Podcast Summary
Learning to Surf, Embracing Life's Challenges and Emotions.: Avoiding difficult experiences and emotions only reinforces the problem and escalates negativity. By navigating challenges with adaptive strategies and embracing emotions, we can empower ourselves to cope better and take control of our lives.
Learning how to cope with unexpected and overwhelming experiences, and our emotions, is like learning how to surf. Avoidance is a maladaptive coping strategy that reinforces itself - it provides relief in the moment, but doesn't make the burden go away. Instead, it contributes to more of the problem and escalates negative energy or emotion. By avoiding the hard thing, we don't have any direct experience and forfeit having any feedback. Rather than avoiding, we need to navigate unexpected things with adaptive strategies and learn how to deal with our feelings. Emotions are powerful and at the most fundamental level, are energy that has to go somewhere.
Techniques to Overcome Anxiety: Start small and practice distress tolerance to overcome fear of a big task. Acknowledge where you are, set different criteria for success, and shift the lens on emotions to improve skill. Remember HALT to cope effectively.
To overcome the fear of a big task, start small and commit to working on it for just ten minutes. Set a different criterion for success to practice exposing oneself to that thing. Shift the lens of how we look at emotions to being skilled and unskilled with different propensities based on what we've practiced. Practice distress tolerance, which means tolerating negative emotions that come with feeling ill-equipped to do a certain activity. Mastery comes after 10,000 hours of doing something, so start practicing to get better. It's important to acknowledge where you are and start practicing. When coping, remember the acronym HALT - if you're Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired, your coping will look different.
How to Manage Emotions to Improve Decision-Making Skills: By recognizing our emotional states and practicing practical skills, such as planning ahead, front-loading, and grounding, we can improve our decision-making skills and ultimately enhance our physical and emotional well-being. Eating provides us with vital components such as energy, satisfaction, and connection.
Hunger, anger, loneliness, and tiredness can drain our energy and make simple decisions difficult. Planning ahead and front-loading can help us navigate these challenges, as can grounding, which involves attending to sensory data in real time to calm down. When our emotional reactivity is low, our frontal lobe comes online, and we can process information more effectively. Therefore, it's important to be aware of our emotional states and not let them deter us from practicing practical skills. Eating provides us with energy, satisfaction, and connection, which are vital components of our physical and emotional well-being. By naming and acknowledging our emotional states, we can ride their waves more effectively and make better decisions for ourselves and those around us.
Techniques for managing anxiety and overwhelming emotions.: When feeling anxious or overwhelmed, focus on the present moment using sensory experiences and naming emotions to create balance. Exercise is an effective way to release cortisol and balance mood.
When feeling anxious or overwhelmed, it can be helpful to identify what is actually happening in the present moment by focusing on sensory experiences such as sight, touch, smell and taste. This can help to combat catastrophic thinking, which can be a feature of anxious thoughts. Being able to name emotions can also be helpful in managing them: this can create a sense of balance and allow for planning or problem-solving. When experiencing strong emotions, trying to move or discharge the energy of the feeling can be helpful in calming down. Exercise is a particularly effective strategy for managing feelings as it can release cortisol and other substances that can help balance mood.
How Exercise Boosts Brain's Flexibility and Mental Health: Exercise enhances brain plasticity, reduces negative emotions and allows individuals to embrace grey areas in life. Sensory data from outdoor workouts helps to balance chaos and improve mental health.
Exercise can improve brain plasticity, which is important for individuals struggling with anxiety or depression. It helps increase flexibility in their mind and allows them to see the grey area in life rather than just black or white. Exercise helps to reduce negative emotions such as anger and releases dopamine, which gives a rush similar to a runner's high. Exercising outside allows for the sensory data and the experience of the present moment. In life, things do not always fit neatly into a box, the brain is always wanting to hijack us and move us into the future, and managing and balancing chaos and rigidity is important for mental health.
Developing Effective Coping Habits: Coping mechanisms are developed through specific effort and practice. Rewarding effort, regardless of outcomes, reduces anxiety and builds dopamine, making it easier to navigate difficult situations. Acknowledge and celebrate your unique evidence of effort.
Coping is like developing habits where emotional cues trigger coping practices to navigate troubled waters. The emotional charge of cues varies, and we may be skilled in one area not because of expertise, but because of different emotional charges. Efforts need to be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound(SMART). Focusing on effort and rewarding efforts, regardless of outcomes, helps reduce anxiety and pressure and builds dopamine in you. Everyone’s evidence of effort is unique. Failure to accomplish a hard thing should not affect the reward for your effort; instead, you should acknowledge the effort and receive accolades for it.
Importance of Focusing on the Process of Growth and Learning.: Success comes from the small changes made over time, recognizing progress, and building grit. Explore alternative goals, serve the community, learn from others, and embrace the process to achieve long-term success.
It's important to focus on the process of getting better and acquiring skills rather than just the end result. Small changes made over time lead to significant gains and it's crucial to recognize them while working towards bigger goals. Emotions and expectations can often lead to struggles, but exploring other options, such as holding a piece of ice, can help overcome overwhelming emotions. Serving the community and helping others is a satisfying motivator. Being open to alternative goals besides winning, identifies opportunities to appreciate effort, growth, and learning, which helps build grit. Learning from others helps to expand knowledge and curiosity. Being in process and recognizing that we can achieve goals slowly over time, rather than immediately, is the key to success.
Coping Strategies for Dealing with High Emotions in Relationships: Take a break, use coping strategies like holding an ice cube, delay response, pursue partners must give a time-out, write down conversations, emotions will go up and down, gain a file for tolerating negative emotions.
Dealing with high emotions requires coping strategies like holding a small ice cube, taking a break, or delaying the response to the scenario to allow our frontal lobe to cope rationally with the challenge at hand. Pursuing partners must give a specified time-out not longer than 60 minutes to withdrawers with an assurance to re-engage. Writing down the conversation or using name-it-to-tame-it coping strategy helps process the information and engage the supplemental motor cortex and frontal lobe to gain further insights. It is essential to remember that the emotions will go up and down like a crescendo and decrescendo, and gaining a file for tolerating negative emotions is crucial to cope with it in the future.
The Power of Writing and Breathing for Emotional Balance: Writing down emotions and practicing breathing techniques can help regulate emotions during challenging situations and anxiety-related issues, promoting a sense of calm and well-being.
The methodology of writing down your emotions helps channel your existing energy and emotion, allowing therapeutic moments with yourself to help you feel more equipped and calm in future scenarios. In challenging relationships, it's important to be your own advocate, which can be hard when activated and emotional. Breathing can also be a useful technique in calming panic attacks and anxiety, as holding your breath can lead to reinforcement of panic signals from your brain. Breathing in for five and out for five, along with guided imagery practices, can remind your body there isn't an active present danger. Tripping your mind with visualization techniques can also help shift your thoughts away from negative emotions.
Using the Power of Imagination to Cultivate New Neural Networks: Our brains can't tell the difference between real and imagined experiences, allowing us to use visualization to develop new skills and handle emotions. Practicing and experimenting with new strategies is crucial for growth.
Our brains don't know the difference between real or imaginary experiences, as they run the same neural network, which can be beneficial in cultivating a new neural network that helps to handle emotional charges and irrational thoughts. Visualizing and practicing approximating a live event can be helpful in acquiring new skills and dealing with emotions. Writing them down and keeping it in the visual field can help in moments of distress, rather than relying on memory. Practice is vital to acquire new skills, and it is essential to experiment with new strategies, even if it feels silly; never giving it a go is vicarious forfeiture.
