the side to explain
what it is your feeling and why, you probably believe
that you are someone who processes your emotions well, or
(01:09):
who finds that their emotions have a very nice like beginning, middle,
and end. You definitely see yourself as somebody who is
very emotionally adjusted. Maybe you are, but I'm very guilty
of this. Just knowing the words for your emotions or
just knowing how you think you should be feeling and
knowing why you should feel. That isn't the same as
(01:31):
a actually allowing yourself to feel those emotions fully, even
in their ugliest form, and b is not the same
as being able to move through those emotions and move
through the discomfort. I think more and more of us
thanks to social media, thanks to just the reduction of stigma,
thanks to just education, like we have the language for
(01:53):
our emotions without actually having the tools and without actually
being able to fully express them. That's meaning we're still
kind of feeling emotionally stunted, even though we're very informed.
That means that, without realizing it, we can become somebody
who can't connect with their emotions in a deep way,
who can't connect with their emotions without feeling debilitated by them,
(02:17):
even though we feel like we should and we do
have a good hand over what we're feeling. So that
is what we're going to break down today, kind of
a guide to the research on why and how we
avoid our emotions without consciously realizing it, what that actually
looks like in our behavior and in our reactions to things,
and some of the greatest tools and studies on what
(02:39):
to actually do, like what does it mean to process
an emotion? What does it mean to be able to
cry when you want to cry? Sing and experience joy
when you want to experience joy, be disappointed when you
want to be disappointed. And I guess, like really just
exploring why that's actually a gift and we shouldn't be
afraid to process emotions in a way that maybe is
(02:59):
a little bit ugly, And I guess how we do
that in the first place. So without further ado, let's
get into how to actually process your emotions to begin with,
how can we identify when we are becoming detached from
our emotions and how can we identify when we are
(03:20):
not processing our emotions in a sustainable way? Because I
think sometimes it's not that obvious, right when we're attached
or I'm sorry, detached from our emotions, though, I think
things just feel flat, like we don't feel sad, we
also don't feel happy. I've sometimes heard this described as
like the world is a little bit it's fuzzy, right.
(03:42):
You don't seem to feel your pain in its fullest form,
But you also don't feel your happiness in its fullest
form either. You're like existing in the middle frequency of
your feelings. Sometimes we're very aware that this is the case,
and sometimes like I don't want to say, we enjoy it,
but I don't know, we rely on it, or we
(04:04):
just don't have the capacity to fix this numbness. Like
after you've been through a big breakup, or you've lost
your job, or you've had a really traumatic incident, you
probably know you should be feeling things on a deeper level.
You know you should be grieving or anxious, but it
is like this emergency part of your body switches off
and you don't necessarily know whether it would be better
(04:26):
to switch it back on again. People can last like
years in this state of numbness, even after the original
situation is like well in the past, even after the
thing is like it, even if it looks like they've
eerily been coping all along, what's actually happening is that
the emotions are like they're still sitting in the emotional
(04:49):
waiting room. They are yet to be processed, and they
need to be processed to be moved out of that
waiting room. So why are we so bad at feeling
our feelings? Obviously there's a few a few very clear reasons,
the biggest one being that processing our emotions in a
helpful way was probably something that was never modeled to
(05:11):
us as children or at any stage really by society,
by our parents, by anybody, and so we don't have
a guide on how to feel our emotions without them
completely overwhelming us. There's this, well, there was this really
huge paper from like, I don't know, twenty ten that
showed especially if you have emotionally stunted parents. In particular,
(05:32):
this reduces how many different emotions people report being able
to label or feel, and it's highly correlated to emotional
suppression in individuals themselves. So people couldn't name as many
emotions as they actually had available to them. Contrary to
popular belief, emotions are also not things that were born understanding,
(05:53):
like we have to form a relationship to our emotions,
and that is done by modeling the people around us
and seeing what they're doing. If emotions aren't shown unless
they are this extreme thing, we don't actually get those skills,
and if they, again, it are only shown at their highest,
most intense level. That also drives us to be a
(06:15):
bit more avoidant of our emotions, because our impression is
that the only way to feel our feelings is intensely,
and is maybe violently or is severely. There is no moderation.
Somebody's gonna get hurt, and so we don't feel them
at all. Another reason we are about it feeling our
feelings because it feels like self protection. If we don't
(06:39):
feel sad about what happened, who's to say it happened
at all. If we don't let ourselves feel angry, then
maybe the emotional impact of what we've been through will
just fade away like ignorance is bliss. That's kind of
the mindset that we have unconsciously. The longer we avoid
the emotional consequences. Though. The longer we avoid, the longer
(07:01):
we avoid the origin point and we prevent ourselves from
examining it. There's so much research that does also show
that this isn't again, this isn't a conscious thing. Sometimes
our minds will unconsciously blunt or numb our emotions for
us so that we can endure hard situations and so
that our immediate survival isn't compromised by the intensity of
(07:24):
our sadness or the intensity of our grief, our outrage,
our loneliness, and the irrationality of those emotions sometimes the
fact that they cause us to sometimes do things we
don't want to do. The issue is that off switch
isn't selective, it's very rudimentary. It doesn't just shut down
what our brain sees is compromising or bad emotions. It's
(07:45):
just going to shut down everything, meaning that all those
positive feelings we still very much want to feel get
dialed down, get diluted for us. Also, because our mind
is preventing us from feeling the bad feelings, the good
feeling come along with it. When something difficult or traumatic happens,
or when numerous really frustrating, hard situations occur all at once,
(08:10):
our nervous system is basically just like an overwhelmed worker,
like it just can't cope. There's this amazing book called
The Inner World of Trauma, and the author of that
book describes this phenomena very very well, where he says,
we are all given more to experience in life than
we can experience consciously, so like our brain cannot fathom
(08:33):
everything that we have to go through. Emotional numbing is
one of the ways that our brain our minds have
adapted to endure it. Remember your brain, your mind doesn't
care if you are fulfilled, like at a fundamental level,
it doesn't care if you are happy, It doesn't care
if you are in touch with your emotions. It just
cares that you are alive. And if that means shutting
(08:55):
down the emotional centers of the brain, so be it.
Even if that means we don't process things fully or
we never process the middle and they linger. I think
a lesser explored explanation as well is that we can
also become emotionally numb and have this part of our
brain shut off due to vicarious suffering and vicarious exposure
(09:18):
to stressful and harmful things. Yes, we may be enduring
hard things in our lives. Our relationship isn't working the
way we want it to, our parents are getting older,
our jobs suck, we don't make enough money. But at
the same time as all of that personal stuff is
going on, we're also being exposed to so much, just
like everyday suffering in the world beyond ourselves, and so
(09:39):
much daily stress about the future of the world, that
our individual issues become less of a priority and we're
not able to focus on them because we have been
emotionally desensitized. Think of it this way, if you, I
don't know, if you lived in like a if you
lived in an isolated island and you had been for
(10:01):
the last ten years and you suddenly came back to
life right now, in reality, right now, in society, right now,
you would freak out. You would think, oh my gosh,
the world has gone to shit, like it is an
awful place to be being somewhat desensitized to that is
our brain's way of trying to keep us calm in
the face of just like an onslaught of negative information
(10:23):
that would otherwise emotionally paralyze us and maybe cause us
to do irrational things, and that then bleeds into our
personal lives. There is this really fascinating study they did,
I think like over a decade ago now in Canada, Canada,
the US, I can't remember where. They exposed sixty men
and women to read either negative news stories or neutral
(10:47):
news stories, and then they measured their cortisol levels. The
cortisol levels of these individuals didn't jump that significantly when
they read the paper, but when they then exposed them
to a personal stressor afterwards. That is when the people
who had been exposed to the negative news story, that's
when their stress response was revealed to be much much
(11:08):
larger compared to those who read the neutral stories. Essentially,
like the story may not have stressed them out, but
it definitely lowered their ability to deal with their daily lives.
And we know the more stressed you are, the less
connected you are with your emotions. The very environment we
are in right now, you're me like the chaos that
we are enduring as a society, that does impact your
(11:32):
personal ability to feel sad, to feel happy, to feel
anything at all, because your cognitive resources are already taken
up with so much other stuff happening around you. When
it comes to emotional suppression, though, because that's really what
we're talking about, there's actually two levels going on right
This level we've just been talking about is often very unconscious,
(11:54):
like the nervous system jumps in, shuts everything down that
goes to town, just leveling down our emotions, making us numb.
The second level, though, is when we actually employ very
often specific, deliberate coping mechanisms to shut down our emotions.
For us, the first level like no emotions are getting
(12:15):
through at all. The second level, emotions are getting through,
but then we're fielding these emotions or using these certain
methods or coping mechanisms. So we've talked about the first kind,
but what are these underlying methods that we use in
the second level of emotional suppression? You are you definitely
are probably familiar with a lot of these, And I
(12:36):
think the biggest one that I think of for a
lot of smart twenty somethings, like what we find ourselves
doing is over intellectualizing. If you are a smart person,
you are so used to being able to outthink or
out smart any problem in your life that you apply
the same behavior to your feelings. Intellectualizing. This is essentially
(12:58):
we are trying to reason our way through what we're
feeling in order to make those emotions more manageable. And
I read this wonderful Psychology Today article that basically said,
by channeling our emotions towards logic and reason and assessment,
we make what is deeply personal a lot more abstract,
Like we kind of get to remain at arm's length
(13:20):
from it without actually feeling the hard parts of it,
because it's something that we understand theoretically and therefore we
don't have to understand emotionally. You know, if you're deeply
hurt by a relationship breakdown, if you're really terrified of
being single, if you're struggling with heartbreak, instead of letting
yourself be sad, if you like throw yourself into analyzing
(13:42):
emotional attachment styles and reading self help books and like
microanalyzing every single thing, like in a very systematic way,
that means you don't actually have to feel how sad
you are. Another example is like, if you're somebody who's
been hurt deeply by your parents past behavior and their
unkindness and their cruelty, using language that describes their behavior
(14:08):
and the psychological family models that they're operating in, and
you know all the different science, but never actually using
any language to describe how you feel or how you felt.
That is intellectualizing. You know, if you're going through grief,
you could tell me the five stages of grief. You
could tell me the biology of grief, the psychology of loss,
but that's not the same as feeling what you are
(14:29):
actually going through. The thing is that like knowing and
having the words for it sounds a lot like processing,
but it's at this like emotionally distant level where like
we are adding a layer and layer of rational explanation
onto a onto an emotional wound. We're wrapping it up
(14:51):
in this like cellophane or in this like bubble wrap,
so that we don't actually have to feel the raw feeling.
The other thing about this is it just like it
just doesn't work. Like we have evidence to show that
intellectualizing in the long term doesn't work. Specifically, some studies
in the early two thousands that looked at hundreds of
participants and essentially found that people who like have the
(15:14):
academic or intellectual words for how they feel may not
necessarily adjust better than people who don't, because the people
who don't often just have to sit with the feeling.
They can't explain it away. This is something I've heard.
I've actually spoken to a lot of my friends who
are psychologists about this, and they struggle with this with
(15:36):
their patients. Right Like, they have a patient come in
who's probably a lot like you, very very smart, very curious.
You're listening to this podcast, like, you know, you really
want to know answers for yourself. You've maybe experienced real hurt, portrayal, rejection,
and you have this language for why this person did
what they did. You understand the psychology behind why they
(15:57):
reacted the way they did, but now you almost, like
my friends say, like I almost have to do the reverse.
I can't just give the explanation. I have to almost
take the explanation away from these people and just be like,
just sit with it, like you don't need the complex words,
just feel. So that's the first way intellectualizing. Another way
(16:17):
we avoid processing our emotions is through escapism, which, just
like intellectualism, is complicated at times because it's so socially acceptable,
Like it is really socially acceptable to go out and
get drunk after losing your job and maybe you know,
the next day and the next day because like why
the hell not, like you're unemployed. It is super socially
(16:40):
acceptable to binge watch a TV show instead of going
out with your friends, or to always have a TV
show playing in the background so you don't have to
listen to your thoughts. You know, it's socially acceptable. Just
to give one more example, to become obsessed with loving
or even hating a particular celebrity, becoming obsessed with a
particular book series, video game, with going to the gym
(17:02):
after you've gone through something hard, or just on a
regular basis, escapism like The psychological definition is essentially when
we divert our attention away from internal discomfort by immersing
ourselves in an outside situation that feels a lot safer
and easier to control and to understand. I feel like
(17:23):
hating celebrities is a great example of this. It is
not only obviously a distraction, it is a way in
which we get to feel like we're controlling somebody else's life,
or we have a say, or we have some kind
of authority over them, when during it and within our
own lives, we don't have any authority. We feel the
complete opposite. We feel completely out of control. There's one
(17:48):
massive form of escapism though, that we need to discuss like.
It's probably the one that you are going to relate
to the most. We're going to take a short break,
see if you can guess we'll be right back. A
huge form of escapism that I think we are all
(18:11):
waking up to, and which I know is my coping
mechanism for sure, is overworking. We live in a culture
that celebrates hard work, glorifies people who put in extra shifts,
who sleep less than they need, who are always really
really busy. What you don't see is that when somebody
(18:33):
is a workaholic or maybe even like a passionoholic, right,
like maybe they're not working all the time, but they
always have like a million hobbies and activities or things
that need their attention. This can be a way of
physically cramming your life to be so emotionally full there
is no space left for the negative feelings to creep in.
(18:54):
And may that is not may, it is applauded. And
actually a lot of times people who will work a
whole do see great success. They may do better professionally,
but you'd be surprised. Like their mental life, their social life,
their emotional life probably suffers greatly, like deeply. It's also
self reinforcing. The more we avoid our feelings through work,
(19:17):
the more we are driven to other negative behaviors once
working hard loses its allure. There was a study from
twenty twenty five that followed like twelve hundred full time
employees aged twenty five to sixty five, and these participants
filled out an online survey they talked about that it
essentially assessed them for work addiction, emotional regulation, deficits, addictive eating,
(19:42):
physical functioning, like all these other coping mechanisms and The
study showed that workaholics had a depleted levels of emotional
regulation over time because again their only coping mechanism is
just to work more. But that also led to be
them being more likely to have addictive behaviors like substance use,
(20:05):
excessive drinking, eating as a coping mechanism because it became
the self reinforcing cycle. It would like, the more you
work hard and the more you push, the less resources
you have to take care of yourself, the less resources
you have to hold yourself up, and so the more
you then have to rely on other behaviors to give
(20:25):
you dopamine and other behaviors to make you feel whole.
From a neuroscience perspective, which you guys know we always
have to offer a neuroscientific perspective, many of these behaviors
are rewarded, particularly through dopamine pathways, and they're rewarded in
the short term, which makes them highly addictive but stops
(20:46):
us from actually resolving the underlying emotional state over time.
What happens is something psychologists referred to as experiential avoidance.
This is a really key concept from our acceptance and
commitment there and essentially, the more we try and suppress
or outrun a feeling through whatever behavior is working anything,
(21:08):
the more persistent and intrusive it becomes. The emotion. Yeah,
it seemingly disappears, it's actually like in the background doing
pushups and getting stronger and stronger and stronger, because it
starts feeling more and more scary the more we avoid it,
and we just keep delaying the moment that we will
eventually have to face it, meaning that when we eventually do,
(21:29):
we start to believe that all emotions, when we encounter them,
must be difficult to manage because we only feel them
at their most extreme point. Why we're really doing all
of this is like because we're scared, Like we're really
scared that when the emotion finally hits us, it's going
to take out the whole village and we're not going
(21:49):
to be able to cope. Probably because yeah, again, we're
falling into this pattern where we don't feel, we don't feel,
and then when we do feel, it's at like level
five thousand, and we're so scared of excessively ruminating, we're
so scared of hypervigilance taking over our lives. We don't
know how to down regulate our feelings. We don't know
how to stick, like just to sit with them. We
(22:12):
don't know how to deal with them, and so it
just gets worse again, not by choice, but through years
of subconsciously teaching our minds that big feelings are big disasters,
therefore they should be avoided. Therefore, when we do feel them,
there we don't have any healthy coping skills because the
only way we cope is to just put up as
(22:32):
many barriers as possible between us and the feeling. It's
very sad. I think it's sad because it actually denies
us the ability to enjoy a rich and meaningful life,
or to identify what needs to change, or to work
through things until they have a stable resolution. Also, we
don't know ourselves, and we don't know ourselves if you
don't know your emotions. Your emotions are a reaction to
(22:55):
your experiences. How can you know your experiences if you
never in touch with what you feel about them? So, yeah,
we miss out, and that's why we need to talk
about Okay, what are we going to do here? Like,
what is the path back to feeling our feelings without
feeling like? My God, I want to know how many
times I say feeling in this episode, but without feeling
(23:16):
like they are going to completely run our lives? How
do we actually process our emotions? Something I've really come
to learn recently is that our big emotions often like
to disguise or hide themselves as other emotions that feel
more temporary or easy to manage. And that's what we
(23:39):
would call a presentation later, that's the word I've heard
use to describe it. If you want to learn how
to process your emotions, you have to look for the
clues and interrogate what is the immediate feeling and what
is the deeper feeling, Like what is the feeling that
comes first, and what is the feeling that actually wants
to be heard? In psychology, I think I've heard people
(24:01):
refer to this as like a primary emotion, which is
the original instinctual response, Like that's the real emotion, the sadness,
the fear, the loneliness, and then again the secondary emotion
and that's the one that comes in to protect us,
like anger, irritability, numbness, even humor. At times, I feel
(24:21):
like humor is a massive coping mechanism. And again this
is a learned response, and it can often feel like
the secondary emotion is the main emotion because it's a
lot louder and it's a lot more visible. For example,
like I think anger is the best example of this. Actually,
anger can feel a lot safer than admitting that you
feel rejected. So when you've been like slided by a friend,
(24:44):
or criticized at work, or ghosted or whatever, it's easier
to just feel rage than to investigate why you feel rage,
Probably because you're scared about your value. You're scared about
being lonely. This is bringing up past experiences of never
feeling wanted or needed by anybody, and under all that
anger is fear, and under all that fear is a
(25:08):
deeper fear of loss, of losing people, of not feeling seen.
Another example is jealousy. It's a lot easier to feel
jealous of your partner's new girlfriend and to obsess over
that jealousy than to admit that you actually feel a deep,
deep sense of loss and sadness for the fact that
(25:28):
you know the future you imagine with this person it's
not going to happen, or your sadness at the years
that you feel you've now wasted. Jealousy anger, like the
thing about our secondary emotions is that they often lead
to behaviors yet again that further detach us, yes, through avoidance,
but also through blame, through minimization, attacking other people, pushing
(25:54):
other people away, like through jealousy, through anger, that sort
of thing, so they actually don't do us any favor.
You know. It's a really great depiction of this. This
I just thought about. This is Louis Thru's documentary about
the Manisphere. I don't know if you've seen it. Great,
by the way, you should watch it. But one thing
that really jumps out to me about the whole Red
(26:15):
Pill Manisphere movement and the men in this documentary is
that so many of them are just like deeply afraid
and they have such deep childhood wounds that they don't
want to address. I watched it a couple months ago,
so but from memory, I think from memory, I think
only one of the men that he interviews doesn't have
(26:37):
a complex relationship with their father or their mother or
their families. Only one of them, and there's like ten
people he interviews, And the anger and the control they
feel towards women and sometimes towards themselves, I think just
conceals a deeper fear of being lonely, or of a
loss of respect or social standing, a fear of not
having control over one's own life or being seen is
(27:00):
unworthy because they've gotten all this rejection from their parents.
Like not to psychoanalyze them, but I really do think
that's an explanation. The inability to correctly identify and accept
these feelings of anxiety and fear is why this movement
has gained so much notoriety and so much following amongst
people who are similarly confused. And they're like, cool, this
(27:23):
is a great way that I don't have to ever
feel any of that. I can just be mad and mean.
This is something a psychologist friend of mine said to
me a few weeks back. I was talking to her
about this episode, she says. She said to me, so
often our emotions pair up, like they come in pairs.
There's the real emotion and then it's like bodyguard who
(27:46):
we see and feel first. Like the thing we have
to do is push past the bodyguard to see what's
actually behind the bodyguard and see what the true emotion is,
which often is quite a vulnerable emotion and quite a
weak emotion, and hence why it needs the bodyguard. So
I think part of processing our emotions is just initially
(28:06):
asking ourselves, like, is this what I'm really feeling? He's
like this anger, this jealousy, this outrage, this shame. Is
this really what I'm feeling? Or what am I trying
to hide from? Here? What's the bodyguard covering up for?
Another good way to do this is just like quite simple,
expand your emotional vocabulary beyond just happy, sad, angry, even
(28:29):
just fine. We all use these words a lot. I
use these words a lot, but I bet you like
quite often these words don't actually properly describe the emotional
state that you are in. Giving yourself more words to
work with to correctly identify what it is you're actually
feeling is so helpful. Literally, you can go online right now,
(28:49):
find a massive list, copy it into your notes app
when you're angry, before bed, whenever you need it, find
the word that you actually think best matches what you
are sitting with, rather than just I'm not good or
I have to be numb because I don't have the words. Psychologically,
this is tied to a concept known as emotional granularity,
(29:12):
which is your ability to identify and label emotions with precision.
Emotional granularity is actually it's a really new term, only
like I think, it was only written about a couple
of years back by this woman called Lisa Feldman Barrett.
She wrote this book How Emotions Are Made in like
twenty seventeen. Don't quote me on that may have been earlier,
(29:33):
it may have been later. And she basically realized, like
whilst writing this book, that emotions fall across a four
point spectrum, how intense they are and how aroused they
make us feel, so, how positive or negative they are,
and basically whether they make us feel like intense or
quite slow and quite no more quite yeah? What's the
(29:57):
opposite of intense? I don't know, not int And her
research shows that people with higher emotional granularity they are
significantly better at regulating their emotions and being able to
place their emotions because the brain responds differently when an
experience is named accurately. So when you say I feel bad,
(30:18):
your mind has very little to work with because what
does bad mean? Bad? In what way? But when you
identify that, you know, I feel disappointed, I feel rejected,
I feel overstimulated, resentful. On certain you create clarity, and
when you are clear on something, you have control over
(30:39):
it and the ability to process it. This is also
connected to something called affect labeling, where just simply putting
feelings into words reduces Like they've shown this, it reduces
activity and you're amygdala your fear response or your threat center,
and it increases activity in areas responsible for reasoning and regulation.
(31:00):
In other words, the more specific you are, the more
words you have for your emotions, the less overwhelming your
emotions tend to feel, meaning you're better able to process them.
This is obviously harder for some people, especially for people
on the spectrum for example, they really struggle with this,
but it can be taught. Her research showed it can
be taught, and having more language does help. Just the language.
(31:24):
A fun fact also about emotional granularity. If you have
high emotional granularity, so you can label more emotions. This
may may seem very obvious, but you are also better
able to read other people and you're better able to
guess their emotions from very mindor facial expressions. So also
(31:44):
a good asset socially. When we have the label for
what we're feeling, when we've pushed past the initial emotional god,
then we can actually start like the processing part to
all of this, which annoyingly actually begins which just like
kind of doing nothing, like just microdosing the feeling and
(32:04):
learning to sit with it. Like processing emotions is incredibly
boring work. The easiest way like to do it is
just to sit with your emotion, but also just to
give your emotions standing appointments of five minutes. This is
a method that I heard about when I was at UNI,
but I recently saw it displayed in an episode of Shrinking, which,
(32:27):
Oh my god, best TV show on the planet right now.
Love the show in it, like quick summary because I'm
like their number one fan. The like it shows this
guy he's like a therapist. He's also a dad, and
his wife has died, and he is the therapist, Like
he is the person that he kind of needs, but
(32:47):
his life is falling apart, and he's basically trying to
get through, you know, the grief of losing his wife
and trying to take care of his daughter whilst he's
also trying to take care of people and like the
worst moments of their lives. Super funny. Jason Siegel's in it,
Harrison Ford's in it, a bunch of other great actors
are in it. That's besides the point they need to
(33:08):
cut me a check. For all the time I talk
about this TV show, but in there's this one episode
where Harrison Ford's character is basically like, you don't have
to the options aren't don't feel the feeling or feel
the feeling. You can just feel the feeling for five
minutes at a time. Put on a five minute timer.
Put on a song, even that's gonna last for the
(33:30):
amount of time that you have, and for the duration
of that song, for the duration of that five ten minutes,
just let it rip. Just let yourself feel every single
piece aspect depth of that emotion. Let yourself feel furious,
let yourself feel sad and on like and the sense
(33:52):
of injustice, let yourself feel disappointed, like you have five
minutes to just let just to open the cake, eight
just to go. This technique may sound slightly like avoidance,
because you know you're only limiting how long you can
feel the emotion for. But I think it addresses again
the biggest reason we don't want to feel anything at all.
(34:13):
We're worried that once we let the feeling in, like
they're the captain now, we're never going to be free
of it. But this exercise just continues to show you
like I'm in control. I am the feeling, and the
feeling is me. And if I just give it space
to have its tantrum, to have its moment, it's not
gonna overwhelm me. I don't have to spend my entire days,
(34:34):
all my life suppressing an emotion if I just give
it its appointment and let it let myself feel it
in that second, in those minutes. Okay, I have three
more methods for you, but we do need to take
one more short break. I'm sorry. We will be right back.
(34:55):
So giving your emotions a standing appointment definitely works. Putting
in your diary great technique. You know what also works?
Just freaking just screaming, literally just screaming, crying, ripping something,
punching something, dancing through something, chanting through something, running through something,
(35:17):
whatever it is, in a physical, expressive way. Let me
explain that, because I don't know, like, how can you
expressively run your probably thinking? Let me explain the whole
principle behind this. What we're basically talking about is somatic release.
Lots of us will know Vessel Vanderbilt's or Vandal Koch's
(35:37):
famous book The body keeps the score classic these days.
It's a classic if you haven't heard of it, or
if you want a summary. It basically shows that trauma
and emotion and pain register within our bodies on a
cellular level. So your break up, your self, doubt, your loneliness,
your anger at your parents, your anxiety is as much
physical as it is emotional, and the tension or the
(36:01):
tension of those emotions not being released impacts our muscles,
impacts our limbs, impacts ourselves in a dangerous way. Somatic
therapy is basically a way of processing that through kinetic
movement and turning the tap back on and processing it
through output and sensation and making like something, making it
(36:21):
feeling tangible, putting it into a physical form when it
normally sits in a very untouchable, unconscious form. A really
simple example of somatic healing is just shaking. I don't know,
if you have a dog, you'll see animals do this,
like after they experience a threat or their stress, they'll
like shake. That's the nervous system discharging excess energy, and
(36:45):
humans have the same mechanism, Like we've just learned to
suppress it. We've just learned to not look weird in
front of people, even though our body needs something from
us to process what we've been through. I know when
I went through like a really really sad time a
couple of years back, that, let's be real, manifested in
a lot of just like anger at the world. That
is when I picked up boxing, and I would sometimes
(37:07):
cry during those classes because I was so pent up
and angry at the world and life. What was really
below that anger was just like sadness and unfairness and helplessness.
I had to get the anger out. That was like,
I had to get through that. That was the only
way to access what was actually below the surface, and
(37:29):
boxing helped me do that by releasing the somatic or
the physical feeling. It's obviously a very intense example, but
the same mechanism as at play for things like yoga
as well. If you want to go down a hole
rabbit hole, look at the research on yoga and emotional
processing and how many people will want to cry, scream, chant,
(37:50):
heave giggle during yoga classes and yoga practice because of
how all these deep emotions are channeling through them physically,
probably for the first time ever. The most famous paper
on this is from twenty fourteen. It was a study
on sixty four women who had chronic treatment resistant PTSD.
So they tried a bunch of stuff and they divided
(38:12):
the group. They had half of them do these trauma
informed yoga sessions for like three years, and half of
them just do normal therapy. At the end of the study,
almost fifty two percent of the participants no longer met
the criteria for PTSD, compared to just twenty percent of
the people who did therapy alone. One in two of
those people PTSD was treated. Now, obviously, execute your judgment here.
(38:36):
This isn't an It's not the only method in intervention
for processing our feelings or for trauma, But you can't
deny the research is pretty powerful, Like, especially for a
somatic approach. There's so much evidence that this channeling works.
Any movement that you can or that you have access
to move through the emotion dance, hike, just wait, I
(39:00):
don't know anything. It all functions on the same kind
of plane and through the same mechanism of release. Another
way to really process your emotions is to capture it
through a different creative medium. Write it all down, send
yourself a voice note. When you're like in the middle
of the feeling journal, just to see how your emotions evolve,
(39:23):
make art, write poems, whatever it is. When you translate
your emotions into words, into sound, imagery, art, you are
essentially converting something raw and implicit and hidden into something
structured and explicit and visible. A lot of what processing
our emotions really is is just being able to sit
(39:45):
side by side within an emotion, let yourself feel it,
understand why you are having it and channeling it. And
how have humans been doing that for thousands of years
before you had podcasts like this one like through art.
Why do you I think so many albums or breakup albums?
Why do you think so many movies are about grief?
Or why do you think there's so much art about
(40:06):
suffering and war and violence? Because it is the or
one of the primary instinctual ways that we allow ourselves
to feel as a species. Finally, if you really want
to process your emotions and get to the solid core
of why you are feeling what you are feeling when
you are feeling it, oh my goodness, that was a
(40:27):
million times. But if you really want that emotional clarity,
that's going to mean you know, you know yourself. That's
going to mean that you are in touch with yourself.
Please stop telling yourself that you are not just you're
just not an emotions person. We are all feeling beings
who think second in that order. Nobody is just not
(40:49):
an emotions person. Something or someone has taught you that
you're not. But underneath it all is like this deep,
deep pool of feeling that will let you with so
much more that life has to offer, even if it's
hard at first. Sometimes the aim isn't to be constantly
emotionally calm and balanced and in checked. We want to
(41:11):
feel intense grief, we want to feel like we want
to feel rage when we witness injustice. We want to
feel sadness when we witness rejection. Your body knows what's
going on, and sometimes true emotional regulation is just being
able to feel that and sit with it and letting
(41:32):
a whole range of emotions in so you have emo diversity,
and letting that simply remind you like, oh my god,
this is evidence that I'm alive and I'm here and
life hurts sometimes, but sometimes it also feels absolutely amazing,
and I cannot have one of those things without the other.
I just think we're not aiming for perfection in our
(41:52):
emotional processing. Again, we're aiming for that emo diversity. Can
I look at my life and see that I'm feeling
things deeply from all angles? Because if it's just like
one of the crappiest things about being human, like, there
is nobody who feels absolutely happy all the time. And
I often think that the people who are able to
experience the deepest, most vibrant feelings of joy and feelings
(42:18):
of elation and just like friendship and kinship and greatness,
are the ones who've also really been at the been
at the other end of the spectrum, right who've really
been down in the dumps. Again, this is what we're
talking about right now. I think a lot of us
are sitting at this central frequency of emotion. We feel
(42:39):
every emotion, but we feel it at like fifty percent,
or we kind of only feel the emotions that influence
us to a mid range. We want to see and
feel every single peak and troth and again, to summarize
what that involves is understanding your coping mechanisms. What are
the ways that you are detaching from your motions through work,
(43:01):
through escapism, through intellectualizing, and then also understanding your emotional bodyguards.
For every deep emotion that feels painful or maybe shameful
to feel, there's going to be a corresponding emotion that
feels more appropriate to feel, like anger, like jealousy, like shame,
(43:21):
like nothing like numbness. You process your emotions by being
able to identify what that feeling actually is, which is
a distraction, and being able to move through that primary
feeling through somatic release, through art, through whatever means, so
that you can really get to the deep core of
(43:42):
you know, why do I feel this way? And beyond
an explanation, can I feel this way? Can I just
let myself sit in the discomfort of being alive and
know that sometimes that doesn't need an answer. I feel
like this is the thing we've been getting to you
all day. Like what does it mean to process your emotions?
It means being okay with not knowing why something is happening,
(44:04):
but just knowing that you are feeling it and letting
that be kind of part of your experience. That's my opinion.
That's my opinion. At least you can disagree. Maybe it
means something else to you, But I think that's all
I have time for. I need to take a. I
feel like I've said the word feeling about fifty million times,
so I need to I need to take a breath
after that. But I do hope that this episode has
(44:26):
been informative. When I learned about like emotional bodyguards, my
life changed. I genuinely was like, oh my god, I've
so much about who I am as a person is
explained because I used to be so angry, and I
was like, why am I such an angry, irritated person
at times? And I was like, oh, because that's like
the only way I know how to feel anything. So
(44:47):
maybe that's a realization you've had from this episode as well.
I want to thank our researcher, Lucy Davidson for her
help looking at some of these studies and research for
this episode. As always, if you want more of the
psychology of your twenties, you can go to our Instagram,
you can go to our substack, and you can watch
us on Netflix wherever you are in the world. If
(45:08):
you want to watch future episodes on your TV, on
your laptop, if you just want to see what it
looks like, that is available to you now worldwide. I'll
leave a little link in the description. But again, I
hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for visiting us here, Thanks
for staying till the end. Till next time, be safe,
be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very
(45:28):
very soon.
Hello everybody. I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the
Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through
the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and
what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back
(00:26):
to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is
so great to have you here. Back for another episode
as we, of course break down the psychology of our twenties. Today,
let's talk about something I think many of us believe
we are doing but probably aren't doing very well, which
is processing our emotions. This is something that I've come
(00:47):
to find. If you are a very self aware, smart individual,
of whom I know many of you are, and you
cry occasionally, and you get sad occasionally, and you're happy occasionally,
and you have every word under the side to explain
what it is your feeling and why, you probably believe
that you are someone who processes your emotions well, or
(01:09):
who finds that their emotions have a very nice like beginning, middle,
and end. You definitely see yourself as somebody who is
very emotionally adjusted. Maybe you are, but I'm very guilty
of this. Just knowing the words for your emotions or
just knowing how you think you should be feeling and
knowing why you should feel. That isn't the same as
(01:31):
a actually allowing yourself to feel those emotions fully, even
in their ugliest form, and b is not the same
as being able to move through those emotions and move
through the discomfort. I think more and more of us
thanks to social media, thanks to just the reduction of stigma,
thanks to just education, like we have the language for
(01:53):
our emotions without actually having the tools and without actually
being able to fully express them. That's meaning we're still
kind of feeling emotionally stunted, even though we're very informed.
That means that, without realizing it, we can become somebody
who can't connect with their emotions in a deep way,
who can't connect with their emotions without feeling debilitated by them,
(02:17):
even though we feel like we should and we do
have a good hand over what we're feeling. So that
is what we're going to break down today, kind of
a guide to the research on why and how we
avoid our emotions without consciously realizing it, what that actually
looks like in our behavior and in our reactions to things,
and some of the greatest tools and studies on what
(02:39):
to actually do, like what does it mean to process
an emotion? What does it mean to be able to
cry when you want to cry? Sing and experience joy
when you want to experience joy, be disappointed when you
want to be disappointed. And I guess, like really just
exploring why that's actually a gift and we shouldn't be
afraid to process emotions in a way that maybe is
(02:59):
a little bit ugly, And I guess how we do
that in the first place. So without further ado, let's
get into how to actually process your emotions to begin with,
how can we identify when we are becoming detached from
our emotions and how can we identify when we are
(03:20):
not processing our emotions in a sustainable way? Because I
think sometimes it's not that obvious, right when we're attached
or I'm sorry, detached from our emotions, though, I think
things just feel flat, like we don't feel sad, we
also don't feel happy. I've sometimes heard this described as
like the world is a little bit it's fuzzy, right.
(03:42):
You don't seem to feel your pain in its fullest form,
But you also don't feel your happiness in its fullest
form either. You're like existing in the middle frequency of
your feelings. Sometimes we're very aware that this is the case,
and sometimes like I don't want to say, we enjoy it,
but I don't know, we rely on it, or we
(04:04):
just don't have the capacity to fix this numbness. Like
after you've been through a big breakup, or you've lost
your job, or you've had a really traumatic incident, you
probably know you should be feeling things on a deeper level.
You know you should be grieving or anxious, but it
is like this emergency part of your body switches off
and you don't necessarily know whether it would be better
(04:26):
to switch it back on again. People can last like
years in this state of numbness, even after the original
situation is like well in the past, even after the
thing is like it, even if it looks like they've
eerily been coping all along, what's actually happening is that
the emotions are like they're still sitting in the emotional
(04:49):
waiting room. They are yet to be processed, and they
need to be processed to be moved out of that
waiting room. So why are we so bad at feeling
our feelings? Obviously there's a few a few very clear reasons,
the biggest one being that processing our emotions in a
helpful way was probably something that was never modeled to
(05:11):
us as children or at any stage really by society,
by our parents, by anybody, and so we don't have
a guide on how to feel our emotions without them
completely overwhelming us. There's this, well, there was this really
huge paper from like, I don't know, twenty ten that
showed especially if you have emotionally stunted parents. In particular,
(05:32):
this reduces how many different emotions people report being able
to label or feel, and it's highly correlated to emotional
suppression in individuals themselves. So people couldn't name as many
emotions as they actually had available to them. Contrary to
popular belief, emotions are also not things that were born understanding,
(05:53):
like we have to form a relationship to our emotions,
and that is done by modeling the people around us
and seeing what they're doing. If emotions aren't shown unless
they are this extreme thing, we don't actually get those skills,
and if they, again, it are only shown at their highest,
most intense level. That also drives us to be a
(06:15):
bit more avoidant of our emotions, because our impression is
that the only way to feel our feelings is intensely,
and is maybe violently or is severely. There is no moderation.
Somebody's gonna get hurt, and so we don't feel them
at all. Another reason we are about it feeling our
feelings because it feels like self protection. If we don't
(06:39):
feel sad about what happened, who's to say it happened
at all. If we don't let ourselves feel angry, then
maybe the emotional impact of what we've been through will
just fade away like ignorance is bliss. That's kind of
the mindset that we have unconsciously. The longer we avoid
the emotional consequences. Though. The longer we avoid, the longer
(07:01):
we avoid the origin point and we prevent ourselves from
examining it. There's so much research that does also show
that this isn't again, this isn't a conscious thing. Sometimes
our minds will unconsciously blunt or numb our emotions for
us so that we can endure hard situations and so
that our immediate survival isn't compromised by the intensity of
(07:24):
our sadness or the intensity of our grief, our outrage,
our loneliness, and the irrationality of those emotions sometimes the
fact that they cause us to sometimes do things we
don't want to do. The issue is that off switch
isn't selective, it's very rudimentary. It doesn't just shut down
what our brain sees is compromising or bad emotions. It's
(07:45):
just going to shut down everything, meaning that all those
positive feelings we still very much want to feel get
dialed down, get diluted for us. Also, because our mind
is preventing us from feeling the bad feelings, the good
feeling come along with it. When something difficult or traumatic happens,
or when numerous really frustrating, hard situations occur all at once,
(08:10):
our nervous system is basically just like an overwhelmed worker,
like it just can't cope. There's this amazing book called
The Inner World of Trauma, and the author of that
book describes this phenomena very very well, where he says,
we are all given more to experience in life than
we can experience consciously, so like our brain cannot fathom
(08:33):
everything that we have to go through. Emotional numbing is
one of the ways that our brain our minds have
adapted to endure it. Remember your brain, your mind doesn't
care if you are fulfilled, like at a fundamental level,
it doesn't care if you are happy, It doesn't care
if you are in touch with your emotions. It just
cares that you are alive. And if that means shutting
(08:55):
down the emotional centers of the brain, so be it.
Even if that means we don't process things fully or
we never process the middle and they linger. I think
a lesser explored explanation as well is that we can
also become emotionally numb and have this part of our
brain shut off due to vicarious suffering and vicarious exposure
(09:18):
to stressful and harmful things. Yes, we may be enduring
hard things in our lives. Our relationship isn't working the
way we want it to, our parents are getting older,
our jobs suck, we don't make enough money. But at
the same time as all of that personal stuff is
going on, we're also being exposed to so much, just
like everyday suffering in the world beyond ourselves, and so
(09:39):
much daily stress about the future of the world, that
our individual issues become less of a priority and we're
not able to focus on them because we have been
emotionally desensitized. Think of it this way, if you, I
don't know, if you lived in like a if you
lived in an isolated island and you had been for
(10:01):
the last ten years and you suddenly came back to
life right now, in reality, right now, in society, right now,
you would freak out. You would think, oh my gosh,
the world has gone to shit, like it is an
awful place to be being somewhat desensitized to that is
our brain's way of trying to keep us calm in
the face of just like an onslaught of negative information
(10:23):
that would otherwise emotionally paralyze us and maybe cause us
to do irrational things, and that then bleeds into our
personal lives. There is this really fascinating study they did,
I think like over a decade ago now in Canada, Canada,
the US, I can't remember where. They exposed sixty men
and women to read either negative news stories or neutral
(10:47):
news stories, and then they measured their cortisol levels. The
cortisol levels of these individuals didn't jump that significantly when
they read the paper, but when they then exposed them
to a personal stressor afterwards. That is when the people
who had been exposed to the negative news story, that's
when their stress response was revealed to be much much
(11:08):
larger compared to those who read the neutral stories. Essentially,
like the story may not have stressed them out, but
it definitely lowered their ability to deal with their daily lives.
And we know the more stressed you are, the less
connected you are with your emotions. The very environment we
are in right now, you're me like the chaos that
we are enduring as a society, that does impact your
(11:32):
personal ability to feel sad, to feel happy, to feel
anything at all, because your cognitive resources are already taken
up with so much other stuff happening around you. When
it comes to emotional suppression, though, because that's really what
we're talking about, there's actually two levels going on right
This level we've just been talking about is often very unconscious,
(11:54):
like the nervous system jumps in, shuts everything down that
goes to town, just leveling down our emotions, making us numb.
The second level, though, is when we actually employ very
often specific, deliberate coping mechanisms to shut down our emotions.
For us, the first level like no emotions are getting
(12:15):
through at all. The second level, emotions are getting through,
but then we're fielding these emotions or using these certain
methods or coping mechanisms. So we've talked about the first kind,
but what are these underlying methods that we use in
the second level of emotional suppression? You are you definitely
are probably familiar with a lot of these, And I
(12:36):
think the biggest one that I think of for a
lot of smart twenty somethings, like what we find ourselves
doing is over intellectualizing. If you are a smart person,
you are so used to being able to outthink or
out smart any problem in your life that you apply
the same behavior to your feelings. Intellectualizing. This is essentially
(12:58):
we are trying to reason our way through what we're
feeling in order to make those emotions more manageable. And
I read this wonderful Psychology Today article that basically said,
by channeling our emotions towards logic and reason and assessment,
we make what is deeply personal a lot more abstract,
Like we kind of get to remain at arm's length
(13:20):
from it without actually feeling the hard parts of it,
because it's something that we understand theoretically and therefore we
don't have to understand emotionally. You know, if you're deeply
hurt by a relationship breakdown, if you're really terrified of
being single, if you're struggling with heartbreak, instead of letting
yourself be sad, if you like throw yourself into analyzing
(13:42):
emotional attachment styles and reading self help books and like
microanalyzing every single thing, like in a very systematic way,
that means you don't actually have to feel how sad
you are. Another example is like, if you're somebody who's
been hurt deeply by your parents past behavior and their
unkindness and their cruelty, using language that describes their behavior
(14:08):
and the psychological family models that they're operating in, and
you know all the different science, but never actually using
any language to describe how you feel or how you felt.
That is intellectualizing. You know, if you're going through grief,
you could tell me the five stages of grief. You
could tell me the biology of grief, the psychology of loss,
but that's not the same as feeling what you are
(14:29):
actually going through. The thing is that like knowing and
having the words for it sounds a lot like processing,
but it's at this like emotionally distant level where like
we are adding a layer and layer of rational explanation
onto a onto an emotional wound. We're wrapping it up
(14:51):
in this like cellophane or in this like bubble wrap,
so that we don't actually have to feel the raw feeling.
The other thing about this is it just like it
just doesn't work. Like we have evidence to show that
intellectualizing in the long term doesn't work. Specifically, some studies
in the early two thousands that looked at hundreds of
participants and essentially found that people who like have the
(15:14):
academic or intellectual words for how they feel may not
necessarily adjust better than people who don't, because the people
who don't often just have to sit with the feeling.
They can't explain it away. This is something I've heard.
I've actually spoken to a lot of my friends who
are psychologists about this, and they struggle with this with
(15:36):
their patients. Right Like, they have a patient come in
who's probably a lot like you, very very smart, very curious.
You're listening to this podcast, like, you know, you really
want to know answers for yourself. You've maybe experienced real hurt, portrayal, rejection,
and you have this language for why this person did
what they did. You understand the psychology behind why they
(15:57):
reacted the way they did, but now you almost, like
my friends say, like I almost have to do the reverse.
I can't just give the explanation. I have to almost
take the explanation away from these people and just be like,
just sit with it, like you don't need the complex words,
just feel. So that's the first way intellectualizing. Another way
(16:17):
we avoid processing our emotions is through escapism, which, just
like intellectualism, is complicated at times because it's so socially acceptable,
Like it is really socially acceptable to go out and
get drunk after losing your job and maybe you know,
the next day and the next day because like why
the hell not, like you're unemployed. It is super socially
(16:40):
acceptable to binge watch a TV show instead of going
out with your friends, or to always have a TV
show playing in the background so you don't have to
listen to your thoughts. You know, it's socially acceptable. Just
to give one more example, to become obsessed with loving
or even hating a particular celebrity, becoming obsessed with a
particular book series, video game, with going to the gym
(17:02):
after you've gone through something hard, or just on a
regular basis, escapism like The psychological definition is essentially when
we divert our attention away from internal discomfort by immersing
ourselves in an outside situation that feels a lot safer
and easier to control and to understand. I feel like
(17:23):
hating celebrities is a great example of this. It is
not only obviously a distraction, it is a way in
which we get to feel like we're controlling somebody else's life,
or we have a say, or we have some kind
of authority over them, when during it and within our
own lives, we don't have any authority. We feel the
complete opposite. We feel completely out of control. There's one
(17:48):
massive form of escapism though, that we need to discuss like.
It's probably the one that you are going to relate
to the most. We're going to take a short break,
see if you can guess we'll be right back. A
huge form of escapism that I think we are all
(18:11):
waking up to, and which I know is my coping
mechanism for sure, is overworking. We live in a culture
that celebrates hard work, glorifies people who put in extra shifts,
who sleep less than they need, who are always really
really busy. What you don't see is that when somebody
(18:33):
is a workaholic or maybe even like a passionoholic, right,
like maybe they're not working all the time, but they
always have like a million hobbies and activities or things
that need their attention. This can be a way of
physically cramming your life to be so emotionally full there
is no space left for the negative feelings to creep in.
(18:54):
And may that is not may, it is applauded. And
actually a lot of times people who will work a
whole do see great success. They may do better professionally,
but you'd be surprised. Like their mental life, their social life,
their emotional life probably suffers greatly, like deeply. It's also
self reinforcing. The more we avoid our feelings through work,
(19:17):
the more we are driven to other negative behaviors once
working hard loses its allure. There was a study from
twenty twenty five that followed like twelve hundred full time
employees aged twenty five to sixty five, and these participants
filled out an online survey they talked about that it
essentially assessed them for work addiction, emotional regulation, deficits, addictive eating,
(19:42):
physical functioning, like all these other coping mechanisms and The
study showed that workaholics had a depleted levels of emotional
regulation over time because again their only coping mechanism is
just to work more. But that also led to be
them being more likely to have addictive behaviors like substance use,
(20:05):
excessive drinking, eating as a coping mechanism because it became
the self reinforcing cycle. It would like, the more you
work hard and the more you push, the less resources
you have to take care of yourself, the less resources
you have to hold yourself up, and so the more
you then have to rely on other behaviors to give
(20:25):
you dopamine and other behaviors to make you feel whole.
From a neuroscience perspective, which you guys know we always
have to offer a neuroscientific perspective, many of these behaviors
are rewarded, particularly through dopamine pathways, and they're rewarded in
the short term, which makes them highly addictive but stops
(20:46):
us from actually resolving the underlying emotional state over time.
What happens is something psychologists referred to as experiential avoidance.
This is a really key concept from our acceptance and
commitment there and essentially, the more we try and suppress
or outrun a feeling through whatever behavior is working anything,
(21:08):
the more persistent and intrusive it becomes. The emotion. Yeah,
it seemingly disappears, it's actually like in the background doing
pushups and getting stronger and stronger and stronger, because it
starts feeling more and more scary the more we avoid it,
and we just keep delaying the moment that we will
eventually have to face it, meaning that when we eventually do,
(21:29):
we start to believe that all emotions, when we encounter them,
must be difficult to manage because we only feel them
at their most extreme point. Why we're really doing all
of this is like because we're scared, Like we're really
scared that when the emotion finally hits us, it's going
to take out the whole village and we're not going
(21:49):
to be able to cope. Probably because yeah, again, we're
falling into this pattern where we don't feel, we don't feel,
and then when we do feel, it's at like level
five thousand, and we're so scared of excessively ruminating, we're
so scared of hypervigilance taking over our lives. We don't
know how to down regulate our feelings. We don't know
how to stick, like just to sit with them. We
(22:12):
don't know how to deal with them, and so it
just gets worse again, not by choice, but through years
of subconsciously teaching our minds that big feelings are big disasters,
therefore they should be avoided. Therefore, when we do feel them,
there we don't have any healthy coping skills because the
only way we cope is to just put up as
(22:32):
many barriers as possible between us and the feeling. It's
very sad. I think it's sad because it actually denies
us the ability to enjoy a rich and meaningful life,
or to identify what needs to change, or to work
through things until they have a stable resolution. Also, we
don't know ourselves, and we don't know ourselves if you
don't know your emotions. Your emotions are a reaction to
(22:55):
your experiences. How can you know your experiences if you
never in touch with what you feel about them? So, yeah,
we miss out, and that's why we need to talk
about Okay, what are we going to do here? Like,
what is the path back to feeling our feelings without
feeling like? My God, I want to know how many
times I say feeling in this episode, but without feeling
(23:16):
like they are going to completely run our lives? How
do we actually process our emotions? Something I've really come
to learn recently is that our big emotions often like
to disguise or hide themselves as other emotions that feel
more temporary or easy to manage. And that's what we
(23:39):
would call a presentation later, that's the word I've heard
use to describe it. If you want to learn how
to process your emotions, you have to look for the
clues and interrogate what is the immediate feeling and what
is the deeper feeling, Like what is the feeling that
comes first, and what is the feeling that actually wants
to be heard? In psychology, I think I've heard people
(24:01):
refer to this as like a primary emotion, which is
the original instinctual response, Like that's the real emotion, the sadness,
the fear, the loneliness, and then again the secondary emotion
and that's the one that comes in to protect us,
like anger, irritability, numbness, even humor. At times, I feel
(24:21):
like humor is a massive coping mechanism. And again this
is a learned response, and it can often feel like
the secondary emotion is the main emotion because it's a
lot louder and it's a lot more visible. For example,
like I think anger is the best example of this. Actually,
anger can feel a lot safer than admitting that you
feel rejected. So when you've been like slided by a friend,
(24:44):
or criticized at work, or ghosted or whatever, it's easier
to just feel rage than to investigate why you feel rage,
Probably because you're scared about your value. You're scared about
being lonely. This is bringing up past experiences of never
feeling wanted or needed by anybody, and under all that
anger is fear, and under all that fear is a
(25:08):
deeper fear of loss, of losing people, of not feeling seen.
Another example is jealousy. It's a lot easier to feel
jealous of your partner's new girlfriend and to obsess over
that jealousy than to admit that you actually feel a deep,
deep sense of loss and sadness for the fact that
(25:28):
you know the future you imagine with this person it's
not going to happen, or your sadness at the years
that you feel you've now wasted. Jealousy anger, like the
thing about our secondary emotions is that they often lead
to behaviors yet again that further detach us, yes, through avoidance,
but also through blame, through minimization, attacking other people, pushing
(25:54):
other people away, like through jealousy, through anger, that sort
of thing, so they actually don't do us any favor.
You know. It's a really great depiction of this. This
I just thought about. This is Louis Thru's documentary about
the Manisphere. I don't know if you've seen it. Great,
by the way, you should watch it. But one thing
that really jumps out to me about the whole Red
(26:15):
Pill Manisphere movement and the men in this documentary is
that so many of them are just like deeply afraid
and they have such deep childhood wounds that they don't
want to address. I watched it a couple months ago,
so but from memory, I think from memory, I think
only one of the men that he interviews doesn't have
(26:37):
a complex relationship with their father or their mother or
their families. Only one of them, and there's like ten
people he interviews, And the anger and the control they
feel towards women and sometimes towards themselves, I think just
conceals a deeper fear of being lonely, or of a
loss of respect or social standing, a fear of not
having control over one's own life or being seen is
(27:00):
unworthy because they've gotten all this rejection from their parents.
Like not to psychoanalyze them, but I really do think
that's an explanation. The inability to correctly identify and accept
these feelings of anxiety and fear is why this movement
has gained so much notoriety and so much following amongst
people who are similarly confused. And they're like, cool, this
(27:23):
is a great way that I don't have to ever
feel any of that. I can just be mad and mean.
This is something a psychologist friend of mine said to
me a few weeks back. I was talking to her
about this episode, she says. She said to me, so
often our emotions pair up, like they come in pairs.
There's the real emotion and then it's like bodyguard who
(27:46):
we see and feel first. Like the thing we have
to do is push past the bodyguard to see what's
actually behind the bodyguard and see what the true emotion is,
which often is quite a vulnerable emotion and quite a
weak emotion, and hence why it needs the bodyguard. So
I think part of processing our emotions is just initially
(28:06):
asking ourselves, like, is this what I'm really feeling? He's
like this anger, this jealousy, this outrage, this shame. Is
this really what I'm feeling? Or what am I trying
to hide from? Here? What's the bodyguard covering up for?
Another good way to do this is just like quite simple,
expand your emotional vocabulary beyond just happy, sad, angry, even
(28:29):
just fine. We all use these words a lot. I
use these words a lot, but I bet you like
quite often these words don't actually properly describe the emotional
state that you are in. Giving yourself more words to
work with to correctly identify what it is you're actually
feeling is so helpful. Literally, you can go online right now,
(28:49):
find a massive list, copy it into your notes app
when you're angry, before bed, whenever you need it, find
the word that you actually think best matches what you
are sitting with, rather than just I'm not good or
I have to be numb because I don't have the words. Psychologically,
this is tied to a concept known as emotional granularity,
(29:12):
which is your ability to identify and label emotions with precision.
Emotional granularity is actually it's a really new term, only
like I think, it was only written about a couple
of years back by this woman called Lisa Feldman Barrett.
She wrote this book How Emotions Are Made in like
twenty seventeen. Don't quote me on that may have been earlier,
(29:33):
it may have been later. And she basically realized, like
whilst writing this book, that emotions fall across a four
point spectrum, how intense they are and how aroused they
make us feel, so, how positive or negative they are,
and basically whether they make us feel like intense or
quite slow and quite no more quite yeah? What's the
(29:57):
opposite of intense? I don't know, not int And her
research shows that people with higher emotional granularity they are
significantly better at regulating their emotions and being able to
place their emotions because the brain responds differently when an
experience is named accurately. So when you say I feel bad,
(30:18):
your mind has very little to work with because what
does bad mean? Bad? In what way? But when you
identify that, you know, I feel disappointed, I feel rejected,
I feel overstimulated, resentful. On certain you create clarity, and
when you are clear on something, you have control over
(30:39):
it and the ability to process it. This is also
connected to something called affect labeling, where just simply putting
feelings into words reduces Like they've shown this, it reduces
activity and you're amygdala your fear response or your threat center,
and it increases activity in areas responsible for reasoning and regulation.
(31:00):
In other words, the more specific you are, the more
words you have for your emotions, the less overwhelming your
emotions tend to feel, meaning you're better able to process them.
This is obviously harder for some people, especially for people
on the spectrum for example, they really struggle with this,
but it can be taught. Her research showed it can
be taught, and having more language does help. Just the language.
(31:24):
A fun fact also about emotional granularity. If you have
high emotional granularity, so you can label more emotions. This
may may seem very obvious, but you are also better
able to read other people and you're better able to
guess their emotions from very mindor facial expressions. So also
(31:44):
a good asset socially. When we have the label for
what we're feeling, when we've pushed past the initial emotional god,
then we can actually start like the processing part to
all of this, which annoyingly actually begins which just like
kind of doing nothing, like just microdosing the feeling and
(32:04):
learning to sit with it. Like processing emotions is incredibly
boring work. The easiest way like to do it is
just to sit with your emotion, but also just to
give your emotions standing appointments of five minutes. This is
a method that I heard about when I was at UNI,
but I recently saw it displayed in an episode of Shrinking, which,
(32:27):
Oh my god, best TV show on the planet right now.
Love the show in it, like quick summary because I'm
like their number one fan. The like it shows this
guy he's like a therapist. He's also a dad, and
his wife has died, and he is the therapist, Like
he is the person that he kind of needs, but
(32:47):
his life is falling apart, and he's basically trying to
get through, you know, the grief of losing his wife
and trying to take care of his daughter whilst he's
also trying to take care of people and like the
worst moments of their lives. Super funny. Jason Siegel's in it,
Harrison Ford's in it, a bunch of other great actors
are in it. That's besides the point they need to
(33:08):
cut me a check. For all the time I talk
about this TV show, but in there's this one episode
where Harrison Ford's character is basically like, you don't have
to the options aren't don't feel the feeling or feel
the feeling. You can just feel the feeling for five
minutes at a time. Put on a five minute timer.
Put on a song, even that's gonna last for the
(33:30):
amount of time that you have, and for the duration
of that song, for the duration of that five ten minutes,
just let it rip. Just let yourself feel every single
piece aspect depth of that emotion. Let yourself feel furious,
let yourself feel sad and on like and the sense
(33:52):
of injustice, let yourself feel disappointed, like you have five
minutes to just let just to open the cake, eight
just to go. This technique may sound slightly like avoidance,
because you know you're only limiting how long you can
feel the emotion for. But I think it addresses again
the biggest reason we don't want to feel anything at all.
(34:13):
We're worried that once we let the feeling in, like
they're the captain now, we're never going to be free
of it. But this exercise just continues to show you
like I'm in control. I am the feeling, and the
feeling is me. And if I just give it space
to have its tantrum, to have its moment, it's not
gonna overwhelm me. I don't have to spend my entire days,
(34:34):
all my life suppressing an emotion if I just give
it its appointment and let it let myself feel it
in that second, in those minutes. Okay, I have three
more methods for you, but we do need to take
one more short break. I'm sorry. We will be right back.
(34:55):
So giving your emotions a standing appointment definitely works. Putting
in your diary great technique. You know what also works?
Just freaking just screaming, literally just screaming, crying, ripping something,
punching something, dancing through something, chanting through something, running through something,
(35:17):
whatever it is, in a physical, expressive way. Let me
explain that, because I don't know, like, how can you
expressively run your probably thinking? Let me explain the whole
principle behind this. What we're basically talking about is somatic release.
Lots of us will know Vessel Vanderbilt's or Vandal Koch's
(35:37):
famous book The body keeps the score classic these days.
It's a classic if you haven't heard of it, or
if you want a summary. It basically shows that trauma
and emotion and pain register within our bodies on a
cellular level. So your break up, your self, doubt, your loneliness,
your anger at your parents, your anxiety is as much
physical as it is emotional, and the tension or the
(36:01):
tension of those emotions not being released impacts our muscles,
impacts our limbs, impacts ourselves in a dangerous way. Somatic
therapy is basically a way of processing that through kinetic
movement and turning the tap back on and processing it
through output and sensation and making like something, making it
(36:21):
feeling tangible, putting it into a physical form when it
normally sits in a very untouchable, unconscious form. A really
simple example of somatic healing is just shaking. I don't know,
if you have a dog, you'll see animals do this,
like after they experience a threat or their stress, they'll
like shake. That's the nervous system discharging excess energy, and
(36:45):
humans have the same mechanism, Like we've just learned to
suppress it. We've just learned to not look weird in
front of people, even though our body needs something from
us to process what we've been through. I know when
I went through like a really really sad time a
couple of years back, that, let's be real, manifested in
a lot of just like anger at the world. That
is when I picked up boxing, and I would sometimes
(37:07):
cry during those classes because I was so pent up
and angry at the world and life. What was really
below that anger was just like sadness and unfairness and helplessness.
I had to get the anger out. That was like,
I had to get through that. That was the only
way to access what was actually below the surface, and
(37:29):
boxing helped me do that by releasing the somatic or
the physical feeling. It's obviously a very intense example, but
the same mechanism as at play for things like yoga
as well. If you want to go down a hole
rabbit hole, look at the research on yoga and emotional
processing and how many people will want to cry, scream, chant,
(37:50):
heave giggle during yoga classes and yoga practice because of
how all these deep emotions are channeling through them physically,
probably for the first time ever. The most famous paper
on this is from twenty fourteen. It was a study
on sixty four women who had chronic treatment resistant PTSD.
So they tried a bunch of stuff and they divided
(38:12):
the group. They had half of them do these trauma
informed yoga sessions for like three years, and half of
them just do normal therapy. At the end of the study,
almost fifty two percent of the participants no longer met
the criteria for PTSD, compared to just twenty percent of
the people who did therapy alone. One in two of
those people PTSD was treated. Now, obviously, execute your judgment here.
(38:36):
This isn't an It's not the only method in intervention
for processing our feelings or for trauma, But you can't
deny the research is pretty powerful, Like, especially for a
somatic approach. There's so much evidence that this channeling works.
Any movement that you can or that you have access
to move through the emotion dance, hike, just wait, I
(39:00):
don't know anything. It all functions on the same kind
of plane and through the same mechanism of release. Another
way to really process your emotions is to capture it
through a different creative medium. Write it all down, send
yourself a voice note. When you're like in the middle
of the feeling journal, just to see how your emotions evolve,
(39:23):
make art, write poems, whatever it is. When you translate
your emotions into words, into sound, imagery, art, you are
essentially converting something raw and implicit and hidden into something
structured and explicit and visible. A lot of what processing
our emotions really is is just being able to sit
(39:45):
side by side within an emotion, let yourself feel it,
understand why you are having it and channeling it. And
how have humans been doing that for thousands of years
before you had podcasts like this one like through art.
Why do you I think so many albums or breakup albums?
Why do you think so many movies are about grief?
Or why do you think there's so much art about
(40:06):
suffering and war and violence? Because it is the or
one of the primary instinctual ways that we allow ourselves
to feel as a species. Finally, if you really want
to process your emotions and get to the solid core
of why you are feeling what you are feeling when
you are feeling it, oh my goodness, that was a
(40:27):
million times. But if you really want that emotional clarity,
that's going to mean you know, you know yourself. That's
going to mean that you are in touch with yourself.
Please stop telling yourself that you are not just you're
just not an emotions person. We are all feeling beings
who think second in that order. Nobody is just not
(40:49):
an emotions person. Something or someone has taught you that
you're not. But underneath it all is like this deep,
deep pool of feeling that will let you with so
much more that life has to offer, even if it's
hard at first. Sometimes the aim isn't to be constantly
emotionally calm and balanced and in checked. We want to
(41:11):
feel intense grief, we want to feel like we want
to feel rage when we witness injustice. We want to
feel sadness when we witness rejection. Your body knows what's
going on, and sometimes true emotional regulation is just being
able to feel that and sit with it and letting
(41:32):
a whole range of emotions in so you have emo diversity,
and letting that simply remind you like, oh my god,
this is evidence that I'm alive and I'm here and
life hurts sometimes, but sometimes it also feels absolutely amazing,
and I cannot have one of those things without the other.
I just think we're not aiming for perfection in our
(41:52):
emotional processing. Again, we're aiming for that emo diversity. Can
I look at my life and see that I'm feeling
things deeply from all angles? Because if it's just like
one of the crappiest things about being human, like, there
is nobody who feels absolutely happy all the time. And
I often think that the people who are able to
experience the deepest, most vibrant feelings of joy and feelings
(42:18):
of elation and just like friendship and kinship and greatness,
are the ones who've also really been at the been
at the other end of the spectrum, right who've really
been down in the dumps. Again, this is what we're
talking about right now. I think a lot of us
are sitting at this central frequency of emotion. We feel
(42:39):
every emotion, but we feel it at like fifty percent,
or we kind of only feel the emotions that influence
us to a mid range. We want to see and
feel every single peak and troth and again, to summarize
what that involves is understanding your coping mechanisms. What are
the ways that you are detaching from your motions through work,
(43:01):
through escapism, through intellectualizing, and then also understanding your emotional bodyguards.
For every deep emotion that feels painful or maybe shameful
to feel, there's going to be a corresponding emotion that
feels more appropriate to feel, like anger, like jealousy, like shame,
(43:21):
like nothing like numbness. You process your emotions by being
able to identify what that feeling actually is, which is
a distraction, and being able to move through that primary
feeling through somatic release, through art, through whatever means, so
that you can really get to the deep core of
(43:42):
you know, why do I feel this way? And beyond
an explanation, can I feel this way? Can I just
let myself sit in the discomfort of being alive and
know that sometimes that doesn't need an answer. I feel
like this is the thing we've been getting to you
all day. Like what does it mean to process your emotions?
It means being okay with not knowing why something is happening,
(44:04):
but just knowing that you are feeling it and letting
that be kind of part of your experience. That's my opinion.
That's my opinion. At least you can disagree. Maybe it
means something else to you, But I think that's all
I have time for. I need to take a. I
feel like I've said the word feeling about fifty million times,
so I need to I need to take a breath
after that. But I do hope that this episode has
(44:26):
been informative. When I learned about like emotional bodyguards, my
life changed. I genuinely was like, oh my god, I've
so much about who I am as a person is
explained because I used to be so angry, and I
was like, why am I such an angry, irritated person
at times? And I was like, oh, because that's like
the only way I know how to feel anything. So
(44:47):
maybe that's a realization you've had from this episode as well.
I want to thank our researcher, Lucy Davidson for her
help looking at some of these studies and research for
this episode. As always, if you want more of the
psychology of your twenties, you can go to our Instagram,
you can go to our substack, and you can watch
us on Netflix wherever you are in the world. If
(45:08):
you want to watch future episodes on your TV, on
your laptop, if you just want to see what it
looks like, that is available to you now worldwide. I'll
leave a little link in the description. But again, I
hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for visiting us here, Thanks
for staying till the end. Till next time, be safe,
be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very
(45:28):
very soon.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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