← Take Out Therapy: End Overthinking & Overwhelm for Empathic High Achievers
Take Out Therapy: End Overthinking & Overwhelm for Empathic High Achievers
Prevent Burnout and Emotional Overwhelm With A Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Skill
00:11:50
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:00]
A
In this episode, you'll discover a simple process to track your mood so you can see yourself clearly, stop assuming the worst and actually feel more balanced. Welcome to Takeout Therapy, the podcast for empathic high achievers who are done with overthinking, overworking and overwhelm. I'm Rebecca Hunter, a therapist and anxiety expert, helping busy, big hearted people like you learn practical tools to quiet their minds, manage emotions, and live life with ease. If this all sounds good to you, you're in the right. Thanks for listening. Let's get to work. Well, hello there friend. I'm so happy you stopped in for today's episode. My goal today is to help you build self awareness so you can respond to your emotions in real time rather than react to them. By the end of this episode, you'll understand why it's so hard to gauge how we're actually doing in the moment and how tracking your mood will help you separate your perception from your reality. And of course, I'll give you three questions that make mood awareness easy and sustainable. Mood tracking is a fundamental skill in cognitive behavioral therapy, actually, and I started doing it early in my career because at the end of a long day of seeing a ton of clients in community mental health, I was emotionally exhausted, but I didn't really understand why or understand all the different elements that go into us ending up emotionally exhausted. When I finally started jotting down how I felt each day, just like five words usually, it showed me patterns that I couldn't see. When I was dealing with my work and my kids and my marriage. I just couldn't see it in the moment. For me, it was the first step toward real balance and it's what I help people with in my practice. So the reason that tracking our moods can be really, really effective is that most of us assume that we know how we feel. I mean, we've thought about it, haven't we? A lot of times it just stays in our minds how we feel. Or maybe we've talked with somebody about how we feel, but in reality, we're often reacting to distorted perceptions. Maybe we don't see the bigger picture because, you know, when you're in it, you can't really see what's going on. How are you supposed to see the bigger context of things? Not to mention when you're tired or overwhelmed, our brain starts to exaggerate problems. Thank you, brain. It's a survival skill, friend. Anything wrong, the brain's gonna focus there. That's how it keeps us ticking, right? A lot of people miss the emotional Buildup until they hit the wall. I hear so much of the time like, I'm busy, but it's fine, right? Sure it is. Right till you hit the wall. The result is that we have a sense that life is just really, really hard, maybe harder than it actually is, which causes roller coaster moods and frankly, burnout. The real problem is that we miss noticing when it actually is getting really hard, when we don't see the bigger context, and oftentimes it's too late. So today, what I want to help you do is figure out how things are going on the regular so that you can monitor and adjust iterate in your life to get the best results. A good example of this is a client that will come in to see me. And people are funny because they typically think they have one problem going on, when in reality it's so much more intricate and different than they think it is. This is where I get into having people track moods. I need to know, and you need to know, how are things going generally across the board? What types of things cause you to have a big mood all of a sudden? That surprises even you. Using a simple three question daily check in for a couple of weeks can give you so much information about your emotional patterns, about relationship patterns, and other things that are going on in your life that you actually do have control over. But the thing is, is when we don't really know what's going on, like things are constantly changing and we're not really tracking how our mood is changing with them, then we don't even really know where to begin to intervene. So I'm hoping that my simple little lesson today will help you to just check in with yourself every day and write down a few words about what you're observing so that you can start to intervene and be more involved with keeping things balanced. So here's your three question mood check in. It could not be easier. The first question is, what am I feeling right now? Just name the emotion without having any judgment about it. You're just like being a journalist. You're getting more information about yourself. What am I feeling right now? A good time to ask these types of questions are in the evening, right? Because in the evening we're too tired for faking that everything's okay. And so you might be able to get at what your core emotion is. Now, I will give you a caveat on this. An emotion is a word, not a sentence or a paragraph, my friend. Use an emotional wheel if you need one. A lot of us grew up in homes where we didn't say emotions. We didn't even understand what our emotions were because the people around us were not emotionally intelligent or productive. And so if you're one of these millions of people, just get an emotion wheel off of Google or wherever you go to get your things. There are lists of emotions. It's not that you don't know what emotions are. It's that when you're having an emotion, it's hard to tell what it is. But the first question is, what am I feeling right now? So it's a good opportunity to learn about emotional recognition. The second question is, what might have led me here? Which I think is a funny question. You know me, I have a sense of humor because oftentimes it's really obvious and oftentimes it's really not right. So what might have led me here is just a curious question. And I would almost add, what led me here in the past 24 hours? Because a lot of times when people are starting to get moody, it's not the current moment that's causing them to be moody. It's whatever happened, like yesterday or this morning. You know what I mean? So you want to look for clues in your life. How are you sleeping? How's your stress level? What have you eaten or drank today? How about social interactions? How's your brain kicking along? Is there a lot of thinking or not so much? There's a lot of things that can lead us into emotional territory, and it's good to just ask the question of, like, well, what happened here? And then the third question is where you come into relationship with yourself and you ask yourself, what do I need in this moment? It's a question about nurturing oneself. How can I take care of myself? Right? Because I'm having this emotion and this is what led to it. What do I need to do? And this is where the rubber meets the road. I think we do a lot of thinking about how we're feeling all the time. We do a lot of rumination about all the crazy situations in our life, but we never turn to ourself and say, what do I need? What might help? Is it rest? Do I need to set a boundary? Do I need a little bit more connection or less connection? Do I need to exercise some compassion or nurture myself in some way? Whatever you need is on the table. This is what it looks like to be in a relationship, right? A couple tips for you are don't overthink it. Just keep it simple. Use your notes app or just a little piece of paper. Just write down a few words, you don't have to write paragraphs. And then after doing it a few times, maybe even for a few days in a row, just look back and see if you notice any patterns. This isn't about tracking to fix yourself, it's actually just about awareness. It's about noticing how you feel on the regular so that you can iterate things in your life to feel more balanced. Awareness comes first and then change follows naturally, right? Once we know, then we're like, okay, I'm ready to do something about this. I love this cognitive behavioral therapy skill. When you practice it, you build emotional accuracy and trust with yourself. It's how you learn to see what's actually happening in your life instead of just thinking about it or believing every story that your mind tells you. I hope it's helpful. And remember, self awareness in your relationship with yourself is the foundation of your emotional health and you can start building it in about five minutes a day. I'm here to help reach out if you want to talk further about this. Thanks so much for spending your time with me today. I really appreciate you being here and doing this work as always. While Takeout therapy is a great educational resource, get the level of support that you need for your situation. Head to takeouttherapy.com to check out all of my resources. Until next time, take really good care of yourself, friend.