Understanding Emotions and Building Trust Within Yourself

Have you ever had a feeling take over your entire day and you just could not figure out why you couldn't fix it. You couldn't think your way out of it. You just felt off. Today we are exploring emotions and we are going to make them simple, useful, and trustworthy so that you can actually begin to build trust within yourself and your own body. You're listening to relish the podcast for people ready to stop chasing self-improvement and start savoring their lives. If you're tired of the hamster wheel of healing and hungry for more joy, presence, and

meaning, you're in the right place. Welcome to relish. If you are new here, I am so glad you're here. I am Alyssia. If this episode supports you, please follow. Subscribe. I invite you to leave a five star review rating on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. I have a personal goal to reach 100 reviews and your words really help more people find the show. So thank you. Also, I wanted to give you a heads up that I started a relish hotline. Ooh. How exciting. And it's a phone number you can call in. Leave a little voicemail. And initially I thought, oh, this would be kind of neat to have you,

you know, call in and share challenges or questions and maybe I can answer them or talk about them on the podcast related to your own struggles and that kind of thing. But as we approach the holidays here, I thought it would also be interesting and fun to invite you to call in and share what you are grateful for. So I would love for you to call the number that's in the show notes and just leave a little message sharing what or who in your life you're grateful for, and a little bit about the what or the why. Okay. You can say your name. You can leave

it anonymous, whatever you want. Thank you for being here. Let's get into it. For thousands of years, there has been a kind of tug of war about what makes us human, our reason or our emotion, intellect or emotion. And Plato saw the mind like a chariot, where logic had to kind of rein in the wild horses, of feeling, of emotion. Now Aristotle disagreed. He believed emotions carried their own intelligence, their own wisdom, and could actually guide us toward virtue if we understand them. For centuries, science actually sided with Plato. You know, reason, good, emotion bad. And that split still shapes how many of us relate to ourselves and to emotion. But modern

neuroscience on emotions, which we're going to dive into today, it shows something different. The brain does not separate reason from emotion. It actually builds them together. So feeling is not like the opposite of thinking. It's a part of how we think. For a lot of my life, I did not understand emotions. I thought they were these, you know, inconvenient, messy things that kind of got in the way of being productive or rational. I would have sided with Plato. Okay. And that's kind of the conditioning of our society. That's what science has said. But the more I've learned and really, the more I've lived, the more I see emotions are a foundation of what it means to be human emotions.

They are one of my greatest special interests. So much so that I actually did my grad school thesis on the neuroscience of emotions so I could talk about it all day long, but I've tried to condense it here so that it's relevant to you. Emotions are in many ways our body's built in guidance system. They help us survive. They help us connect. They help us make decisions and find meaning. And that's happening. Whether we are aware of them or not. And emotions are not good or bad. They are simply information. And in fact, they are vital to experiencing joy. And this podcast, relish is about savoring life. And joy is, of course, an

emotion. So today we are talking about emotions. We're talking about what they are, the science, how they work, and how understanding them can change how you experience the world. Now, before we dive into the neuroscience, let's start with a bit about what's happening in the body, because emotions are both physical and mental experiences. Every moment your brain is tracking what's happening inside of you. It's tracking and monitoring your heartbeat, your temperature, your hormones, breathing, blood sugar, all of it. And it's doing this through a process called interception, which we've talked about before. That constant stream of internal data is what scientists call core affect. So

interception is the sensation of the signals. Like the racing heart, the empty stomach and core affect is the resulting feeling anxious or feeling hungry, for instance, core affect is the foundation of all emotional life, and it has two main dimensions. There's valence and arousal. Valence is whether something feels pleasant or unpleasant. I like it or I don't like it. Arousal is how much energy or activation it carries. So you can think of affect As your body's background tone. Maybe you wake up feeling heavy and slow. That could be categorized as unpleasant valence

and low arousal. Or maybe you're buzzing a bit before a meeting or an event, and that might be high arousal, but it could feel pleasant if it's like excitement, or it could feel unpleasant in the valence if it's more like anxiety, depending on the situation. Your brain senses these shifts in valence and arousal all day long, and it uses them to help you navigate your environment. And it's happening whether you are conscious of it or not. This is where we start to see that emotions are not separate from our mind or our bodies. They're really more like a bridge between the two. For a long time, science followed something called the basic emotion theory. It's an idea that emotions are universal,

kind of hard wired, and that they look the same for everyone according to this view. Anger means someone is going to probably have a red face and clenched fists. Fear is going to look like wide eyes and a racing heart. Happiness is going to equate to a smile. Okay. You might have even seen these classic assessments where you choose which face matches a particular emotion. It's a simple and somewhat compelling idea that we all share a common emotional code, and it feels like it could be a part of our innate physiology, almost like a part of our anatomy. It makes sense. That's how it

can feel like it's happening to me, just like my heart rate or my breath or any other physiological response. But in the past few decades, research has shown us that this is not actually the case. And neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett is responsible for a lot of this work. She's kind of turned the field on its head with this theory she developed called the Theory of Constructed Emotion. This modern theory shows that emotions are not built in reflexes that you're born with. They are constructions that your brain makes in real time. And she has a book called How Emotions Are Made. It's very in-depth, but it's also pretty

accessible science. I'll link it below. And basically, this theory posits that your brain does not just detect an emotion that already exists, and that emotions are not just reactions to the world. The brain creates an emotion based on the information that's available in the body. Now, there are really pretty big implications here that we're going to talk about, but let's break it down first. So according to this theory, each emotion that you feel is constructed by your brain from three key ingredients. There are three ingredients to emotion. One is body sensations. So this is what Barrett calls your body budget. Your brain's kind

of ongoing management of energy and resources. We'll talk more about that. The second ingredient is context. Context is what's happening around you in this moment. And then the third ingredient is your past experiences. So the concepts and the memories that your brain is using to predict. We've talked about predictive processing. Your brain's using to predict what those sensations probably mean based on your past. I remember when I was writing my thesis, I had an interesting kind of aha moment one day. Of course, at the time I was very intensely investigating my own emotional

experience. I was super curious about it, and I remember I was headed to an exercise class with a friend, and I was really looking forward to seeing her. We were going to go do the class, we were going to grab brunch, and I remember in the car before going into the class, I noticed like, oh, my heart's racing a little bit. I have some jittery sensations in my chest and I read it as excitement. I'm excited for this experience now. The emotion was excitement constructed by the ingredients of those sensations in my body, the racing heart and the jittery chest. The context of

going to see a friend and doing an activity I enjoyed. And the third ingredient my brain's prediction based on past positive, similar experiences with this friend with this kind of class. Okay, so I had that experience. And then after the class, I was driving home and I got pulled over by a cop for a rolling stop, which if you don't know, that's where you roll through a stop sign without stopping completely. And he was right. I did it, okay, but I'm driving, I get. I see the flashers in the mirror behind and I notice in my body I had the sensations. Oh my gosh, there's

this racing heart. There's this jittery feeling in my chest. But this is not excitement. No, this was fear. This was panic. Something about the proximity of those two experiences so close together and me being intimately aware of it. It was this huge insight, like something clicked. Wow. The sensations were identical. What changed was the context. All right, am I going into the class or am I? Am I going to see a friend and do something I enjoy, or am I getting pulled over by a cop? That, combined with my past experience, not positive for the cop

part, okay, and my brain then translating or the meaning making also changed. The body's data can be the same, but the emotion can change or be interpreted differently with context and prediction. So this is a really good example of how emotions are constructed. Your heart can be racing and that could be interpreted as fear before a presentation or before being pulled over. But it could also be excitement for an event or a roller coaster or, you know, during some kind of performance or something like that. The physical sensations are the same. The meaning your brain assigns is what changes. I also want to note that

this approach, this theory of constructed emotions, it is incredibly inclusive and nuanced because it recognizes that emotional life and experiences are shaped by culture and language and personal experience. And of course, you know how we learn to relate to emotions or to suppress them. That's going to vary. It's going to differ across cultures and families and neuro types. Okay. And I want to pause to name something here, because I think it's important to normalize the full range of how people can experience emotions. Not everyone feels emotions in

the same way or with the same kind of clarity. For example, some people experience something called alexithymia, which literally means no words for emotion. It's often misunderstood as a lack of feeling, but that is not what's happening. Okay. The emotions are there. They're happening. The body is having a physiological experience. The heart race, the tightness in the chest, the changes in your breath. And there's some kind of categorizing going on, combining with prediction and context. But the brain isn't necessarily translating those sensations into conscious awareness or language, so the person

still might feel the effects of the emotion, they might feel it even in their body, but they can't always identify or describe what it is or what it might mean. I like to bring this up because it's actually more common than people think. I think when I wrote my thesis. So this was years ago, but it was like 5 to 20% of the general population, particularly various neuro divergences. It can be common like myself, people with trauma, people with psychiatric disorders. I was actually informally diagnosed with it almost a decade. It's not technically a diagnosis because

it's not really a DSM disorder. It's more of a factor recognized alongside other conditions. But the point is, I have made great strides with my own emotional understanding and my emotional capacity through exploring this and doing this work. And I like to share it, because this holistic approach to emotions shows the mind and the body are connected. We can heal, and while our brains might be wired a certain way, there's a lot that we can see changes around through gaining better inter receptive awareness and emotional healing and

things like that. Now, on the other side of the spectrum, there's something called synesthesia, and that's where sensory experiences kind of blend together. So someone might literally perceive emotions as colors or sounds or textures. Anger for someone might look red or sadness might feel blue. Joy might have a sound or a vibration. So both of these I wanted to share them because they're examples of how uniquely Human emotional experience really is. And the diversity that can be there. There is not a single right way to feel or express emotion. Some of us process emotion more from a

top down, others more of a bottom up, some through entirely different sensory pathways. I'm going to talk more about that in a bit, but however your experience shows up, it's valid, it's valid, it's your emotional experience. And that is, to me what makes this theory so empowering. It tells us emotions are not things that just happen to us. They are things our brain actively creates to make sense of what's happening and to guide us in what to do next. You could say an emotion is kind of like your brain's best guess, a best educated guess about what you're feeling and what the meaning is. So when we talk about learning to feel our feelings,

we're really talking about learning to listen to that conversation between our body and our brain. Now, before we go further, I think it's helpful to clarify a few other terms. Words that often get used interchangeably. We've got emotions, feelings, and moods. And in your, you know, regular daily life, it's probably not so important to distinguish. But for the context of this conversation, I think it's interesting. Emotions are the brain's interpretation of what's happening in the body, given your context and history. Feelings are your conscious awareness of those emotions. So what it's like from the inside to

feel fear, joy, peace, whatever it is. And moods are those emotional tones that kind of linger over time. It's almost like a weather pattern of your nervous system. So if you're low energy, you know, and in this kind of unpleasant state for days, there might be a mood of heaviness. If your body budget is well resourced and balanced, you're more likely to have a mood of ease or lightness. All right, so to recap back to affect from earlier. That's the raw data valence and arousal. Emotion is your brain's interpretation of the data. It's what your brain and body are doing mostly below conscious awareness. It's the brain's construction of meaning from the ingredients of body sensations,

context and past experience. And feeling is your awareness of the interpretation, the subjective awareness. When your brain constructs anger or fear or joy and you become conscious of it and can sense it, you're in yourself. That's feeling. It's the part you can name, you can describe, you can reflect on so you feel an emotion. Mood is what happens when the tone kind of sticks around. So if that's confusing, you know, don't worry too much about it. It's not so important to follow the rest of this episode. I just wanted to share it because this is the modern scientific understanding of emotion, of the brain as an active meaning

maker. And that understanding completely changed the way that I relate to my own emotional life. Discovering emotions was a pivotal point in my life and in who I am today. I will never forget the first time I was handed a feelings list. It's a more common tool today, but I had never seen it back then. All right, this was almost ten years ago when I went to the Hoffman process. And the feelings list is quite literally a list of feeling. Words, emotions and sensations are on there. And I remember staring at it and thinking, oh my God, are there really this many

emotions? You know, before that? Uh, if someone asked how I felt, I might have said fine or good, maybe stressed. Okay, but when I looked at that list. Good. Fine. Okay. Are not on there. I now see that before that really what I was most of the time was numb. I had a very flat, limited emotional range. Nothing felt that great. Nothing felt that terrible. Um, I thought that meant I was doing okay. Really. I now look back and see I was quite disconnected. Emotions are the path to us being connected to ourselves, to knowing ourselves, to knowing our inner world and what's happening and what it all means. For

me, learning to feel again was in some ways like getting color back in this world that had become very grave for me. So I'm so glad that the process kicked off my journey with emotions. And now I am also a Hoffman Process teacher alongside my other work, so I'm really grateful to get to share that with others, and working with others in that capacity is what's greatly contributed to me getting an intimate view into the diversity of emotional experiences. If you want to check out a feelings list, I have included a downloadable one

that I use with my clients in the show notes, and I've also linked a feelings wheel that's another super useful feelings tool. Now, when I started exploring and feeling emotions, it was really uncomfortable. You know, feeling numb was kind of in my comfort zone, and I started feeling and sometimes I'd stop and go, wait a second, is this really worth it? Like, why would I want to feel this? Feeling is in many ways more uncomfortable than not. At least it was for me. But emotions serve a purpose. They serve many purposes, actually. So for one, they help regulate the body. Your brain runs this budgeting system behind the scenes, sometimes called Alastair or Barrett calls it body

budgeting. And it's constantly predicting your energy needs and then adjusting your physiology to keep you ready for what's coming or for what's next. It's releasing or conserving resources and changing your heart rate and your hormones and shifting your attention. It's priming you to act, and that budgeting often feels like emotion, because those internal shifts show up as pleasant, unpleasant valence or high low arousal energy in your body. The brain's job is to keep you alive, and it does that by predicting and regulating your body budget. Emotions are basically how your brain makes sense of those changes and guides action. Emotions also guide your attention and decision making. They direct you toward what matters in a given moment. You

know you might experience some kind of jolt of unease when you're overlooking something, or maybe there's some warmth that might draw you closer to what matters to you, what's meaningful. Or if you've ever felt hangry. Hangry is, like, angry or irritable because you're hungry. For me, when I'm hungry, I know I get a little more judgmental. I get a little harsh. That's because the body state is coloring my choices. Emotions also motivate action and behavior. Fear helps us to escape danger. Sometimes Love helps us bond. It helps us protect. We are emotionally motivated beings, and almost anything we do is because we want to feel something. They help us

know what we want to move towards or away from. In that way, emotions also are a really important signal for our needs and are vital to setting boundaries now. Boundary. Let's talk about this word for a minute. It's a term thrown around a lot in the self-help world. What is a boundary? Right? A boundary is like a line that says what is okay and what's not okay. And when we're talking about it, typically it's like an invisible line. But you can think about a fence around your house as a boundary. A boundary is there to protect you. And in this context, a boundary is really there to protect Affect your

needs. So if you want to set a boundary, you have to know your needs. How do you know your needs based on what you feel from a. Humanistic psychology perspective, our emotions indicate if our needs are being met or not met. So a positive valence emotion. Joy. Gratitude. Peace. Excitement those are all signals. There's some need being met. The unpleasant emotions. They're not bad okay. But the negative valence ones fear, anger, sadness, shame. It's like an indicator from your nervous system. There is some unmet need here. There's some need for care or protection. In this way, emotions can kind of become like a guide, a GPS for your needs and thereby knowing the boundaries that you need to set. Emotions are also important because they help

us connect. Now think about this for a minute. If your partner or your friend comes to you and they ask what you're feeling. They're trying to get to know you. Okay. They ask what you're feeling, but if you don't know yourself, can you share that with them? Emotions are at the heart of intimacy. You can break down the word itself into me. You see? Intimacy. Okay. It means allowing others to see your inner world and for you to share that inner world. You have to know it. So learning to feel what's happening in you is how you build intimacy with yourself first. And then that's what allows true connection with others. Emotions also help you trust yourself if you

struggle with doubt and you want to build confidence and trust. You have to know who you're trusting. Emotions are how you know your experience there, how you know what you need, what you value, what's true for you. You know self trust. It's not just like an intellectual thought. It's a felt sense. It's a felt relationship with your inner world. Now, if that sounds easier said than done, all right. You're not alone. Most of us did not learn how to feel all right, especially in Western and American society. Most of us learned rather how to not feel. As kids, we might have heard. Stop crying. You're fine. Don't be angry. Toughen up.

And then we learn to push the feelings down to cope by disconnecting. I think the tide could be changing on that a little bit with parenting today, but for most of us, at least most adults today, the feelings we had in childhood were not typically acknowledged or expressed in a healthy way. We didn't learn how to do that. And when emotions are unexpressed, they don't just disappear, they don't just go away. They get stuck. They get stuck in our bodies. And stuck. Energy turns into anything from tension and irritability to chronic health issues or burnout. You might know yourself, or maybe someone close to you who

had physical health ailments that you, or maybe even they suspect are related to some kind of emotional pain or repressed emotion. That emotional pain doesn't go away in our bodies. We might try to explain it away. We might try to rationalize it or minimize it. That's what most of us learn to do. When I work with clients, a lot of times I hear people wanting to understand their feelings. They're like, why am I feeling this? The why question as if understanding can give some relief. And it can. Now, from the perspective of the theory of constructed

emotions. Whatever you're feeling is there for a reason. There are some body sensations combining with context and past experience, but you may not be able to consciously deconstruct those specific ingredients every time an emotion comes up. So much is happening beneath conscious awareness. So sometimes we might know why we feel something, and then maybe that's helpful, but often we might not. And that doesn't mean something's going wrong. At the end of the day, a feeling is here because it needs to be felt. And of course, that is not comfortable, particularly for the negative valence emotions.

It's not comfortable to feel sadness or shame or fear. Now I know for me, when those start to pop up at that moment, it can feel like, oh my gosh, you know, I can't let this in. Because if I do, it's going to take over and it's going to last forever. It feels terrifying. But emotions are energy in motion. Emotion. They are meant to move through you. Not to get stuck in you. And when we don't feel we repress. We get them stuck. We push them into, into a corner of ourselves. Maybe our lower backs or our shoulders or our intestines, and they eat away at us. All that to say, if you can't explain why they're here, that's okay. The

goal isn't to figure them out intellectually, it's to feel them out. When we label our emotions as a problem to fix. We reinforce a belief that there's something wrong with us. Emotions are not problems, they're messages. They are trying to tell you something about your inner world. Emotions for me also kind of feel like a no guts, no glory situation. So when I was numb, I felt really boxed in. You know, I was like, oh yeah, more joy would be nice, more of the good stuff, the positive valence experiences. But my capacity to touch into the good was really dependent on my willingness to go to the pain and the courage to go. There is what expanded my range. Each of us has a range. All right. We might have our own

range and experience it differently, but we each have one that we can work with and grow. And the more we learn to feel, Eel, which really is about becoming more comfortable with being uncomfortable. The more we widen our window of tolerance, which can then open us up to greater possibilities, and that might include some more unpleasant emotions at times. But it's also what makes the pleasant possible. But we're all different. You know, I spent a long time thinking I must be broken because of my experience of emotions. Of course, that's why I

went on to study it. It was liberating to realize there are different ways to experience emotion, just like anything else. And now, through years of investigating my own experience and working with hundreds of people, over a thousand people very intimately around their emotions, seeing how differently feeling can present. I personally believe some people experience emotions more in a what I go to call college top down way and others in a more bottoms up way and I'll clarify. This is like my anecdotal hypothesis. Okay. As far as I know. But from my

experience, some people are top down emotional processors. So if I ask them what they feel, they name it, oh, I'm happy, I'm irritated. And if asked further, they might be able to deconstruct it down into the ingredients. You know, like they might be able to name the sensations that come with it, a warmth in their chest or a smile, tension, whatever it might be. They might be able to name the context, but generally it's the broader mind labeling it first kind of more abstractly, and then the body is following. Now, some people, like myself, okay, I

believe are more bottoms up processors. They notice the bare data of those ingredients, like the body sensations. First, the tightness in my chest, the buzzing that's happening under my skin. I might also be more aware of the context or the past experience. And then I kind of have to, like, assemble the ingredients, almost working backwards to identify what I'm feeling. And I want to clarify. I say backwards not because it's wrong, but because that's how in my experience, in most healing contexts, therapists, coaches, facilitators, etc., emotions tend to be held in that top down perspective, likely because basic emotion theory

was the norm until this theory of constructed emotions was developed. If that weren't true, then you know more diverse experiences would be considered normal. You know it would be normal to feel a color or to be not able to name an emotion word. And while I hope that one day we can get there, and maybe I'm looking at this podcast as like a little seed for that possibility. We're definitely not there yet. Okay. For years, I thought there was something wrong with me because my experience was not typical. It was not top down. And now I just understand it's a different way my

brain assembles information. But I am a human with feelings, and that's a valid experience. There's no right way or one way to feel. So that all brings me to this concept. We have to discuss in this in this podcast, which is of course, emotional intelligence. This term, a lot of people mistake intellectual understanding for emotional intelligence. Anything about that word intelligence, it implies knowledge. And we tend to equate knowing with reasoning, intellectual reasoning. But reading about emotions or knowing emotion theory does not mean you have high emotional intelligence. So emotional intelligence, AI or

EQ sometimes it's called EA or emotional ability. Academically, it's not about knowing the right term for an emotion, it's about your ability to be aware of what's happening inside of you, of what you're feeling, and to navigate it. So there's a term in the research called emotional granularity. That's the ability to get granular with your vocabulary and distinguish more finely between words like irritated, disappointed, angry, hurt instead of lumping everything together under mad. All right, people with higher emotional granularity tend to regulate better. They tend to make clearer decisions. They tend to experience less overwhelm. They tend to be more emotionally intelligent. So there is a

correlation. We don't know about causation, the goal of emotional intelligence, And really, the need is not to analyze your feelings, it's to feel them. To be emotionally intelligent is to be able to check in with what you're feeling and navigate through it, feel it, regulate it, actually be with it. And from a mindfulness perspective, which this is my background. It doesn't actually matter if you name the feeling. Really naming it could help. But what really matters is that you stop and you notice where the emotion lives in your body, and you just give it space. You let it pass through. You feel the heat, the pressure, the movement.

Because when you do that, you're letting the energy complete its cycle. And so right now, as I'm talking about this, I can feel this lightness in my chest. I feel this kind of tingling in my head. And I can translate that as excitement, I feel enlivened, I feel happy right now And when I feel something heavier, like shame or fear. You know, for me, it's often feels very dark. It feels dense, kind of like this metal weight rising up in my chest or my throat. It's usually moving very slowly. Now, whether or not I can name it as shame or anxiety or fear or whatever it is, that's not going to help it

pass. Stopping and bringing the awareness to it at the level of the sensations without judging it, just allowing it to be. That's the emotional intelligence feeling. It also doesn't require fixing it. It just requires noticing it, breathing with it, letting it pass. That's really what the word expression means. People hear that word expression, they think it means like verbalizing. You know, expressing your feelings is making your feelings known, but it's not necessarily by telling a story to someone else. Sometimes I might share my emotions to others or not. The importance of expressing my emotions is allowing that energy to

move through my body, to move through my system, to let the energy be expressed as it will. It's not, you know. Oh, I expressed how angry I am to my partner by telling them all the things that they did wrong. That's talking about the story, the context that you've attached to the experience that's actually staying more intellectual in your head about what happened. Expression is feeling in the body. What happened? I felt I feel it in my chest. I feel it moving. I feel it a tightness. It's pokey. It's hard, it's uncomfortable.

It's tight. It's contracted. Okay. It's feeling in the body because it needs to be felt. I mentioned this in the compassion episode a few weeks ago. If you're struggling with a hard thing, you're going through something hard and someone in your life comes to try and fix it. Is that helpful? Is that what you want? No. What do you want? You don't want them to fix it. You want them to be there with you, to allow your experience to be in it with you. So self-compassion. It's not okay. I'm in pain. And so I'm going to give my self-compassion and feel the feelings to make it go away in order to fix it. No, it's oh, pain is here. Compassion is needed because pain is here. I need to feel it because it needs

to be felt. We don't need an agenda to make them go away. Just let the energy move through because it wants to flow. It needs to flow so that it doesn't get stuck. Now I want to expand on something I mentioned earlier as we move toward practical applications for you to take with you. This idea that emotions are constructed has pretty big implications for one. It means it's not as frankly, as intuitive as it feels right. Emotions can feel like they are happening to me. I didn't cause the anger or the fear or the excitement. It just happened. You know,

it's like my body is reacting to the world. That's the foundation of this kind of now debunked basic emotion theory. If emotions, though, are created, that they're constructed, it means we have more power over our experience than we think. And with that power comes responsibility. If emotions are built from ingredients, then we can learn to shape the ingredients that we bring to each moment. As you learn more emotion concepts and expand your vocabulary. Your brain might get better at predicting and regulating because you know what's happening. Your concept library kind of upgrades your nervous system options. You know the words we use matter because they teach your

brain what to look for. Context matters because it tells your brain what a sensation likely means. Caring for your body. Budget. Sleep. Food. Movement. Breath. This matters because it changes the raw data your brain is using to build the experience. That's empowering. Actually, you know you are not so at the mercy of a pre wired emotional circuit. But again, it's also this invitation to stewardship in a way to acknowledge the connection of the mind and body. If I Chronically under sleep. Over. Caffeinated. Never move.

Scroll endlessly before bed on Instagram. I am feeding my brain noisy, depleted ingredients, so of course my predictions are going to skew toward threat or overwhelm or negative valence stuff. If I practice naming the nuance irritated versus disappointed versus hurt, if I curate my inputs, who I engage with, people, media I consume, places that I go. If I support my body budget by taking care of my body, I'm training my brain to make more accurate and more compassionate predictions. This is why simple practices work. A feelings list helps to grow your emotional granularity. Breathing practices help stabilize the budget. A boundary around news or doom scrolling or people cleans

up context. You know, even trying on a new word tender instead of weak, protective instead of defensive can shift the meaning your brain constructs, and therefore what action is going to be available next. So in her book, which I will link below in the show notes, Lisa Feldman Barrett gives all kinds of practical ways to work with this responsibility. But, you know, spoiler alert, it all ultimately goes back to the basics that you already know taking care of yourself, taking care of your body, taking care of your mind. Another important implication she talks about is that you

can update these old priors with new experiences. It's called re categorization. So if your body learned that a fast heartbeat means panic. You can deliberately pair that sensation with safe contexts, like taking a brisk walk or laughter or music, and then your brain has some new options. Oh, maybe this heartbeat is excitement. Maybe it's aliveness. Over time, the predictions change, and with the changed predictions, so does your lived reality. This is all really the heart of self trust, not forcing yourself to feel a certain way, but reliably tending to the ingredients that you can influence

and meeting whatever arises with presence. So check out her book if you want a deeper dive. This is, you know, not sponsored, but just genuine love for her. Really grateful for her work. Another neuroscientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, did. She did a great TEDx talk, and she found in a study that emotion lasts, on average, about 90s. Now, that doesn't mean your sadness is necessarily going to go away in 90s, but it means the chemical wave of emotion itself can pass that quickly. I do worry about people misinterpreting what this can mean, but I will say intellectually, this has been a

kind of helpful touch point for me. If you are very logical and rational and maybe a little afraid of your emotions like I was and still am, sometimes this concept has almost given my mind some buy in, in a way. In those moments, those big scary emotions, when they come, it comes with this fear that it's never going to end or that I can't handle it. And this 92nd rule or study it kind of reminds me, you know, it's not going to last forever. So the next time something overwhelming hits, you know, try it out, maybe see if you can give yourself just 90s to feel it, to feel the sensations and breathe and let the wave

kind of come and crest and fall. And you don't have to analyze it. Just stay present until it passes. Feel it in your body and see what happens. Because when we stop resisting emotion, it stops running us. It becomes information again. You know, just data from the heart and body. That moment of presence is where self trust really begins. Every time you stay with that wave, you teach your nervous system. I can be with myself here. Knowing your emotions is knowing yourself. Building emotional intelligence builds trust in yourself. You know self trust. I'm bringing it back to this because this is so much of what I coach and talk

about. This is not built by making perfect choices. It's built by showing up for yourself in the moments you would usually abandon yourself. Every time you feel an emotion, instead of suppressing it, you show your nervous system. You are safe with you within yourself. You teach your body. It can bring you information and that you're going to actually listen to it. This is what it means to have a trusting relationship with yourself. When you can hold space for your own fear or anger or joy or sadness and stop needing the world to do it for you, that's actually

freedom. At the end of the day. So much of what I want for you, for anyone listening, is for you to trust yourself. You know, no one can ever understand you or make authentic choices for your life better than you. I believe that with all my heart. But you have to know yourself. You have to know what you feel and what matters to you to be able to trust yourself. So now let's get practical. Here are a few ways that you can start building that relationship with yourself and your emotions. The first is to pause and feel when you notice some big emotion coming. Can you

stop and just name the sensations? If it's helpful to name the word, then fine. But really name the sensations heat, tightness, movement and just breathe with it. Maybe for 90s even if you don't know the what. Just pausing builds awareness and trust with your body. You can use a feelings list and you might keep it somewhere visible. Some people like put it on their fridge, something like that, or put it on your phone. Practice it for yourself. You might also use it when journaling or during a gratitude practice. You could add a practice of naming a

word for what you're feeling right now. Another one that I like to do with my family and friends. If someone asks how you are, choose a real feeling word like practice not saying fine, there's an acronym. Fine is feelings inside, not expressed. Okay. Choose an actual word. I'm feeling happy. I'm feeling scared. I'm feeling content. I'm feeling relaxed. I get so much more information in that. Now, if naming the emotions feels hard, start with affect. Sometimes it can be easier to describe how your body feels before you name the emotion. So you can ask two kind of simple questions on a scale of 1 to 5. How pleasant or

unpleasant in this maybe unpleasant is one, pleasant is five, or however you want to orient the scale, or on a scale of 1 to 5. Is my energy low or high? That's arousal. You can also picture a simple kind of map with four quadrants. I'll try to link this in the show notes. This is from Lisa Feldman Barrett's book. You can look at if something is high energy and pleasant. Maybe it's along the category of excitement, joy, inspiration. If it's high energy but unpleasant, Pleasant. Maybe it's anger or fear. Anxiety. If it's low energy and also

pleasant, you might feel calm or content or peace. And if it's low energy and unpleasant, maybe it's like sadness or heaviness or some kind of fatigue. Okay. You don't have to know the perfect emotion word, but sometimes just locating it on the map of whether it's pleasant or unpleasant valence and high or low arousal can help your brain learn the language of emotion and more importantly, what's happening inside. Over time, you will naturally get more precise, and that's how you're going to build emotional granularity from the body up. Also, ask what the emotion is protecting. Every feeling is pointing to a need.

Maybe it's safety, rest, understanding. Belonging. Get curious what's the need associated with this feeling? Also notice patterns that might come up without judgment. The patterns that you learned. Around emotions. Maybe you catch yourself numbing or trying to fix or. Rationalize invalidating your emotions. Now can you just acknowledge, oh, that's the old protective strategy. There's my protector and then just come back to your body. Celebrate positive valence moments, okay. We spend so much time focusing on the negative. Joy or tenderness? Excitement. They're all information too. So let yourself register those fully. And bringing it back to

self trust. If emotions are the language of the body. Self trust is learning that language fluently. And again, it might not be through words but the language of emotions themselves. We might all experience that differently. And as you get to know yourself in that way, you start to realize that your sensations, they're not, you know, betraying you. They're guiding you. You can trust the wisdom of your own system. And when you can trust yourself to feel. You can trust yourself to live and make decisions and experience joy. So maybe the question isn't, why do we feel? Maybe it's. What are our feelings trying

to show us? Emotions are not random. They're not irrational. They're not inconvenient. They are your body's way of saying, hey, something's happening inside. Maybe Aristotle was on to something. After all, when we learn to feel the emotions are wisdom, and they're a really important part of what makes us human. And when you can meet them with curiosity, instead of trying to control them or fix them or shut them down, you step into partnership with yourself. We feel to know. We feel to connect. We feel to become. And speaking of becoming. Before we end, I want to give you a little heads up about something really

exciting. I've got a program coming called The Power of Becoming. I am stoked you can check it out using the link below, but it is a live in person retreat. It's a program really, that I'm going to be hosting in January. We will spend a couple of days in person together quieting the noise, reconnecting to your needs, your values, what matters to you, and building a vision that really feels alive in your body. And then you're going to actually learn how to take inspired action so you can feel the happiness that you want now and set up the future that you

want without gripping to the outcome. I ran a pilot program and the results were so inspiring. People you know, still today are doing the work, manifesting their dream jobs and projects that they wanted, you know, for years, but haven't been able to step into one person. I'm not even kidding. One person manifested a Porsche. All right. And yet, what's bringing her joy isn't the Porsche itself. I mean, maybe the Porsche itself is bringing some joy, but it's been the journey. It's the eudaimonia we talked about in one of the first episodes. Okay. And she gets some hedonic pleasure of driving it

around as well. Anyway, the point is, I'm so happy for these humans who are taking such inspired action to create the life that they want from a place of feeling enough. And I want that for you. I want that for everyone. This work is not about chasing a version of who you think you should be. It's about remembering who you already are and becoming that this is where your greatest power lies. So if you feel like you've been, you know, striving and you're ready to feel free in the process, I'd love for you to join us and to be with you in person. The details are all linked

below. So thank you for being here. If this episode resonated, please feel free to download. I put a feelings list in the show notes, as well as a feelings wheel. Those are some powerful but simple tools you can use to build that emotional literacy and self trust. And if you are enjoying the podcast, if you're enjoying relish, please, please, please, please help us out. Leave a five star rating and review. It really helps people find the show. And I've got that goal. I want to get to 100 reviews on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, so if you don't mind, I really appreciate you

taking the time to support. If you want to share your thoughts, please email me. Let me know what's coming up and call in on that hotline. You can share your thoughts, you can share feedback. You can share questions or challenges. And I really want to know what you're grateful for. So call that in as well. All right. Thanks for being here. If this resonated, send it to a friend. Maybe there's someone else who might find it interesting. I'll be back here soon. Go ahead and feel your feelings so that you can relish your life.