If you can eat Thanksgiving dinner, you can manage your stress (part 2)
So we’ve been talking about what to do when your emotions flare up REALLY big and you don’t have the capacity to change your thoughts, take effective action, or problem-solve the thing in front of you at all.
In those situations, you need to take your focus off the external situation…
…and put your focus on your own internal situation.
You need to decide how you want to think about the thing that is currently happening inside of you.
In the intro to this series, I gave you the 4 unhelpful ways people usually react to their uncomfortable emotions.
And in Part 1, I gave you the first more helpful way you can react to uncomfortable emotions: think about them the same way you think about mild physical pain, like getting your legs waxed or doing a tough workout.
You don’t run screaming out of the gym or the waxing appointment. You accept it and move through it. And you can do the same thing with uncomfortable emotions.
Today, let’s dive into Part 2—
If you can eat Thanksgiving dinner, you can manage your stress
How do you feel after you’ve eaten Thanksgiving dinner (or any other big meal)?
Pretty uncomfortable, right? You’re bloated. You’re really full. You’re brain is foggy. You can’t even look at food.
AND, even with that discomfort, here’s what you’re probably thinking—
You know this is a normal reaction
You’re not beating yourself up for feeling full after eating a lot.
You’re like: This is normal. I ate a lot of food. Now I feel full. That’s how that works.
The reaction I’m having to this experience is 100% normal.
The way I feel right now is 100% normal.
You trust your body to regulate itself
You can’t consciously make yourself digest a meal faster.
That’s because you don’t have conscious control over your digestive processes.
You can’t decide to move food from your stomach to your small intestine. You can’t decide to release certain enzymes vs. others.
You don’t get to decide how long the digestive process takes or when things will move from one stage to the next.
That whole thing is handled by automatic bodily processes that you don’t even EXPECT to have conscious control over.
You trust your body to handle it — in its own time.
You support your body in regulating itself
When you’re sitting there feeling really full, your body gives you little signals.
It says, “Hey, we should unbutton our pants.”
And “Hey, I want to take a slow walk around the neighborhood.”
And “I need to say no to another round of dessert.”
You listen to those little signals and in doing so, you create a supportive environment for your body to regulate itself.
You’re not trying to CONTROL your body, top-down, into feeling less full on YOUR timeline.
You’re just listening to your body’s signals, creating a supportive environment for it, and trusting it to do its thing, aka process all that food and feel less full.
What might it look like if you applied this way of thinking to big, uncomfortable emotions?
Let’s say you have a meeting, and it does NOT go how you wanted it to go.
Afterwards, your mind is racing with all the things you did wrong. “I should have said this. Why did I say that? Omg, the look on their face was so bad. They hate me. I’m going to be fired.”
Your heart is pounding. Your hands are shaking. You’re sweaty.
There’s no way you can do more work right now. All you want to do is run as fast and far away as you can.
Let’s apply Thanksgiving Dinner Thinking to this situation.
You are having a normal reaction
You’re not overreacting. You’re not crazy. You’re not too sensitive.
You’re having a 100% normal reaction to the situation at hand.
You went into a meeting where you really wanted to get certain outcome.
You didn’t get that outcome.
Your first reaction is going to be to feel really stressed about it.
That’s as normal and expected as “I feel really full after I eat a lot of food.”
Nothing is going wrong here.
You can trust your brain to regulate itself
No matter how full you feel after a big meal, you’re not going to feel that full forever.
You gave your body more input than you had capacity for. So you’re going to feel full for a little while.
But even while you sit there feeling full, your body is already hard at work processing and metabolizing all the inputs you just gave it.
It’s automatically figuring out how to get back to equilibrium.
That’s its job. It knows how to do it.
And you will eventually feel normal again — on your body’s timeline, not your own.
And by the way, if you keep eating big meals, you’ll grow your body’s capacity to handle big meals. Your body will adapt so that it can take in that much food without getting knocked out of equilibrium.
Now let’s apply that to feeling stressed after a meeting.
No matter how stressed you feel after a bad meeting, you’re not going to feel that stressed forever.
You gave your brain more input than you had capacity for. You don’t (yet!) have the mental and emotional capacity to handle a bad meeting without letting it shake you. So you’re going to feel stressed for a little while.
But even while you sit there feeling stressed, your brain is already hard at work processing and metabolizing all the inputs you just gave it.
It’s automatically figuring out how to get back to equilibrium.
That’s its job. It knows how to do it.
And you will eventually feel normal again — on your automatic brain’s timeline, not your own.
And by the way, if you keep going to meetings like this, you’ll grow your brain’s capacity to handle these kinds of meetings.
Your brain will adapt so that it can take in that much opposition and skepticism and weird vibes from other people without getting knocked out of equilibrium.
But this “re-regulation and capacity growing” process is not something you can (or need to!) control in a top-down fashion. You don’t need to consciously hurry it along or make sure it’s done in 20 minutes.
It’s going to happen no matter what.
You just need to trust your brain and let it do its thing.
You can support your brain in regulating itself
While you’re sitting there feeling stressed, your brain is giving you little signals.
It’s saying, “I can’t possibly do any work right now.”
And “I just want to get up and run away from everything.”
And “I need to stare out the window and zone out.”
You can listen to those little signals and create a supportive environment for your brain to regulate itself.
Put work aside for a little bit.
Get up and go for a jog, or wave your arms around like a crazy person.
Yell into a pillow.
Take a deep breath and stare out the window.
Follow the little signals your brain is giving you.
Don’t try to “calm yourself down.”
Try to listen to what your brain is requesting from you and support it in calming ITSELF down.
Knowing all the while that it’s got this. The help you’re giving it is just a little push on the edges.
It’s doing 90% of the work automatically and you couldn’t stop it if you tried. Just like you can’t stop yourself from digesting a big meal.
And once you’ve given your nervous system and your automatic brain the space, trust, and support they need to re-regulate…
The intense emotion will calm down.
Your executive functioning will come back online.
And you’ll be able to figure out what you want to do next.
One of the reasons it’s so helpful to have a coach as you’re doing this work is that this is a multi-tool approach.
I don’t tell you: “Every time you feel stressed, just do X and that will solve it.”
I tell you: “When you’re stressed, there are a variety of things you can do to feel better.
You can change your thoughts about the situation.
You can change your situation.
Or you can change how you handle the internal experience of stress.
And within each of those three pathways, there are a LOT of different things we can try to see what works best for you.”
(This whole masterclass is giving you four different, robust ways to approach JUST Pathway #3.)
This isn’t a silver bullet approach. This is a multidimensional toolkit.
Toolkits are more effective than “silver bullets” because they’re more flexible and they let you handle a wider variety of situations.
And toolkits are more challenging than “silver bullets” because you have to master multiple tools and you have to figure out which tools to use when.
That’s where hiring a coach comes in.
Because working with a coach massively shortens your learning cycles in figuring out how to use the tools effectively and which tools work best for you in which situations.
Don’t go through months- and years-long test & learn cycles on your own.
Not when you can lean on my experience and expertise and let me sort it out for you in a few hours.
You’re already making so much progress just by reading these emails and applying these concepts to your life.
Imagine how much further and faster you’re going to go when you hire a coach and get the exact, tailored, laser-focused help YOU need in YOUR situation, every single week.
Let’s start today.
Read Part 3 ➡️
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