Pod Insights The Psychology of your 20s 419. How to ACTUALLY process your emotions About this episode When we’re detached from our emotions, things can feel a little… flat. But though our brain might be trying to protect us from harm, emotionally detaching stops us from being able to appreciate the true richness of life. In this episode, we’ll unpack why emotional blunting occurs, the ways we might be avoiding our true emotions, and look at some ways to actually start to process your emotions.
We explore:
• Why we’re bad at feeling what we’re feeling
• The hidden strategies we use to push our emotions away
• How maladaptive coping mechanisms can cause us long-term harm
• Why most emotions are actually driven by fear
• How we can more effectively process our emotions
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Our favourite sources:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12916575/
https://positivepsychology.com/maladaptive-coping/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/basics/intellectualization
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:40 Jemma Sbeg? Hello, everybody. I'm Jemma Sbeg 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.
3:00 Jemma Sbeg? 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 20s. 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 it is you're feeling and why, you probably believe that you are someone who processes your emotions well,
3:44 Jemma Sbeg? 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
4:28 Jemma Sbeg? 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, um 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 gonna break down today. Kind of a guide to the research on why and how we avoid our emotions without consciously realizing it, what that actually looks like in our behavior and in our reactions to things.
5:11 Jemma Sbeg? 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 wanna cry, sing and experience joy when you wanna experience joy, be disappointed when you wanna 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.
5:48 Jemma Sbeg? 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 like 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.
6:30 Jemma Sbeg? Sometimes we're very aware that this is the case and sometimes, like I don't wanna 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.
7:14 Jemma Sbeg? Even after the thing is like, it, even if it looks like they've eerily been coping all along. What's actually happening is that the emotions are like, they're still sitting in the emotional 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.
7:57 Jemma Sbeg? There's this, well, there was this really huge paper from like, I don't know, two thousand and ten that showed. Especially if you have emotionally stunted parents in particular. This reduces how many different emotions people report being able to label or feel. And it's highly correlated to emotional suppression in individuals themselves. So people. 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.
8:38 Jemma Sbeg? If emotions aren't shown unless they are thi- this like 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 gonna 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, you know, who's to say it happened at all?
9:18 Jemma Sbeg? If we don't let ourselves feel angry, like, then maybe the emotional impact of what we've been through will just fade away. Like ignorance is bliss. That's kind of the 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
9:58 Jemma Sbeg? by the intensity of our sadness or the intensity of our grief, our outrage, our loneliness. Um, and the irrationality of those emotions sometimes, the fact that they cause us to sometimes do things we don't wanna 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 gonna 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.
10:45 Jemma Sbeg? 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 phenomenon ve- 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,
11:27 Jemma Sbeg? 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 explod- 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
12:12 Jemma Sbeg? 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 ten years and you suddenly came back to life right now and reality right now and society right now, you would freak out. You would think, oh my gosh, the world has gone to shit. Like, it is an awful place to be. Being somewhat desensitized to that is our brain's way of trying to keep us calm
12:55 Jemma Sbeg? 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 US, I can't remember, where they exposed sixty 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,
13:41 Jemma Sbeg? that's when their stress response was revealed to be much, 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?
14:25 Jemma Sbeg? 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.
15:10 Jemma Sbeg? Um, and I think the biggest one that I think of for a lot of smart twenty somethings, like, what we find ourselves doing is over intellectualizing. If you are a smart person, you are so used to being able to outthink or 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.
15:52 Jemma Sbeg? 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 micro-analyzing 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,
16:33 Jemma Sbeg? 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.
17:14 Jemma Sbeg? 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 two thousands that looked at hundreds of participants and essentially found that people who like have the academic or intellectual words for how they feel may not necessarily adjust better than people who don't.
17:57 Jemma Sbeg? 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, um, I've actually spoken to a lot of my friends who are who are psychologists about this. Um, and they struggle with this with their patients, right? Like they have a patient come in who's probably a lot like you, very, very smart, very curious. You're listening to this podcast, like, you know, you you really wanna know the 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.
18:41 Jemma Sbeg? 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.
19:25 Jemma Sbeg? 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.
20:10 Jemma Sbeg? 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 gonna take a short break. See if you can guess it. We'll be right back.
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24:52 Jemma Sbeg? 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.
25:38 Jemma Sbeg? 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 behaviours, once working hard loses its allure. There was a study from two thousand and twenty five that followed like twelve hundred full time employees aged twenty five to sixty five. And these participants filled out an online survey. They talked about that it essentially assessed them for work addiction,
26:24 Jemma Sbeg? 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 overtime, because again, their only coping mechanism is just to work more. But that also led to B, them being more likely to have addictive behaviours, 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
27:06 Jemma Sbeg? the more you then have to rely on other behaviours to give you dopamine and other behaviours to make you feel whole. From a neuroscience perspective, which you you guys know, we always have to offer a neuro- neuroscientific perspective. Many of these behaviours 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.
27:45 Jemma Sbeg? And essentially, the more we try and suppress or outrun a feeling through whatever behaviors, working, anything, the more persistent and intrusive it becomes. The emotion, yeah, it seemingly disappears. It's actually like in the background doing pushups and getting stronger and stronger and stronger. Because it starts feeling more and more scary, the more we avoid it. And we just keep delaying the moment that we will eventually have to face it. Meaning that when we eventually do, we start to believe that all emotions, when we encounter them, must be difficult to manage because we only feel them at their most extreme point. Why we're really doing all of this is like because we're scared.
28:27 Jemma Sbeg? Like, we're really scared that when the emotion finally hits us, it's gonna take out the whole village. And we're not gonna be able to cope. Probably because, yeah, again, we're falling into this pattern where we don't feel, we don't feel. And then when we do feel, it's at like level five thousand. And we're so scared of excessively ruminating, we're so scared of hypervigilance taking over our lives. We don't know how to down-regulate our feelings, we don't know how to stick, like, just to sit with them. We 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
29:12 Jemma Sbeg? 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 richer, meaningful life. Or to identify what needs to change or to work through things until they have a stable resolution. Also, we don't know ourselves, and we don't know ourselves. If you don't know your emotions, your emotions are a reaction to 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 gonna do here? Like, what is the path back to
29:54 Jemma Sbeg? feeling our feelings without feeling like, oh my god, I wanna 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 wanna learn how to process your emotions, you have to look for the clues and and interrogate what
30:35 Jemma Sbeg? is the immediate feeling and what is the deeper feeling? Like, what is the feeling that comes first and what is the feeling that actually wants to be heard? In psychology, I think I've heard people refer to this as like a primary emotion, which is the original uh instinctual response, like tha- 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.
31:19 Jemma Sbeg? 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 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
32:05 Jemma Sbeg? 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 gonna 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 behaviours yet again that further detach us. Yes, through avoidance, but also through blame, through minimisation, attacking other people, pushing other people away, like through jealousy, through anger, that sort of thing. So they actually don't do us any favours.
32:46 Jemma Sbeg? You know what? It'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. Um, 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 of 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 ten people he interviews.
33:29 Jemma Sbeg? 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 psychoanalyse them, but I really do think that's a, 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.
34:13 Jemma Sbeg? 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, the true emotion is, which often is quite a vulnerable emotion and, 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?
34:54 Jemma Sbeg? 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 like 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.
35:37 Jemma Sbeg? 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 of years back by this woman called Lisa Feldman Barrett. She wrote this book, How Emotions Are Made, in like two thousand and seventeen. Don't quote me on that, may have been earlier, may have been later.
36:19 Jemma Sbeg? 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, uh, what's the opposite of intense?
36:43 Jemma Sbeg? I don't know, not intense. And her research shows that um 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 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.
37:25 Jemma Sbeg? 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.
38:08 Jemma Sbeg? A fun fact also about emotional granularity. If you have high emotional granularity, so you can label more emotions. This may seem kind of, 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. Was just like kinda doing nothing, like just microdosing the feeling and learning to sit with it. Like processing emotions is incredibly boring work.
38:53 Jemma Sbeg? 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, cause I'm like their number one fan. Um, 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 kinda needs, but his life is falling apart and he's basically trying to get through, you know,
39:36 Jemma Sbeg? 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. Um, super funny, Jason Segel's in it, um, 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 gonna last for the amount of time that you have. And for the duration of that song, for the duration of that five, ten minutes,
40:21 Jemma Sbeg? 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 un, like, and the sense of injustice, let yourself feel disappointed, like you have five minutes to just let.
40:43 Jemma Sbeg? 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, 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 the, in those minutes.
41:27 Jemma Sbeg? 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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44:23 Speaker 02 and technology closer to biomedical researchers. Learn more about how Cleveland Clinic and IBM are using AI and quantum computing to revolutionize biomedical research at ibm.com/smarttalks.
44:42 Speaker 02 Every small business owner has that one story, the one moment that could have broken them, but remarkably, it didn't. Hi, I'm Kathleen Griffith, co-host of The Unshakeables, along with Stevie Barron, CEO of Chase for Business. We have more incredible stories of overcoming the impossible still to come in season three. You'll hear from entrepreneurs who faced make or break moments and came out stronger. We dig into how they did it, what they learned, what they'd never do again and what kept them pushing forward.
45:15 Jemma Sbeg? These are the stories that remind us that being unshakable isn't about never falling. It's about how you rise, rebuild, and keep going. Whether you're starting up, scaling up, or trying to find your footing again, these stories remind us that resilience lives everywhere, in small businesses, shaping communities all across America. Listen to The Unshakables wherever you get your podcasts and learn more at chase.com/podcast. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Copyright 2026 JPMorgan Chase & Company.
45:51 Jemma Sbeg? So giving your emotions a standing appointment definitely works. Putting them in your diary, great technique. You know what also works? Just fricking, 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.
46:17 Jemma Sbeg? Let me explain that because, I don't know, like, how can you expressively run your probably thinking? Let me explain the whole principle behind this. What we're basically talking about is somatic release. Lots of us will know Vessel Van der Boek's, or Van der Kolk'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, or the tension of those emotions not being released
47:00 Jemma Sbeg? impacts our muscles, impacts our limbs, impacts our cells 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.
47:16 Jemma Sbeg? 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, uh like after they experience a threat or they're stressed, they'll like shake. That's the nervous system discharging excess energy. And humans have the same mechanism, like we've just learnt to suppress it. We've just learnt to not look weird in front of people, even though our body needs something from us to process what we've been through. I know when I went through like a really, really sad time a couple of years back that, let's be real, like manifested in a lot of just like anger at the world.
47:59 Jemma Sbeg? That is when I picked up boxing and I would sometimes cry during those classes because I was so pent up and angry. Um, at the world and life, what was really below that angle 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 wanna go down a whole rabbit hole, look at the research on yoga and emotional processing.
48:42 Jemma Sbeg? And how many people will wanna 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 two thousand and fourteen. Um, it was a study on sixty four 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 half of them just do normal therapy. At the end of the study, almost fifty two percent of the participants no longer met the criteria for PTSD. Compared to just twenty percent of the people who did therapy alone.
49:25 Jemma Sbeg? One in two of those people, their PTSD was treated. Now, obviously, execute your judgment here, this isn't, and 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 swi- I don't know, anything. Um, 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.
50:10 Jemma Sbeg? Write it all down, send yourself a vo- a voice note when you're like in the middle of the feeling. Um, 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 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?
50:55 Jemma Sbeg? 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 gonna mean, you know, you know yourself, that's gonna mean that you are in touch with yourself. Please stop telling yourself that you are not, just, you're just not an emotions person.
51:39 Jemma Sbeg? 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 wanna feel intense grief, we wanna feel like, we wanna feel rage when we witness injustice. We wanna feel sadness when we witness rejection.
52:18 Jemma Sbeg? 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
53:00 Jemma Sbeg? 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 fifty percent. Or we kind of only feel the emotions that influence us to a mid-range.
53:43 Jemma Sbeg? We wanna 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 gonna be a corresponding emotion that feels more appropriate to feel, like anger, like jealousy, like shame, like nothing, like numbness.
54:21 Jemma Sbeg? 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.
55:06 Jemma Sbeg? That's my opinion at least. You can disagree. Maybe it means something else to you, but I think that's all I have time for. I need to take a, I feel like I've said the word feeling about fifty million times. So I need to, I need to take a breath after that. But I do hope that this episode has been informative. Um, when I learnt about like emotional bodyguards, my life changed. I genuinely was like, oh, my God, I've so much about who I am as a person is explained because I used to be so angry. And I was like, why am I such an angry irritated 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
55:51 Jemma Sbeg? and research for this episode. Um, as always, if you want more of the psychology of your twenties, you can go to our Instagram, you can go to our Substack and you can watch us on Netflix, wherever you are in the world. If 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.
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