Have you heard of the television show This Is Us? You may even watch it yourself? In this week's blog, I thought I would take a break on the "virus-we-should-not-name" topic and talk about emotions. I will explain why a lot of people cry when watching the show. How the brilliant work of the actors makes us believe that it’s happening to us, and what happens in our brain at that moment. The same apply when we experience any other emotions like anger, fear, hurt, guilt, sadness, etc. You can watch the video or read the transcript below.
Sometimes you're just ready to lose it or you are totally losing it or, you're overly sad or you're overwhelm, or you have anxiety, or you're afraid, or you're not sure if it's going to work, you're doubting... There's a lot of powerful emotions that we live through our experiences, as experiences are showing up in our lives. If you have watched my previous video: Feeling Stuck, you know everything now about powerful emotions and how they're just delivery trucks coming in your driveway. Now today, I'm going to talk about what to do with these experiences.
Let's say somebody cuts you off on the highway on the way to work. You get totally overwhelmed, totally upset at that person, right now, what happens exactly in your brain when this happens is that you enter a state of being angry and your brain sends 1,400 negative chemicals in your body to pollute you right away. It lasts for 30 to 90 seconds.
If you continue to think about it and relive it in your head and say: "Oh my gosh, I should have done this, or I should have done that..." Or let's say that you have an encounter with somebody at work. It didn't go so well, and then you're on your way back from work, it's six hours later, and you're still thinking about it and you relive it in your head and then you go: "Oh, I should've said this. I should've done that. Oh my gosh!" And then you're still very upset. What happens then is that your brain does not know that it's not happening again. So it re-sends again, 1400 chemicals in your body every single time you think about it. So you keep polluting yourself over and over with more cortisol and more chemicals because you're thinking about it again and again and again and you're stuck.
Then you're going home and you're going to tell your spouse: "Oh my gosh, do you know what Jim said to me at work today? It was so upsetting!" So your spouse is now listening to the story. Their brain doesn't know that it's not happening to them. So their brain sends 1400 chemicals in their body because their brain doesn't know it's not happening to them. So now you're polluting your whole family with your story. Same as if you arrive at work after somebody cuts you off and, in the lunch break, you are telling the whole room about this awful person that totally cut you off on the highway, right? So keep it for yourself instead of polluting everybody.
That is why, when you watch This Is Us, you cry because your brain doesn't know it's not happening to you. When you watch a horror movie, your brain doesn't know it's not happening to you. So you're scared. You're in your living room, you're fine there's no ghosts. Everything is okay. There's no vampires in your living room, but you're afraid anyway because your brain does not know it's not happening to you: and it sends 1400 chemicals again through your bloodstream because it thinks that it's happening to you.
Now, if you have been stuck for a long time, just exiting the state can be quite the undertaking. That’s what I do. I work with my client with specific processes at an unconscious level to get them unstuck. Feel free to? book a free 15-minute virtual coffee with me so that I can explain to you how it works and how I can help you. But today, I will give you a few tips that you can do on your own in order to start the process. So, you need to pull back from the experience. You need to completely step back and breathe. Awareness is everything. That's the first step. And then you need to ask yourself, wait a minute, what do I want to send in my bloodstream? Do I want to continue to feel this way? So what's my out? What am I learning here? What was my learning experience from that? Remember the last video in my post Feeling Stuck: so ask yourself: What am I learning? Maybe it's over. Probably it was not about you anyway. The other person, obviously they have problems. It's probably not about you. If it's guilt because it's something you did, then go talk to the person, go apologize if it was you, right? Maybe it's the other person. So make sure that you quickly stop thinking about it and quickly resolve the matter. Quickly do something about it and quickly ask yourself: - pulling yourself back - "What am I learning from this? When this is all resolved, what will I tell myself? What will I make sure that I do from now on that I will have learned from this unfortunate event?" Right?
So next time you feel like losing it or next time you've lost it, ONE: exit from the loop. Get out of it as quickly as you can and TWO: ask yourself: “What am I learning?” and THREE: keep it for yourself, nobody wants to get polluted with your stories.