How's your mood been lately? A little.... all over the place? Ya, me too. Obvi. A global pandemic will knock even the most stoic among us on our asses! And that's okay. Here's the thing with...
How’s your Mood been lately? A little…. all over the place? Ya, me too. Obvi.
A global pandemic will knock even the most stoic among us on our asses! And that’s okay.
Here’s the thing with emotions. We’re supposed to have them. They’re incredible. Feeling our feelings is part of the richness of the human experience.
The problem is most of us never learned how to manage our emotions in a healthy way. In some cases, well-meaning adults taught us not to show our “bad” emotions, which our young minds translated into “don’t feel” those emotions, which over time leads to us instead fearing them #nothelpful
If anything, most of us are conditioned to react to our emotions in an unhealthy ways.
We’ve basically got it backwards.
For example –
We suppress them by pretending we’re okay.
We bottle up our feelings (especially the hard and uncomfortable ones) until we’re about to burst (and often do).
We numb them out (with everything from drugs and alcohol to food and retail therapy).
Or we try to escape from them by distracting ourselves (with everything from binge-watching sports and Netflix to straight up workaholism).
We become almost unconscious and zombie-like in our efforts to not feel. Thinking feels way safer.
Consequently, we ignore our hearts and do all the heavy lifting with our minds, when ideally they should be working together.
That’s a BIG problem. Think of emotions (aka e-motion) as Energy that is meant to be moving through your body. Moving energy improves your state. It improves your mood.
When we don’t feel our feelings, we don’t move the energy, and stagnant energy leads to all sorts of problems, from physical disease to mental health challenges.
It’s SUPER important (and healthy and normal) to feel your feelings. It’s just not common to do so because we’ve been taught we’re that we’re allowed to. It’s SUPER important to move that energy!
Sidenote: feeling your feelings and moving energy doesn’t mean you have to become a hysterical mess or anything like that. (Ironically, that is usually the result of suppressed emotions that then explode out. The more regularly you honor your emotions, the less exploding they’ll need to do!) Nor does it mean you have to do it publicly. I recommend doing these practices solo or with people you trust.
The good news is that if we, as humans, can learn to actually BE with our emotions, everything gets better. One of the most important skills I teach my clients is learning to notice and acknowledge and actually feel their feelings.
Once they start to gain this self awareness, they stop feeling so out of control. Instead, they feel empowered. And alive!
That’s because when we can handle the experience of feeling angry, or sad, or anxious, etc. then we take our power back.
We own those feelings. We learn to handle them. We learn to let them move through us.
Our emotions are also a beautiful and brilliant feedback system, that show us what we are thinking. Our feelings are our bodies’ response to our thoughts. Once we learn to think differently, we start feeling differently too. But that’s a whole other exciting topic #mindset
So, how do we get better at feeling our feelings? And moving the energy?
Here are 5 simple (and healthy) ways to feel your feelings and thus improve your mood:
1) BE with your emotions.
Slow down. Get quiet. Tune in. Pause long enough to actually notice how you feel. Get curious about the PHYSICAL sensation in your body. That is where emotions live. What do you feel in your body and where is it?
Tightness in your throat? Knot in your stomach? Pressure in your temples? Be specific. Write it down. Your journal makes a great partner in this. Give yourself permission to simply notice and acknowledge what’s there. Dare to just be with the feelings.
2) Express them (in a safe way).
Making sure that doing so won’t harm you or anyone else first and foremost, let the feeling you are experience actually come up and OUT of you. If you feel sad, cry. Cry hard! If you feel angry, yell. Punch a pillow. Throw a tantrum on your bed.
Some of my personal go to’s are: screaming into a pillow or jacket, having a long ugly cry in the shower, talking it out with a trusted partner or friend. Or listening to dramatic, sad, or emotional music that helps me tap into a specific emotion #emo
3) Do some breathwork
Test out the simple techniques taught by Wim Hof or by Samantha Skelly. Breathing is free and once you learn these simple techniques you can do them anytime, anywhere! You don’t need to know WHY you’re feeling a certain feeling, in order to release it. (That’s just our analytical brains wanting to label shit.)
The important thing is to release it. I often cry during breathwork, without having any idea why, and it feels great! I end up feeling energetically cleansed and grateful and renewed afterward. Get high on your own supply, as they say
4) Change your environment
We are energetic beings. And the energy in our environments has an impact on our mood. Some of us (i.e. introverts, empaths, and HSPs) are more sensitive to this than others, and get to be extra mindful of what we surround ourselves with!
If you’re in a funk, try changing your environment. Find a room with more windows, step outside, light some candles, turn on some music, or burn some incense. Personally, even just turning on a few more lights and moving to a different seat can do the trick.
5) Move your body
Aside from the many other benefits of exercise, moving your body also helps you move energy, and thus emotions. If you’r frustrated or angry, a sweaty high intensity blast may do the trick. Try some gentle, grounding yoga to help you feel safe if you’re worried or overwhelmed. Some feisty Latin dancing may help you shake it off when you’re feeling blah.
As the teachers at Rythmia taught us during our plant medicine retreat last year, “what’s coming is going”. If emotions are coming up, they want to come out. That is what they’re meant to do. Let them. It’s part of how we heal. Do this regularly and you won’t be so thrown off when the shit hits the fan. Make moving energy your new normal.
Please, be gentle with yourself, as you navigate these uncertain times. Remember that we are legitimately experiencing a collective traumatic event right now, and that it affects us all differently. Be patient and kind. Have compassion for yourself and others.
And use these tips to feel your feelings and move through them, so that you can quickly improve your mood.
Before I learned all of this, I used to get caught up in moods and funks that lasted for hours and hours, or days! Now that I know how to shift them, my poopy moods often pass within minutes or at most an hour or two. It’s a pretty ninja life skill to have.
Cry. Yell. Breathe. Dance. Journal. Run.
MOVE.
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