Welcome to Week Four!
No course about stress is complete without talking about emotion — because stress is, essentially, an overwhelm of emotion. If you are stressed out — you’re emotional! This week, we’re learning about what emotions are, and how we can work with difficult emotions.
Quick Quiz!
Take out a piece of paper and write down all the emotions you can think of in one minute. Go!
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Now look at your list. Next to each emotion, put a + for a “positive” emotion, a – for a “negative” emotion, and leave “neutral” ones without a sign.
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Now I’m going to make a few predictions about your list:
- You have more “negative” emotions listed than “positive” emotions. The English language has far more words for negative emotions than positive ones! So interesting, right?
- This could be because our brains have what’s called a “negativity bias” — we are primed to pay more attention to negative events than positive ones. Blame evolution, yet again, for this one — we are far more likely to survive when we are attuned to threats, and when we recognize and remember dangerous events. Those uber-chill hominids who didn’t sweat the small OR the big stuff…. well, they died and didn’t become our ancestors! As one of my teachers likes to say, we’re the descendants of the nervous worry-warts!
- You don’t have any “neutral” emotions. Unless you wrote something like “equanimity” (which is more of a mind-state than an emotion), you probably didn’t rate any emotions as neutral. Emotion researchers tell us that NO EMOTION IS NEUTRAL. Emotions are the body’s way of alerting us that something in our environment needs our attention. Every emotion has an “action tendency,” which, put simply, prompts us to either approach or avoid.
- Scan through your list again… The emotions you rated as “positive” are likely the ones that will encourage you to keep doing what you are doing, or to seek out another situation similar to the one that generated these feelings (approach). The emotions you rated as “negative” likely prompt you to avoid particular people, environments, or activities, or encourage you to transform a situation.
I use the scare-quotes around “positive” and “negative” because, as we will learn this week, ALL EMOTIONS SERVE A PURPOSE. There are no “bad” emotions; again, it’s just the body telling us to pay extra attention to something. A “negative” emotion like sadness prompts us to seek affiliation with others, while anger can move us to take action to make the world better!
A better way to characterize the “tone” or “valence” of an emotion is pleasant/unpleasant, or, as described above, approach/avoid. Emotions, put simply, guide us to approach the things that are pleasant (safe), and avoid the things that are unpleasant (dangerous).
Learn more about emotions in this introductory video:
Clarification: When I say that we may need to “let go of an idea about the self,” I am not referring to the Buddhist teaching of “no-self.” I’m speaking more from the psychological conception of self, and that there may be beliefs that we cling to about ourselves that cause stress. For example, even the thought, “I’m a great mother,” can contribute to stress if we then attach the label “great mother” to our identity. If we have a day where we yell at the kids, forget an appointment, and serve fast food for dinner, we might start to needlessly attack ourselves for not being the “great mother” we are “supposed” to be. With mindfulness, we can try to loosen our grip on this aspect of self. Can we instead just be a mother…. a person… who tries her best? Can we have compassion for ourselves and understand that each day … each moment … is a new day and a new moment and a chance to begin again?
The Subjective Emotional Present
A helpful way to tap into the subjective emotional present (as described in the video) and to detach a bit from notions of self is to think of the first moments when you wake each day. There is often a brief period of time, as you transition from sleep to wakefulness, when all you are is sensation and awareness. The chatter of the mind has not yet begun; there is perhaps stretching, moving, hearing, feeling, smelling… but there is no “I” yet. That is the type of awareness that we are referring to as the “subjective emotional present.”
It’s kind of one of those states that as soon as you realize you are in it, you are no longer in it! So don’t “try” to experience it…. just see if you notice it sometime!
So the science is cool and all, but WHAT DO WE ACTUALLY DO WHEN WE EXPERIENCE OVERWHELMING EMOTIONS?
No worries… I got you covered on this one!
Peter Levine: Use “SIBAM” to work with emotion
S: Sensation (interoception/internal perceptions) — proprioception (the body in the field of gravity, the body in space), vestibular sense (balance), movement, velocity; heat/coolness, tension/relaxation
I: Image (external sensations) — sight, sound, touch, taste, smell (literally gets you out of your head and into the world!)
B: Behaviors (mostly “subconscious”) — pacing, wringing hands, deep sighing, posture, facial expressions
A: Affect (the “actual” emotion) — the felt sense /experience in the body; name the “categorical” emotion (fear, anger, sadness, joy, disgust, contempt, etc. — and there may be more than one!)
M: Meaning (the LAST step) — suspend cognition until the end. What triggered this? What is my body prompting me to do? How can I see this emotional experience as INFORMATION?
Click here for a 13-minute guided meditation with this practice.
There are many ways to approach a situation!
As shown in the graphic of the Process Model of Emotion Regulation above, we have many options for dealing with emotional encounters and situations.
For example, let’s use the simple example of being in traffic and feeling frustrated with how slow your commute is.
- Situation Selection: Avoid the situations you know can trigger stress! While this is not always possible, perhaps there are things you can change about your daily routine. Can you take the bus? Bike to work? Carpool?
- Modify Situation: Is there something you can change about the current situation? Can you get off at the next exit and take the back roads home?
- Attentional Deployment: Shift your attention to something else (remember how we did this in the guided meditation on working with pain, pendulating between places of pain and islands of security in the body?) Can you focus on the direct experience of the present moment, without getting lost in the story about terrible commutes? Or, instead of focusing on your anger over the traffic (which you can’t really do anything about now that you are in the middle of it), listen to music that you love, download an audio book to ‘read’ while you drive, or download an interesting podcast.
- Cognitive Change: Is there a way to see the situation differently? What is the kindest, most generous assumption you can make? (I remember when the recession began in 2008 that my commute got a little shorter — there were fewer people with jobs driving to work! I think of this often, and remind myself 1) to be grateful for my job, and 2) to see lots of traffic as a sign of a rebounding economy!)
- Response Modulation: Can you respond in a way that can reduce your stress? Can you do some belly breathing in the car? Can you exercise when you get home?
Many times, stress makes us see a situation through a very narrow lens, when, in fact, we have many possible options for how to deal with a situation.
Additional Practices for Working with Stress
You can learn more about Peter Levine’s work on Somatic Experiencing here.
You can read Tara Brach’s words about working with difficult emotions here.
Want a guided meditation on emotions with an Australian accent? Click here!
Our final guest instructor is Lisa McCrohan, who is a somatic psychologist and compassion coach. She weaves together yoga, mindfulness, neuroscience, trauma-healing, meditation, energy work and the spiritual poetry of the mystics. Her work focuses on bringing this integrative, mind-body approach to support individuals, and parents in particular, in deepening their self-compassion and creating space for their own healing so that they live, and parent, from a more resourced, compassionate place.
In this interview, you’ll learn more about how to reduce your stress by cultivating greater kindness for yourself.
How did your life path lead you to these mind-body practices?
The longer story is that in college, I was a business major focused on working in social justice and nonprofit settings. I was interning at a free clinic near college. I saw how patients would come to the clinic looking for a solution to their pain. They’d get a diagnosis and usually a prescription, and then go on their way. I started to ask, “But WHY___?!” Why is she anxious? Why does his stomach hurt? Why did she put off coming to the clinic? Why does he have diabetes?
As a student of meditation, a writer and interest in the spiritual mystics, I knew it back then that our life stories and traumas show up in our bodies. And I wanted to go deeper into the root causes of suffering from a body-centered, spiritual approach.
I trained in yoga therapy, energy work, psychotherapy, theology, mindfulness and meditation. From working in post-war Guatemala and El Salvador, to teaching faculty and staff at Georgetown University, I have been about supporting those I meet with body-centered practices that nourish the nervous system, spirit, and relationships to heal the root causes of their suffering.
As a mom, I see firsthand how if we want a more compassionate world, then it must begin with our own self. So much of my work is about self-compassion. Pretty much every person whom I have ever seen in coaching or counseling treats themselves with such harshness. Our work begins with healing the root causes of such harshness and practices for treating one’s self with compassion. It is from this place of deep self-regard and self-honoring that then one can be a deeply compassionate presence for others and truly SEE them.
What changes have you noticed in your life since beginning your mindfulness and yoga practices?
This has been a 25 year journey of “softening again and again” and practicing having compassion for my own self and seeing how this compassion then organically flows from me to my family, my clients, and this world. Here are the biggest changes I have noticed:
- I’m less anxious. Many of the root causes of my anxiety have been held, tended to, and, quite frankly, healed.
- I look back and see how the gentleness with which I walk on the earth, interact with people, and treat myself has deepened.
- Less effort. There is less striving with me and more “allowing.” There is a balanced feeling of “right effort” within me. There’s less forcing, more allowing.
- More and more, I surrender rather than putting forth lots of efforting and striving (which I used to as a young adult!)
- Delight and gratitude. Delight and gratitude organically arise within me in my day.
- I look and see how, over time, I have softened – softened my judgments, expectations…and even my “look” – how I look at others and myself.
- Self-compassion and grounding practices come more quickly to me now in the moment of stress or shame.
- When I am struggling with something, I pause and sit with it for awhile. In doing so, the action to take arises more easily on its own.
- What influences all my actions and way of being is my devotion to the divine and my ever-deepening practice of listening within.
How do the mind-body practices that you teach help us…
Connect to the body?
The self-compassion and healing that I teach are all about body-centered awareness. Gently, skillfully, slowly, we learn to deeply listen to the body. Our issues are in our tissues! The “posture” we take is one that believes in the innate wisdom of the body and the interconnectivity of the brain, body and spirit. We create the space to skillfully notice the sensations and allow what is here. This is how we heal.
Reduce stress?
In the practices I teach, it begins with pausing. This pausing begins to regulate the nervous system. We allow space for the nervous system to do what is organically was designed to do – organically moving from “fight or flight” to “rest and digest.” This reduces the impact of the chronic stress we are always holding in our bodies.
Improve health or produce other benefits?
Trauma manifests itself in different ways. Often people come to me who have dysregulation in their nervous systems. They can feel stuck, anxious, controlling, depressed, and full of rage. Through practices of self-compassion, clients begin to see how their vitality and energy return. They move from “I can’t” to “I can.” This shift – from “can’t” to “can” – is everything.
How does your practice help you connect to your body? What have you learned about yourself and/or your body through this practice?
As a mom, self-compassion supports me in having compassion for my dear ones! I am more able to respond instead of react. And when I DO react, I catch myself pretty quickly into the process and am able to “begin again.”
In practicing self-compassion, I learned years back that my body was just not meant for commuting! I have created a schedule that is aligned with the rhythms of my body – not someone else’s “should’s.” I give myself time to move my body every day. I see the healing practitioners that support my well-being.
I try and live in a way that is about delight The ancient mystical poet, Hafiz, said it beautifully, “One regret, dear world, that I am determined not to have when I am lying on my deathbed is that I did not kiss you enough.”
What is your favorite, go-to form of self-care?
I’m big on self-care. I believe it is our responsibility as practioners and healers to be engaged in ongoing self-care. I ask myself, “What kind of self-care do I need in this season of my life right now?”
Right now, that is walking, seeing my own body-centered practitioner and painting.
Can you give us an example of a time when you were really stressed, and you turned to your mind-body practice for relief?
Mornings can be stressful! It took me a few years to figure this out: multitasking in the mornings for me = stressed out mama! I realized that I was trying to do too much, tend to too much and get too much done in the morning. Too many expectations of myself for the morning led me to be reactive, then full of regret, and feeling ashamed.
What I learned to do over time is this:
- Get grounded.
- Say, to myself, “It’s ok….” It’s ok to feel stressed, annoyed, anxious….etc.
- Soften the muscles in my body, soften my judgment, soften my expectations.
- Say to myself, “This is hard.”
And then wise action (responding vs. reacting) arises.
I keep in the forefront of my mind that what matters most in the morning in connection. So now I put down what I am doing when they wake up, I let go of any expectations of myself, and focus on connecting with my family.
What advice would you give to someone who has never practiced self-compssion, or tries it and thinks they’re “doing it wrong”?
If someone had never really explored self-compassion, I’d say to start small. Start with noticing the harsh words that you say to yourself. Start with practicing saying to yourself, “It’s okay, Love.” Yes, start with calling yourself “Love.”
When you feel like you “mess up”? Begin again. Begin again in the next moment. Just put your hand on your heart. Feel the earth beneath you.
How can we practice self-compassion?
Every one of us gets triggered and then we can react in ways that are unkind or harsh. When we notice we’ve done this, we can often then judge ourselves pretty harshly. We “turn on ourselves.” The Inner Critic starts in. When you notice this happening, pause. Feel your feet on the earth. Put your hand on your heart. Say to yourself, “It’s okay, Love” or “I see you are suffering right now” and “This is hard.”
These simple gestures and words are powerful. They soften the Inner Critic. They promote understanding and kindness. And they promote “wise, compassionate action.”
Thank you Lisa! You can learn more about Lisa on her website here.
You can find some helpful practices for self-compassion here.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding.
The two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birdwings.
Rumi
In the video below, I share Peter Levine’s practice of containment:
Levine describes this as becoming “aware of the premovement before it graduates into a full-blown movement sequence.” He further explains that “it is the ability to hold back, restrain, and contain a powerful emotion that allows a person to creatively channel that energy. Containment … buys us time and, with self-awareness, enables us to separate out what we are imagining and thinking from our physical sensations.”
Remember, this practice is not SUPPRESSION of emotion — it’s building a larger container for it. This allows us to be less emotionally reactive, which, as I’ve explained previously, is really tiring and stressful!
“Emotional reactivity almost always precludes conscious awareness. On the other hand, restraint and containment of the expressive impulse allows us to become aware of our underlying postural attitude. Therefore, it is the restraint that brings a feeling into conscious awareness. Change only occurs when there is mindfulness, and mindfulness only occurs when there is bodily feeling (i.e., the awareness of the postural attitude.)
“A person who is deeply feeling is not a person who is habitually venting anger, fear, or sorrow. Wise and fortunate individuals feel their emotions in the quiet of their interiors, learn from their feelings and are guided by them. They act intuitively and intelligently on those feelings. In addition, they share their feelings when appropriate and are responsive to the feelings and needs of others. And, of course, because they are human, they blow up from time to time; but they also look for the root of these eruptions, not primarily as being caused by another, but as an imbalance or disquiet within themselves.”
– Peter Levine
“Most of us spend our time seeking happiness and security without acknowledging the underlying purpose of our search. Each of us is looking for a path back to the present: We are trying to find good enough reasons to be satisfied now. How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives. Mystics and contemplatives have made this claim for ages – but a growing body of scientific research now bears it out.”
Sam Harris
How will you meet THIS present moment?
In Full Catastrophe Living, Jon Kabat-Zinn writes, “It is not the potential stressor itself but how you perceive it and then how you handle it that will determine whether or not it will lead to stress…. [I]n and of itself, stress is neither good nor bad; it’s just the way things are.”
With mindfulness, we meet emotions and stressors as they arise, and choose to live in wise relationship with them.
Let me share with you the fable of how shoes were invented, as summarized in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Coming to Our Senses. According to legend, there once was a princess who loved to walk through the forests and fields of her kingdom. One day, walking barefoot through the trees, she stubbed her toe on a protruding root. She yelled and cried in pain, and demanded that her father’s ministers immediately get to work coating the entire kingdom in soft leather, so that no one will ever again need to experience the pain of a stubbed toe.
The king’s exchequer, being ever mindful of the budget, decided that, instead, he would commission someone to make foot protectors out of the same soft leather. Instead of attempting to control the entire environment of the kingdom, people could simply prevent stubbed toes at the immediate point of impact.
This is what we must do with stress: MEET IT AT THE POINT OF IMPACT. It’s what we’re doing in the SIBAM practice, and it’s how we’ve been cultivating our awareness throughout this course. What is happening RIGHT NOW? Drop the story, drop the attachment to “It’s always going to be this way!”, drop the projecting into the future of ALL the disasters that are “surely” going to come.
A helpful question to ask is, WHAT IS NEEDED OF ME RIGHT NOW?
I think I ask myself this question about 10 times a day! I can get so overwhelmed with my to-do list and with kids’ activities and on and on…. so I’ll simply pause and ask, “What is needed of me RIGHT NOW?” If my son is crying because he just spilled his cereal on his shirt and on the floor, about a million thoughts enter my head: “I need to clean up the milk! He needs to change his shirt! We might miss the bus! Is there enough Cinnamon Toast Crunch left in the box? Is the milk seeping under the chair? WHY IS HE SCREAMING SO LOUDLY???….”
You get the point.
So I ask, what is needed of me RIGHT NOW?
I need to console my son. That becomes my single focus. And really, it takes about 32 seconds. Then he can go change, I can pour new cereal, clean up the mess…. I maintain my focus, I keep calm and morning on…. Bringing gentle awareness to the moment, meeting the stressors at the point of impact, and focusing on one thing at a time has saved me more times than I can count!
Research tells us that all the thinking we do when we’re stressed out isn’t terribly helpful… or even accurate! Daniel Gilbert’s research reveals that we greatly overestimate how negatively a hypothetical future event will impact us, and we greatly underestimate our ability to bounce back from negative events.
Instead, focus on meeting THIS PRESENT MOMENT.
Cultivating Your Stress Resiliency
You’ve already learned a lot about ways to make yourself more resilient in the face of stress. Ultimately, mindfulness widens our lens on the present moment and opens up a whole new world of options for how we respond to events.
I want to share some final words from, of course, Jon Kabat-Zinn, about the characteristics of stress-hardy individuals:
“Stress-hardy individuals are more resilient. They have greater coping resources than other people under similar circumstances because they view life as a challenge, have a strong commitment to experiencing the fullness of life as it unfolds moment by moment, and assume an active role in interfacing with the actuality of what they are facing, with clarity and agency, which is what it means to exert meaningful control…. Strong internal convictions about the comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness of life experiences are powerful internal resources.”
Important takeaways:
- Reframe stressful events into challenges and opportunities. Just for a moment, think of a situation that is really stressing you out right now. Can you reframe it as a challenge?
- Widen your options. We often get trapped into very narrow ways of thinking about a situation. Take a moment to breathe, pause, and consider if there is an option you haven’t even considered. Note especially if you have framed your decision as a “whether or not” (e.g., “I can’t decide whether or not I should quit my job!”) With this type of framing, you aren’t even considering ways to make your current job work (“Do I try to change my hours? Talk to my boss? Apply for an internal move?”) Check your frame and widen your options.
- Find meaning in suffering. Victor Frankl says that suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it finds a meaning. We’ve all had experiences that were excruciating to go through, but with a bit of time and distance, we can see how we were shaped by the event … and maybe even come to appreciate it. If you can’t see the meaning now, can you trust that something important will be learned?
- Find meaning in your every day. It’s easy to get burnt out and lose sight of the big picture. When we see the meaning behind our actions, we imbue them with dignity and purpose. Scrubbing the floor can be drudgery, or it can be a intentional way of caring for your family. YOU get to decide.
- Tell yourself, “Everything is figure-out-able!” This is my favorite line from Marie Forleo, and it’s another phrase I use many times a day. Everything is figure-out-able. You WILL be able to do this. How do I know this? Because you’ve done it before! And if you haven’t — ask for help!
- Accept that stress will happen. Research shows that those who expect stress, and know that it is just a part of life, actually manage their stress better AND show reduced physiological signs of stress.
- Choose the most generous interpretation. So often our stress comes from other people! I don’t have research on this one, but let’s just assume that the vast majority of people are 1) kind, 2) trying their best, and 3) not deliberately attempting to make you miserable. Instead of taking something personally, can you see from another’s perspective? What is the most generous assumption you can make about their behavior?
Ultimately, your stress resiliency is not about having “one perfect plan” for managing all stressors and every emotion; it’s about cultivating presence, awareness, and equanimity so that you can meet this stressor on this day with the most appropriate response right now.
Essential Questions for Stress