← The Psychology of your 20s
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This is an I Heart podcast.
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Guaranteed human if you're a new parent. Quick question. When was the last time you ate something that was healthy, delicious and also not just whatever your kids didn't finish? Sprouts Farmers Market gets it. You don't have the time. That's why Sprouts has a variety of healthy and delicious protein bowls, fresh ready to eat salads and chef created oven ready meals. You can even grocery shop online and get home delivery. Being busy doesn't mean you can't eat healthy, it just means you have to make it easier to do so. So whether you're a new parent or just on any other health journey, it's easier at Sprouts Farmer's Market. A fresh sparkling kitchen? Yes please. The scrubbing it takes to get one. Not my favorite. That's why you'll love Dawn Power Wash Dish Spray. From everyday dishes to the toughest messes, it makes cleanup time twice as fast. Less scrubbing, more living.
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I'm in.
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Find Dawn Power Wash Dish Spray at your favorite retailer. Dawn is a proud sponsor of the Elton John Impact Awards, honoring those who have helped shape a more incl. Inclusive and compassionate world with their artistry, advocacy and unwavering commitment to equality. Don't miss the Elton John Impact Awards podcast, available June 1 on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard this summer. Find your next obsession on Prime Video. Steamy romance, addictive love stories and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice like Off Campus, L, the Love Hypothesis and more. Slow Burn Second Chances chemistry you can feel through the screen. They have so many binge worthy series and and can't miss movies perfect for when you're unwinding, reflecting or just want to avoid your responsibilities just for a little bit. No judgment. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime. I feel like in every episode I
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talk about how exhausted and overwhelmed I am because it's true.
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I'm trying to balance a lot and taking care of myself often falls off the list. That is where Premier Protein shakes come in. They have 30 grams of protein, no added sugar, and tons of delicious flavors like cake batter, peaches and cream caramel. Premier Protein shakes are a healthy choice you will actually want to make. Premier Protein powers you to say yes to more. Whether it's crushing a big presentation, building an epic fort, hitting the hiking trail with friends. Find your favorite flavor@premier protein.com the future won't wait. And neither should you. That's why American Public University offers master's programs designed for most momentum affordable, high quality and flexible so you can keep moving forward with career relevant programs in business, healthcare, education, it and so much more. You can gain skills you can use right away and the confidence to power your next move. American Public University made for what's next. Learn more at APU apus.edu. Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Spake and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s. The podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
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Hello everybody, welcome back 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 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 sun to explain what what it is you're feeling and why, you probably believe that you are someone who processes your emotions well or 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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? 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 2010 that showed, especially if you have emotionally stunted parents in particular, this reduces how many different emotions people refer to support being able to label or feel. And it's highly correlated to emotional suppression in individuals themselves. So people, you know, couldn't name as many emotions as they actually had available to them. Contrary to popular belief, emotions are also not things that we're born understanding. 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 are only shown at their highest, most intense level, that also drives us to be a 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 going to get hurt and so we don't feel them at all. Another reason we are bad at feeling our feelings because it feels like self protection. If we don't 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. 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, you know, the longer 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 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 as compromising or bad emotions. It's 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 feelings. Come along with it when something difficult or traumatic happens, or when numerous really frustrating hard situations occur all at once. 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 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, 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 down the emotional centers of the brain, so be it. Even if that means we don't process things fully or we never process them at all 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 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 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 were lived in an isolated island and you had been for the last 10 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 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 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 U.S. i can't remember where they exposed 60 men and women to read either negative news stories or neutral 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 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 and me, like the chaos that we are enduring as a society that does impact your 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. Like the nervous system jumps in, shuts everything down, like 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 through at all. The second level emotions are getting through, but then we're fielding these emotions 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 think the biggest one that I think of for a lot of smart 20 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 outsmart any problem in your life that you apply the same behavior to your feelings. Intellectualizing, this is essentially 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 from, 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 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 like your parents past behavior and their unkindness and their cruelty, using language that describes their behavior 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 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 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 2000s that looked at hundreds of participants and essentially found that people who like, have the academical 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, who are psychologists about this and they struggle with this, with their patients, right? Like they have a patient come in who is 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, betrayal, rejection, and you have this language for why this person did what they did. You understand the psychology behind why they 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 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 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, a video game, with going to the gym 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 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, or we have a say or we have some kind of authority over them. When, during 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 like massive form of escapism though that we need to discuss. Like 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 it. We'll be right back.
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If you're a new parent, quick question. When was the last time you ate something that was healthy, delicious, and also not just whatever your kids didn't finish? Sprouts Farmer's Market gets it. You don't have the time. That's why Sprouts has a variety of healthy and delicious protein bowls, fresh ready to eat salads and chef created oven ready meals. You can even grocery shop online and get home delivery. Being busy doesn't mean you can't eat healthy. It just means you have to make it easier to do so. So whether you're a new parent or just on any other health journey, it's easier. At Sprouts Farmer's Market. If you could enjoy a spotless space without so much scrubbing, wouldn't you? Of course you would. Well, I've got you. Dawn Power Wash dish spray cuts through the mess and gets everything clean in half the time. We're talking about both the toughest messes and everyday dishes. Plus its work goes beyond the sink. Like to clean counters, stoves, grills and to remove stains on laundry. And it's really good at getting those hard to clean dishes. So basically, Dawn Power Wash cleans everything from dishes to grills, removing all the grease and grime and does it twice as fast. Not bad. You can find Dawn Power Wash Dish Spray at your favorite retailer. Dawn is a proud sponsor of the Elton John Impact Awards, honoring those who have helped shape a more inclusive and compassionate world with their artistry, advocacy and unwavering commitment to equality. And we'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate all of this year's deserving honorees. You won't want to miss the Elton John Impact Awards podcast, available on June 1st on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard this summer. Find your next obsession on Prime Video. Steamy romance, addictive love stories and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice like Off Campus and L, the Love Hypothesis and More Slow Burns, Second Chances chemistry you can feel through the screen. They have so many binge worthy series and can't miss movies perfect for when you're unwinding, reflecting or just want to avoid your responsibilities just for a little bit. No judgment. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime. Nothing is more frustrating than when you are ready to lock in for a big day of work, a big day
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of study, a big day of admin
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help on this podcast.
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A huge form of escapism that I think we are all 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 is a workaholic or maybe even like a passionaholic, 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. And that may, that is not may. It is applauded. And actually a lot of times people who are workaholics 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, the more we are driven to other negative behaviors once working hard loses its allure. There was a study from 2025 that followed like 1200 full time employees aged 25 to 65. And these participants filled out an online survey they talked about that essentially assessed them for work addiction, emotional regulation deficits, addictive eating, 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 b them being more likely to have addictive behaviors like substance use, 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 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 us from actually resolving the underlying emotional state over time. What happens is something psychologists refer to as experiential avoidance. This is a really key concept from acceptance and commitment therapy. And essentially the more we try and suppress or outrun a feeling through whatever behavior is working, anything, the more persistent and intrusive it becomes. The emotion, yeah, it seemingly disappears. It's actually like in the background doing push ups and getting stronger and stronger and stronger because it starts feeling more and more and more scary the more we avoid it and, and we just keep delaying the moment that we will eventually have to face it. Meaning that when we eventually do, we start to believe that all emotions when we, 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 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 5,000. And we're so scared of excessively ruminating. We're so scared of hyper vigilance 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 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 many barriers as possible between us and the feeling. It's very sad, I think. 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? Emotion. Also, we don't know ourselves. We don't know ourselves. If you don't know your emotions, your emotions are a reaction to 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, oh, my God, I want to know how many times I say feeling in this episode. But without feeling 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 would call a presentation layer. That's the word I've heard used 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? 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 refer to this as a primary emotion, which is the original instinctual response. 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 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, slighted by a friend 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. Is a deeper fear of loss, of. Of losing people, of not. 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 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 other people away, like through jealousy, through anger, that sort of thing. So they actually don't do us any favors. You know what's a really great depiction of this? This I just thought about. This is Louis Theroux's documentary about the manosphere. 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 pill manosphere 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 a complex relationship with their father or their mother or their families. Only one of them. And there's like 10 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 as 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 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 there's. It's like Bodyguard who 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, hence why it needs the bodyguard. So I think part of processing our emotions is just initially asking ourselves, like, is this, what I'm really feeling. It'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, what's the bodyguard covering up for? Another good way to do this is just a quite simple expand your emotional vocabulary beyond just happy, sad, angry, even 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, 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, 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 years back by this woman called Lisa Feldman Barrett. She wrote this book How Emotions are made in like 2017. Don't quote me on that. May have been earlier, 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 numb or quite. Yeah. What's the opposite of intense? I don't know. Not intense. 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 this, the brain responds differently when an experience is named accurately. So when you say I feel bad, 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 ridiculous, rejected, I feel overstimulated, resentful, uncertain. You, you create clarity. And when you are clear on something, you have control over 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 in your amygdala, your fear response or your threat center. And it increases activity in areas responsible for reasoning and regulation. 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. A fun fact also about emotional granularity. If you have high emotional granularity so you can label more emotions, this may seem counter. 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 minor facial expressions. So also a good asset socially when we have the label for what we're feeling, when we've pushed past the initial emotional guard, then we can actually start like the processing part to all of this, which annoyingly actually begins with just like kind of doing nothing. Like just micro dosing the feeling and 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 emotion. 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. Oh my God, best TV show on the planet right now. Love this show in it, like, quick summary because I'm like the 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 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 in 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 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 are 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 going to last for the amount of time that you have and for the duration of that song, for the duration of that 5, 10 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 unlike and the sense of injustice, let yourself feel disappointed. Like you have five minutes to just let, just to open the gates, 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 is again, the biggest reason we don't want to feel anything at all. 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 going to overwhelm me. I don't have to spend my entire days, 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 am sorry. We will be right back.
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B
If you're a new parent, quick question. When was the last time you ate something that was healthy, delicious, and also not just whatever your kids didn't finish? Sprouts Farmers Market gets it. You don't have the time. That's why Sprouts has a variety of healthy and delicious protein bowls, fresh ready to eat salads, and chef created oven ready meals. You can even grocery shop online and get home delivery. Being busy doesn't mean you can't eat healthy. It just means you have to make it easier to do so. So whether you're a new parent or just on any other health journey, it's easier. At Sprouts Farmer's Market. If you could enjoy a spotless space without so much scrubbing, wouldn't you? Of course you would. Well, I've got you. Dawn Power Wash dish spray cuts through the mess and gets everything clean in half the time. We're talking about both the toughest messes and everyday dishes. Plus, its work goes beyond the sink. Like to clean counters, stoves, grills, and to remove stains on laundry. And it's really good at getting those hard to clean dishes. So basically, Dawn Power Wash cleans everything from dishes to grills, removing all the grease and grime and does it twice as fast. Not bad. You can find Dawn Power Wash dish spray at your favorite retailer. Dawn is a proud sponsor of the Elton John Impact Awards, honoring those who have helped shape a more inclusive and compassionate world. With their artistry, advocacy and unwavering commitment to equality. And we'd like to take this opportunity to congratulate all of this year's deserving honorees. You won't want to miss the Elton John Impact Awards podcast, available on June 1st on the iHeartRadio app and everywhere podcasts are heard this summer. Find your next obsession on Prime Video. Steamy romance, addictive love stories and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice like Off Campus, L, the Love Hypothesis and more. Slow Burns Second Chances chemistry you can feel through the screen. They have so many binge worthy series and can't miss movies perfect for when you're unwinding, reflecting or just want to avoid your responsibilities just for a little bit. No judgment. Your next obsession is waiting. Watch only on Prime. It's May and that means it's Mental Health Awareness Month and although we talk about mental health pretty regularly on the show, it is so important to spotlight it this month and make sure people know help is out there. A lot of us know we might need help, know we might benefit from therapy, but we talk ourselves out of it. We're not sure if it's worth the money, if we'll find the right person. It all seems really, really complicated. Ruler makes accessing quality mental health care affordable with sessions costing an average of 15. With insurance, you can sign up in just a few minutes, get match with the right provider and even book something as soon as the next day. No jumping through hoops, no confusion, just real sincere help when you are ready for it. If you've been thinking about therapy, this may be a great option for you. So turn off the talk track that's keeping you from making progress and head to rula.com that's R U L A.com to find a therapist the easy way. When I first started the podcast, I had zero experience in podcasting. I didn't know how to write scripts, film, video, handle logos, social media. It was super overwhelming. If you're starting something new, it will seem like your to do list keeps growing every day. Finding the right tool that simplifies everything can be such a game changer for millions of businesses. That tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US. From household names like Aloe Yoga, Rare Beauty, Chamberlain Coffee to brands just getting started. Shopify has hundreds of ready to use templates so you can build a beautiful online store. It can help you easily create email and social media campaigns, manage Inventory, international shipping, returns all in one easy to use place. It's time to turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com gemma go to shopify.com gemma that is shopify.com gemma.
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A
So giving your emotions a standing appointment definitely works. Putting them 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, whatever it is, in a physical, expressive way. Let me explain that because I 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 van der Boeks or Vandal Koch's 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 breakup, your self doubt, your loneliness, your anger at your parents, your anxiety is as much physical as it is emotional. And the tensions of, or the 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 a 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 they're stressed, they'll like shake. That's their nervous system discharging excess energy. And 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 that's 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, like, manifested in a lot of just like anger at the world. That is when I picked up boxing and I would sometimes cry during those classes because I was so pent up and angry at the world in 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 boxing helped me do that by releasing the somatic or the physical feeling. It's obviously a very intense example, but the same mechanism is at play for things like yoga as well. If you want to go down a whole rabbit hole, look at the research on yoga and emotional processing and how many people will want to cry, scream, chant, 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 2014. It was a study on 64 women who had chronic treatment resistant PTSD. So they tried a bunch of stuff and they divided the group. They had half of them do these trauma informed yoga sessions for like three years and. And half of them just do normal therapy. At the end of the study, almost 52% of the participants no longer met the criteria for PTSD, compared to just 20% of the people who did therapy alone. One in two of those people, their PTSD was treated. Now, obviously, execute your judgment here. This isn't an. It's not the only method and intervention for processing our feelings or for trauma. But you can't deny, like, 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, I 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. 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 in, into something structured and explicit and visible. A lot of what processing our emotions really is, is just being able to sit side by side with an emotion, let yourself feel it, understand why, 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 think so many albums are breakup albums? Why do you think so many movies are about grief? Or why do you think there's so much art about 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. I. That was a 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 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 connect 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 check. We want to 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 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 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 you. It's just like one of the crappiest things about being human. Like you. 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, like feelings of joy and feelings 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 every emotion, but we feel it at like 50% 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 trough. And again, to summarize, what that involves is understanding your coping mechanisms. What are the ways that you are detaching from your emotions through work, 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, 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, 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 all day. Like, what does it mean to process your emotions? It means being okay with not knowing why something is happening, 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 50 million times, so I need to take a breath after that. But I do hope that this episode has 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, irritant, irritated person at times I was like, oh, because that's like the only way I know how to feel anything. So 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 20s, you can go to our Instagram, you can go to our sub stack and you can watch us on Netflix wherever you are in the world. If you want to watch future episodes on your tv, on your laptop, if you just want to see what's 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 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, very soon.
- [56:54]
B
If you're a new parent. Quick question. When was the last time you ate something that was healthy, delicious, and also not just whatever your kids didn't finish Sprouts Farmers Market gets it. You don't have the time. That's why Sprouts has a variety of healthy and delicious protein bowls, fresh ready to eat salads and chefs created oven ready meals. You can even grocery shop online and get home delivery. Being busy doesn't mean you can't eat healthy. It just means you have to make it easier to do so. So whether you're a new parent or just on any other health journey, it's easier. At Sprouts Farmers Market,
- [57:29]
A
a big priority
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- [59:05]
A
You know that pile of clothes you've
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B
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- [59:46]
A
You can check it out at Trashy
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IO plus with Trashy Unlimited you get unlimited bags for just $48 in your first year. An easy at home clean out system so you can stay on top of it all year long. Clean Out Donate Earn Rewards head to Trashy I.O. to get started today in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, I want to remind you of something that's really stuck with me. You don't need to be healed to put yourself out there or explore your desires. Healed is kind of an illusion anyways. We're always learning. We're always evolving. We're always understanding ourselves in new ways. And that is one of the reasons that we love Field. It's a dating app for the curious. It's built around openness, honesty, and going at your own pace. There's no fast swipe pressure. Attraction can grow over time and you're really encouraged to just reflect on what you want before you connect. Field even has a free self discovery tool called Reflections that helps you explore what you desire, your boundaries and your relationship style. Plus, with over 20 sexuality and gender options, it's a space where questioning labels and embracing change is completely welcome. If you're looking for connection without pretending or pressure, check out Field Co or Download Field on the App Store or Google Play.
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This is an iHeart podcast.
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Guaranteed Human.