286. How to actually FEEL your feelings

In a day and age when 7/10 of us are chronically stressed, living in survival mode, too busy intellectualising our feelings to actually feel them, unsure of whether we will ever feel great happiness again, sometimes we need to return to the basics: how do we actually FEEL our emotions. In this episode we break down: What emotional blunting really looks like The root in trauma + stress + childhood Why we intellectualise our feelings The consequences + risk of emotional breakdown How to reconnect to your emotions through the body The emotions-physical sensation map The 90 second rule + so much more Happy listening :) PREORDER MY BOOK: https://www.psychologyofyour20s.com/general-clean https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/755841/person-in-progress-by-jemma-sbeg/ Follow Jemma on Instagram: @jemmasbeg https://www.instagram.com/jemmasbeg/?hl=en# Follow the podcast on Instagram: @thatpsychologypodcast https://www.instagram.com/thatpsychologypodcast/?hl=en# For business: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] 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. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Jemma Sbeg?

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• 1:09Jemma Sbeg?

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• 1:52Jemma Sbeg?

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• 2:38Jemma Sbeg?

  This episode today, as so many of my favorite episodes are, I was actually suggested by a listener. A listener called Josephine, who sent me this message. And she's given me permission to read it out loud and see if any of you may relate. This is what she had to say. Hi Gemma, it's been a while since I felt any kind of emotion. And I'm not trying to sound dramatic, I mean, truly. Happiness, sadness, excitement, they've all disappeared. My childhood dog recently died and I felt nothing. I got a big promotion that I wanted for a long time, also nothing. One emotion I am feeling is fear, fear that I'll never feel the same way again. I can link it back to some really bad anxiety I had almost a year ago.

• 3:24Jemma Sbeg?

  Around that time, I started to intellectualize almost all of my emotions before I allowed myself to fully feel them. And now I feel like I've ruined my brain by cutting off its pathway to expression permanently. Please, any advice I need and would love for you to do an episode on how to actually feel my feelings. So I got this message and firstly, thank you, Josephine, for sharing, but I got this message and I immediately knew I needed to talk about this. In fact, I actually had a whole other episode planned for this week. But this one just felt so much more like important because Josephine, like me, too. I am here with you. I'm experiencing the same kind of emotional blunting

• 4:09Jemma Sbeg?

  and the same kind of poor communication between me and my emotions. You know, I feel happiness and I confuse it as something bad. I feel sadness, grief, anger, stress. I push it down and say, I'll get to that later. I also, much like you, intellectualize my emotions as a way of getting out of feeling them. You know, overanalyzing every possible cause, explanation and consequence until I'm exhausted. And you know what? I don't feel particularly good about it and I don't feel like it's a particularly great way to live. The absence of any negative emotions doesn't necessarily make your life a happy one. Because your emotions all use the same systems.

• 4:53Jemma Sbeg?

  All thirty four thousand distinct emotions we can feel are operating across the same neural pathways, across all the same cortices of the brain. And that's why nostalgia and regret feel so similar. Passion and anger, trust and vulnerability, anxiety and excitement, grief and gratitude. They feel very similar. So you turn off one, you turn off regret, you turn off anger, vulnerability, anxiety, grief. You also turn off nostalgia. You also turn off passion, trust, excitement, gratitude. And I think a lot of us are finding ourselves in that very position where we've tried to feel,

• 5:36Jemma Sbeg?

  we've tried to manage our negative emotions in a way that's actually meant we've prevented any intense emotion at all. I think a reason for that is that we're scared, not of our actual emotions. We're scared of our feelings about our feelings. Like, let me explain this. I know it sounds like a little bit strange, but you know, if I feel sad. I feel like that's a bad thing and I feel like it's the end of the world. If I'm angry, I worry that something is wrong with me. So it's not that the sadness is bad, it's not that the, you know, the grief or the anger is bad. It's that I believe that it's going to make me feel miserable or have some further on consequence. This whole experience, this whole pattern, this is known as metacognitive or meta emotions.

• 6:21Jemma Sbeg?

  My emotions, our emotions about the possibility of certain emotions. And if that sounds complicated to you, it most certainly is, and it's complicated for our brain. And it's difficult for us to work through that and feel like we can actually feel our feelings. So the two big questions we're really left with is why? You know, why does this happen? And how, how do I fix it? How do I convince myself I'm not at the mercy of my emotions? And actually let them back in and feel human and feel connected again. Well, my lovely listeners, we are going to discuss exactly that.

• 7:03Jemma Sbeg?

  We are going to explore the psychology behind all of this and so much more. Be prepared to go deep, maybe shed a few tears because today I really want us to all leave feeling in touch with at least one emotion we've been suppressing. Just one, that's all I want at the end of the day. So without further ado, let's get into it.

• 7:28Jemma Sbeg?

  So we need to talk about this first. We need to talk about what being detached from our emotions actually looks like. I was literally, I was about to say, what does it feel like? But you know, that's the actual problem we're dealing with. What does it look like? Not being able to feel your feelings essentially means you've put up some kind of wall between you and the actual feeling. So it's not necessarily the absence of any emotion at all. You are not broken, the emotions are still there. It's just that when an emotion comes up, you might feel it for just a second. Perhaps you notice it and then you start overanalyzing. Or you get freaked out that it's going to come out too large and too loud.

• 8:12Jemma Sbeg?

  So you distract yourself or minimize or adopt any number of coping strategies.

• 8:20Jemma Sbeg?

  After long enough, you can no longer name what the sensation or emotion even is. And in some extreme cases, you might also take direct action to completely avoid the trigger. You know, if someone has hurt you or broken your heart, you would perhaps consider and tell yourself, well, they don't even exist anymore. And I'm never going to think about them again, meaning that a lot of the, you know, deep grief or betrayal or the emotions that you should be working through because of that experience remain unhealed, remain untouched. Maybe you're really struggling because you've got like a terrible grade on a uni assignment. And you're such a perfectionist and this is just like the most awful thing.

• 9:06Jemma Sbeg?

  You might try and manage that and not feel the feeling by completely disengaging with your studies altogether. Or completely ignoring any upcoming assignments because you don't even want to give the illusion of trying. So this is known as avoidance and it's often a precursor to not feeling your feelings. Not even putting yourself in the search, in the circumstances or the situations in which that might even be possible. So when you feel out of touch with your feelings, when you're experiencing numbness, uh maybe a delayed emotional response. So something bad happens, you don't really think about it until a month down the line. When you are avoiding emotional situations, when you're experiencing apathy, when,

• 9:50Jemma Sbeg?

  you know, you feel like, yes, you may not have been sad for a while, but you also haven't been happy. There is a word for this. It's called emotional blunting or in medicine, reduced effect display. The best description I've heard of that describes what emotional blunting really is, that actually came from a patient involved in a case study on this experience. And this patient was experiencing intense emotional numbing and blunting. And she said, often what this makes me feel like is I feel invisible. I feel like I'm a ghost. I watch my family engaging with each other, but there is an invisible barrier that keeps me from joining them.

• 10:32Jemma Sbeg?

  This was what another individual had to say in a similar article. "The world around me often seems incredibly superficial, like I am simply going through the motions and can't connect to my environment. If I was to reach out and touch that wall or reach out and swim in the ocean, I wouldn't be able to feel it entirely." So that is what happens when you cannot feel your feelings. You just feel like both of these descriptions from two different patients, two different clients, talk about something between them and the real world, something that has been put there a long time ago or because of a situation that they didn't feel like they can control.

• 11:12Jemma Sbeg?

  So let's talk about the reasons why we may get to a place of being unable to connect with our emotions. The first one that is very present is being stuck in survival mode or experiencing chronic stress. Now, you may hear that and think, "I'm not chronically stressed. I'm gonna skip this section. I'm fine. I'm not burnt out. I'm fine." You might not even realize that you are because recent research suggests that around seven out of 10 of us, seven out of 10 of the people listening are chronically stressed. I'm gonna say that again, 70%. When I heard that, and actually I heard it in Mel Robbins' new book, I was shocked, but the more I thought about it, I wasn't surprised.

• 11:56Jemma Sbeg?

  Our brains were designed for a very different world than the one we currently live in. We were really designed for a slower, less stimulating, less intense lifestyle. And nowadays, when we are constantly being bombarded with information, with a constant to-do list, productivity guilt, and then let's add on financial instability, uncertainty about the future, and, "Oh no, you're in your twenties, so you need to have it all figured out right now." That sounds exhausting because it is and it takes a lot of mental resources to ensure that we don't like just collapse in on ourselves like a dying star. Something has to give in those situations.

• 12:36Jemma Sbeg?

  It takes a lot of brain power and willpower to keep up with that much mental activity. And sometimes our brain thinks, well, if we can just dull our emotions for a little bit, if we can shut down our emotional processing systems, well, amazing, that's great. That's one less thing to worry about while we get out of survival mode. Obviously, that's not sustainable. The reason many people end up in this state even after the stress has passed is because when they do allow themselves to feel their emotions, they are so intense after so many months or years of not feeling them, that we kind of forget what it means to truly feel.

• 13:21Jemma Sbeg?

  And it's, yeah, the best what I can say is it's intense. And so we fall into a bad cycle of feeling safer in our detached state because we are out of practice, we are out of practice with feeling. And so it's easier to revert to the other extreme of nothingness because, you know, the whole system has now become dysregulated where the presence of even a slight emotion feels so profound after lack of exposure. So I just said this one key word here, dysregulated. Again, your emotional processing systems are still there. It's not like someone has gone into your brain and scooped out a part of your cortex and been like, cool, now you can't feel anything anymore.

• 14:06Jemma Sbeg?

  It's dysregulation of a system that is still present and active. So why has this dysregulation occurred other than chronic stress?

• 14:15Jemma Sbeg?

  Well, maybe it it won't come as a surprise that it does begin way back in childhood for many of us. Not all of us, but I think the majority of you can relate to the following series of events. So as children, when we were angry, frustrated, trying to be heard, trying to get our point across, crying out of pain or sadness or exclusion, we were often shut down, either in subliminal or very obvious ways. We were hushed, we were scolded, we were yelled at, even punished. I remember one time, I think I must have been like six years old and um I don't know, we were like on the playground, something,

• 14:59Jemma Sbeg?

  someone like pushed me, I was like feeling excluded. We were like playing some game and everyone kept running away from me and I was really, really sad about it and I felt so lonely and I went up to a teacher and I'm sure I was annoying her, like I'm sure, I'm sure I was annoying her, but I was crying to her being like, no one wants to play with me, like no one wants to be my friend. And she was like, oh, get over it. Like, just go away and get over it. Like, life is unfair. And that's like a distinct part of my memory. And, you know, those reactions, the reactions we have of parents, teachers, adults in our lives, is one of the primary ways we learn what is and isn't appropriate when it comes to our emotional reactions.

• 15:44Jemma Sbeg?

  And unfortunately, we often end up learning that big emotions aren't acceptable and may even result in an uncomfortable outcome or, you know, a bad outcome for us. From those repeated experiences, because if it happened once, I'm sure it happened again and again, we actually begin to deny those emotions ourselves. And over time, that act of suppressing our feelings becomes an unconscious automatic process. We don't need someone else to do it for us. And eventually you don't even realise that you're doing it. Let me give you some of those unconscious ways we still revert to to suppress our emotions that you might not even realise you're doing. The first one, and I think this is massive, major, huge in our twenties,

• 16:30Jemma Sbeg?

  abusing alcohol to dampen our anxiety, dampen our insecurity, our fear or our stress. This one is, I think, the most popular for people in their twenties because drinking is so socially acceptable, but alcohol is also,

• 16:48Jemma Sbeg?

  you know, I'm gonna say this and I don't want it to be misconstrued. Alcohol is a fantastic way to not feel your emotions and it's a fantastic way in the moment to feel less stressed and to feel a little bit happier and to have that buzz in the moment. Afterwards, you begin to associate those happy momentary feelings with the alcohol and you start pursuing the buzz over and over again, meaning that obviously alcohol takes such a toll on your brain, such a toll on your body. But also you have this huge catalogue of memories and experiences that just go untouched and unprocessed, but don't go away. So alcohol is one of the ways that we manage not feeling our feelings.

• 17:32Jemma Sbeg?

  The other one is overworking. You know, you feel a negative feeling come up, you immediately start working, you start working late, you commit to more and more things. That feels satisfying in many ways and is, you know, well, again, socially acceptable in today's hustle culture. Doesn't mean you process your emotions. No, it doesn't. It's just a distraction. This next one is also one that probably a lot of you can relate to, especially during this generation and its escapism through TV shows or social media. I was having a conversation with someone recently where, well, we were talking about death and we were talking about grief. And as it was getting rather heavy, we were both sharing, you know, we were both bonding.

• 18:16Jemma Sbeg?

  She picked up her phone and she started like aimlessly scrolling and like playing TikToks out loud. And I was like, it wasn't rude. I was just like, oh, I'm so sorry, you know. Let's stop talking about this. Like, if you wanna talk about something else, I totally get it. And she like looked up from her phone and she was like really surprised and she was like, pardon? And I was like, oh, you know, like, I just, I didn't wanna be weird about it, but I was like, oh, you know, you're on your phone. Like, I, you probably don't wanna talk about it. And she looked at her phone and she was like, I honestly had no idea I was even doing that. She was like, I had no idea I was even on my phone. And she was still like kind of semi-engaging in the conversation. But at the same time, she was like scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. And I was like, and we both like were sitting there being like, wow.

• 18:59Jemma Sbeg?

  Wow, that's just like a complete, like, the presence of social media is just like dulled. Um, your emotional response. And in some ways, perhaps you're leaning on that in many situations without even realizing. Our phones are like an emotional shield because they can pull us in with all their dopamine offerings and make us feel great. And distracted in the moment, but disconnected in the long run. Finally, one of the ways that we avoid feeling our feelings, my personal favorite, over-intellectualizing. Over-intellectualizing every emotion and rationalizing it to the ninth degree so that we never have to feel it. So let me explain the psychology behind why we do this.

• 19:43Jemma Sbeg?

  Psychologically, intellectualizing is linked to something called cognitive avoidance. Where our brain is essentially trying to bypass distressing emotions by shifting focus to logic and reason. Creating that kind of sense of detachment because our emotions are not sensations. They're not things that are happening to us. They're ideas. They're abstract concepts. I'll give you some examples of this. Um, going through like a big breakup or your first heartbreak. And instead of grieving it, you might be obsessing over the psychology of attachment styles. You might be overanalyzing the entire history of your relationship, rationalizing exactly why it wasn't meant to be.

• 20:27Jemma Sbeg?

  Being quite scientific and dissecting every little moment that you had together. You may also find that you overthink.

• 20:36Jemma Sbeg?

  Any kind of emotion that you're experiencing by saying, why do I feel this way? What's the psychological explanation? What's the science? What's the neurobiology? When is it going to go away? What's the timeline? Instead of just saying, this is uncomfortable. Who cares why it's happening? I'll get through it. I'll say it again. I am very guilty of this. In fact, I think my podcast is a reflection and is evidence of how guilty I am of this. Because, you know, I really did start the psychology of your twenties to break down the emotions I was experiencing in a rational, logical way. I, I was over-intellectualizing them and I've definitely gotten better. But I do find it's quite an interesting thing that often people who are over-thinkers

• 21:17Jemma Sbeg?

  and who feel really big emotions, really lean into intellectual resources or research or articles or fact or science as a kind of emotional crutch. So they don't actually have to feel the thing so intensely. And by doing this, what's actually happening is that our prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for reasoning, is dominating over our limbic system, which processes emotion, basically dulling our emotional response and providing temporary release from emotional pain. Let's quickly talk about some other reasons for this detachment. Trauma is one of them. The emotions of the past are scary and terrifying and big.

• 22:01Jemma Sbeg?

  And sometimes we are afraid that if we open that door, you may not be able to close it ever again, especially since we are not taught really in any capacity in school, in life, how to handle big, uncomfortable emotions. We can also experience emotional numbness because of our current environment or context. Maybe it's a particularly stressful period at work, at school, you're experiencing grief, heartbreak. Even when a situation is dangerous, people often emotionally shut down. It's why you see a lot of people experiencing long-term shock, even amnesia during war, during natural disasters. Our brain is like, we cannot handle this.

• 22:45Jemma Sbeg?

  If we were to feel this all at once, we would surely break. So to survive physically and mentally, let's just shut this off for a little bit. Finally, the reason you might be experiencing emotional blunting is because of certain medications that also can create this sensation, one of them being antidepressants. Now, this is not to fear monger or scare you, especially if you are on any kind of antidepressant or considering it. I'm currently on twenty milligrams of Lexapro a day and we have a complicated relationship, but overall, my Lexapro has helped me tremendously. But I have, however, noticed that whilst it makes those hard, distressing emotions less

• 23:29Jemma Sbeg?

  sharp and painful and biting, it does also make the good emotions feel a little bit less fulfilling. Like, I remember being in Paris last year and being like, wow, I've never been to Paris before and this is beautiful and there's the Eiffel Tower and I was like, I'm trying to get there, I'm trying to get there, like, maybe I should be more excited. And I just couldn't get to the point of excitement that I knew maybe three years before I could have gotten to. It also means I don't get to the levels of depression I could have gotten to, so a win is a win, but for some people, they do find this quite difficult. So what exactly are the consequences of not being able to feel our feelings? The thing is, and I am gonna sound like a broken record, but our emotions haven't disappeared. We just aren't listening to them.

• 24:14Jemma Sbeg?

  All the systems that make emotions possible are still there, it's still firing as usual, we have just wrapped them up in bubble wrap and layers of tape and said, okay, all fixed, you know, it's better this way, we're just gonna leave it as it is. But if you suppress something for too long, have a guess what's on the other side. It's a huge eruption, it's like a volcano. Perhaps we would even experience what we would classify as an emotional or mental breakdown, where one day, there's that final straw, that final thing that cracks you, or your defenses slip, or something so intense happens you can't cope, and again, all the stuff that you have pushed behind the wall comes flooding in.

• 24:58Jemma Sbeg?

  We do not want to get to that point. Not just because it's paralyzing, but also because when that happens, it doesn't matter what you're doing, who you are, where you are, your whole world stops. It's like that quote, you know, take a break before your mental health chooses when to take one for you. That's exactly what I'm describing here. Also, you know, you're alive, you're human. This is part of the experience is to feel and feel very, very deeply. I think life is meaningless without that. So I want that for you, even if it's scary. I really do. I want you to have a full rainbow of of human emotional experiences.

• 25:37Jemma Sbeg?

  So what exactly should we be doing to slowly get back to our emotions and feel them deeply and accurately? I'm so glad you asked. Thanks for asking. Stay with us. We're going to talk about it very, very soon.

• 25:55Jemma Sbeg?

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• 26:37Jemma Sbeg?

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• 27:29Jemma Sbeg?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Vinted, one of the most used apps on my phone. Here is something that you may not know about me, or maybe you do. I really love to shop. I love it. However, I don't want to spend a ton of money to do so and constantly be buying new things. And I also don't like feeling wasteful or leaving things in my closet if I'm just not going to wear them. The clutter just feels too much for me. Vinted solves that problem. Vinted is a second-hand app that makes it so easy for everyday sellers, people like you and me, to sell pre-loved fashion and earn some extra money. This makes it easier to refresh your wardrobe, actually love what you own, wear what you own.

• 28:11Jemma Sbeg?

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• 28:41Jemma Sbeg?

  I've been approaching my health really differently this year. I used to be really focused on maximizing and doing more. And now I'm just realizing that if I listen to what my body needs, I perform way better. And that's why I am obsessed with my Whoop. Truly, you guys, you know I'm such a data and information-driven person. And I love opening my Whoop app and seeing how my sleep, my stress, my strain is correlating with my mood, with my running performance, with how I'm just feeling. Day to day, I'm not an elite athlete by any means, but I do really benefit. And I also just really enjoy knowing more about my body. And Whoop also gives me these actionable personalized insights that have made me more intentional

• 29:26Jemma Sbeg?

  and meant that I make smarter decisions day to day about what I need, rather than just putting my foot on the gas and just going, going, going, going. New members can try Whoop with a thirty day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join dot whoop dot com slash psychology for your free month of Whoop. I think we need to begin this section by myth busting what feeling our emotions is and is not, because if you haven't done it for a while, I think there can be a lot of hidden misconceptions that aren't particularly useful about the truth around emotional expression and emotional connection. Feeling your feelings, it is not being a slave to your emotions.

• 30:08Jemma Sbeg?

  It is not being excessively emotional in a way you cannot control. It is not a sign that you are weak or too sensitive. It is not a reflection of your strength or worth as a person. Feeling your feelings does not mean the end of peace and serenity. That is what your brain is trying to convince you, but we have to ignore it. Emotions do not equal unbridled chaos. Here's what feeling your feelings actually means. It means you are more connected to others. The love that you may feel for people is deeper and you can fall deeper into your relationships with them.

• 30:50Jemma Sbeg?

  It means more joy and moments of real deep contentment. It means you can make beautiful art, write beautiful things, create beautiful things. Feeling your feelings also means more energy and focus in general, because you're not constantly using your finite cognitive resources to force something down that doesn't need to be suppressed. It also means you get to be more human. That's the biggest selling point for me. In my mind, I think accepting this and being like, okay, I'm prepared to feel my feelings is like the moment you're in these huge waves and this huge storm out at sea and you've been fighting and fighting and fighting and you are so tired from fighting and being rocked

• 31:33Jemma Sbeg?

  back and forth and you slip under the water and you think you failed only to realise like, oh my god, I can breathe under here. This whole time I could breathe under here and wow, look at all this cool stuff, like it's beautiful under the water. That's really the metaphor that I love for this. So enough of that, no more metaphors. Here are my actual tips for feeling your feelings. Firstly, it goes without saying, go to a mental health professional, this is really, really intense because they are going to dive into this for you in ways you cannot imagine and just give you so many fantastic, individualized, personalized recommendations and help and assistance. So that's your first step, but if you just want some more daily practices that you can do at the same time,

• 32:18Jemma Sbeg?

  well, I think firstly, you've got to stop telling yourself that you're just an emotionless person. There is literally no good that can come from that. No one is born that way. Seriously, tell me about a child who was born and didn't cry and didn't giggle or get fussy. Emotional reactions are hardwired into us. It's just that you maybe can't recall a time when your emotions were permitted. And considering many of us can't remember anything before the age of three because of something called infantile amnesia. If you started, if your emotions started being hushed and put down and scolded around that age or even earlier, of course, you cannot remember a time when you had

• 33:02Jemma Sbeg?

  a serious connection to your emotions because by the time you were making conscious memories, the damage was already done. So when you hear yourself saying, I'm just, I don't feel my feelings that deeply, I'm just, I'm not that sensitive, I'm quite cold, I'm just a cold, cold person. I need you to ask yourself, how did you come by this realisation? Who told you about that about yourself? Like, who made you believe that? And, and also the fact that you're listening to this episode, my friend, that shows that you know it isn't true. Because you and your emotions obviously have a more nuanced and complicated relationship than that.

• 33:42Jemma Sbeg?

  So after acknowledging, yes, you are an emotional feeling, deeply feeling person, and that's okay, we need to get back in touch with the physicality of our emotions. Often, and this is according to research at Columbia University, which I love to quote, "The first way we feel our emotions is physically." Think about when you were a child, before you were taught to suppress these parts of you, you felt your emotions all over in your body, in your nerves, in your fingers, in your face, before you ever had a word for it. And there is this amazing study from the University of Alabama that talks about how most of us can name a physical sensation better than an emotion. So we need to start there.

• 34:27Jemma Sbeg?

  Try first by leaning into the embodied sensation of an emotion by asking yourself, where in your body, on your body, this emotion tends to make itself known? There is an amazing resource that I, I personally love called the Emotion Sensation Wheel, and it was created by someone called Lindsay Brahman. Personally, like, I cannot recommend it enough. Basically, if you're feeling tense, if your hands are numb, your foot is tapping, your lip is curled, you're hot, you're shivering, you feel electric, whatever it is, where you feel something in your body, which is often what we notice first, you can trace that back to a feeling.

• 35:10Jemma Sbeg?

  So this is actually called a sematic check-in, and it's really an incredibly important tool. Honestly, when an emotion comes up, when you feel it in your body, give it a name, but also treat it like a game. Treat it like a challenge to collect your emotions, to feel as many of them as possible, like Strava. I know this sounds strange to talk about like a running app that tracks your miles in an episode about emotion, but sometimes when I'm like, oh, I shouldn't be feeling that, it's a bad feeling, I want to avoid this, I think, no, no, it's like I've got some cool, like, stamp book or like a passport where I'm trying to collect all the emotions.

• 35:50Jemma Sbeg?

  Like, this is a game, I'm learning here, I'm collecting experiences that remind me that I'm human and that I'm alive and that my environment impacts me and that I can reach out and touch and feel. Everything it, you know, I am here and I don't know. It's uh moving and shifting into a place of wonder, but also having a beginner's mindset about it as well. If you're not at that stage yet, that's totally okay. If you're not at the stage, but you still want to feel something. I want you to try a practice called a somatic release. I recommend a whole lot of tips of this po- on this podcast. You know, I do two episodes a week.

• 36:30Jemma Sbeg?

  There's a whole lot of advice being given, but this one has to make my top three of the things I personally use. Somatic release, I'm going to use the Harvard definition here because I like it the best. Somatic release allows your body to express deeply painful emotions and experiences by using your body as a medium. If trauma is stored in the body, that's where it should be targeted. And somatic, by the way, I should say, is the Greek word for body. So yes, essentially it's the release of emotion through the body. Somatic release could include something I like to call crazy dance. I love crazy dance.

• 37:12Jemma Sbeg?

  And if I'm feeling like really down or crap or numb, I like put on a song in my headphones. And I just like move my body ridiculously. And I mean, like, that's the aim of the game for it to look like crazy dance. Um, the song I'm loving for this right now is, I was like, should I make something up? No, I'm going to tell you the truth. It's Tambourine by Eve. And I need you to listen to that song and understand why. If you know what it is, you understand why I'm a bit like, oh, that's a bit of an embarrassing song to say. But I love like early two thousands music for my crazy dances. And I just find that anything I'm feeling in my body is so much better represented for me right now through that kind of expression.

• 37:57Jemma Sbeg?

  For other people, it's stretching, it's yoga, it's a practice movement or pattern of movements that they've made themselves whilst they're breathing to really connect with an emotional state and to really flow through the intensity of an emotion. It's running, it's anything that makes you feel in touch with your body. You know, if your favorite way to avoid feeling your emotions is to over-intellectualize them like me, talk therapy sometimes just isn't useful anymore because it just gives you further opportunities to do that. This is what I've found. I just don't need to talk about my problems at this stage in my life.

• 38:36Jemma Sbeg?

  I don't need to dig any deeper into the past. I don't need to talk through it anymore with the therapist. Like, I've done it. I've done the work and I'm at a stage where anything a therapist says, I promise you, I've already overthought it at two AM in the morning. I've already rationalized every single dimension and way of seeing this thing. And that's not arrogance. Like, truly, these people are a lot smarter than me. It's just that, you know, that's how my brain likes to think about things and it puts in a whole lot of time to try and, trying to help me avoid feelings by rationalizing them away. Really wish I it wasn't that way, but what I found is that the best way to counteract the plateau that I had reached in my therapy journey

• 39:22Jemma Sbeg?

  was to start actually getting into where my emotions felt physically and providing or pushing for emotional release and catharsis through exercise, through dance, through movement, swaying with an emotion. It really, really helps. My third strategy for feeling your feelings is one that I think will hopefully stop you from being afraid of what that would mean. And it's called the ninety second rule. So this was created by the neuroscientist Dr. Jill Bult Taylor. Um, she's pretty well known for having um, a major stroke when she was in her thirties. A- and she was already a neuroscientist and basically using herself as like a test subject

• 40:04Jemma Sbeg?

  to, you know, understand the brain better through her experience. She also did some pretty amazing research looking at how long our emotions actually last. And she found that most of the time, an emotional reaction cannot last longer than ninety seconds. Unless we keep re-triggering it with our thoughts, i.e. by overthinking or not letting it go or not allowing ourselves to feel it properly. So it keeps returning again and again and again. But basically, what that means is that when an emotion arises for you, set a timer for ninety seconds and just sit with it, find a cozy spot,

• 40:46Jemma Sbeg?

  breathe, feel, it's going to feel scary and like the emotion's gonna take over and then you realize that it won't end suddenly, ninety seconds is up and it's passed. You cannot be frightened, anxious, in the depths of grief, sad, whatever it is. You cannot be like that forever, not even continuously for more than a few hours, even if it feels that way, you know, according to Dr. Jill, not even for more than ninety seconds. So, because of that, it's okay to let yourself feel, to let yourself feel, knowing that this emotion isn't going to consume you because it just has no way of doing that. Again, make your mission here. Your mission here right now is to explore

• 41:31Jemma Sbeg?

  every emotion like some great traveler who's able to come back and tell people about what they found and make great art and write about it and tell us stories about it. This emotion cannot hurt you. There's a fantastic TED Talk I love called, "You are not at the mercy of your emotions, your brain creates them", that I love to watch when I need this reminder as well. This reminder that you can tap into your emotions and let them give you a rich, sensational, emotional, interpersonal experience without losing control. My final big tip for getting back in touch with your emotions is to voice memo or film yourself when you are having a particularly intense emotional experience,

• 42:15Jemma Sbeg?

  but keep it just for you. I'm gonna explain why that's important and why I love doing it. When I went through my first major breakup, when I was in my like early twenties, late teens, maybe even, I can't even remember at this stage. Obviously, I was devastated. I was so, so sad and just torn apart and I couldn't sleep and I couldn't eat and everything was a mess and I started filming myself in those moments. I started filming myself.

• 42:45Jemma Sbeg?

  You know, walking around my campus, going on a hike, crying and talking about where I was at in this like journey to get over this person. It was so raw and it was so real and it was just for me. That's the important part. It was just for me. That it really just allowed me to be like, there's actually, this is kind of beautiful. This is kind of beautiful and I'm really just giving myself permission to feel this. With no shame and no blame and I'm watching it back and I'm seeing. Exactly where this is touching me and exactly where this is impacting me. I actually still have those videos and I know it sounds really, really bizarre. But I think the beginning stages of feeling your feelings is like grabbing on to any glimmer or shimmer.

• 43:31Jemma Sbeg?

  Or instance of the possibility of, the possibility of an emotion and just grabbing it. And letting it take you wherever you, it needs to take you. Like I think about. Tinkerbell in a weird sense and I know that's a weird thing to bring in here, but this like flash of light and this like flutteriness of this. Fairy thing and this small thing and that's your emotions and in the early stages, if it's sitting with you, if it's passing through. Grab it, even if it's not an emotion you particularly wanna feel. Grab it, document it, make it known, let yourself sink deeply into the experience because it is a human one. And remember, please, avoid distracting yourself when this comes up.

• 44:13Jemma Sbeg?

  Avoid distracting yourself through escapism, through alcohol, through work, through the need to rationalize your emotions through, you know. Endlessly keeping yourself busy. It is such a, you know what, the reason that we wanna do it is because for a while it is such an effective strategy to do that. That's why you're doing it, because it does actually help. It helps you right now, it will not help you in the future. And I see a lot of people, the older they get. Lose more and more of who they are because for so long they've suppressed their emotions that as they get older, none of it just feels as special anymore. And they just don't really know, I just feel like they're just not really having the depth

• 44:56Jemma Sbeg?

  of experiences and they're not really searching for emotions and sensations the way that people really should be in this life. So it's not so much a psychological perspective, it's more of a spiritual value-based perspective or belief-based perspective that I have that anytime you try and convince yourself and say, this feels terrible, this feels awful, I shouldn't be feeling this, ask yourself, well, if I shouldn't be feeling this, why is this emotion even around then? Why does this emotion even exist? Because if it wasn't useful or helpful, if there wasn't some specialness to it, it wouldn't be here. And yet it is, so I'm gonna honor it, I'm gonna feel it. That's all I have time for in this episode.

• 45:41Jemma Sbeg?

  I really hope that it helped you. I hope that this like dissection of, you know, this dissection of this experience of emotional blunting and emotional numbness, I don't hope that you can relate to it, but I hope that if you can relate to it, you got something out of it and you can implement these strategies and that you feel sane. And that, bringing it back to the very first thing I said at the start of this episode, I hope that you're leaving this feeling in touch with just one emotion that you're going to be having today. Make sure to send this episode to a friend, a family member, a colleague, a partner, whoever, who may need to hear it. If you've made it this far, my loyal listeners, I know there's like a group of like fifty of you, fifty to a hundred who'd always make it this

• 46:24Jemma Sbeg?

  far. I want you, what's the emoji for today? What's an emoji that represents feeling your feelings? Or I think you should do a crazy dance emoji, whatever you think like crazy dance looks like. Drop it in the comments so I know you've made it this far. Leave your questions, your episode suggestions down there as well. I love engaging with you in that space because, you know, it's not like Instagram or TikTok where anyone can jump on board. It's just the listeners of the show. So I'll see you down there. But until next time, please make sure to follow along. Give us a five-star review. Pre-order my book because it comes out in less than a month, which is wild and we will talk about that a whole lot more. But until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself and we will talk very, very soon.

• 47:13Jemma Sbeg?

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• 47:56Jemma Sbeg?

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• 48:40Jemma Sbeg?

  than just putting my foot on the gas and just going, going, going, going. New members can try Whoop with a 30 day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join dot whoop dot com slash psychology for your free month of Whoop. This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over 14 years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is, lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands.

• 49:24Jemma Sbeg?

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• 49:31Jemma Sbeg?

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• 50:07Speaker 00

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