What Happens to Your Body When You Repress Emotions?

Image by Kira auf der Heide

I have never understood Western medicine’s separation of mind and body, as if they are two distinct entities. How can this make sense? Your mind is generated by your brain, an organ in your body. Your moods and emotions are regulated through the production of hormones. And you feel those emotions, where? In your body, usually in your chest and gut but also in the flushing of your skin, tensing of muscles or clenching of your jaw. In countless ways, both large and small, your mind and body are intertwined. In fact, it’s more helpful to think of mind-body symptoms and experiences, combining rather than artificially separating them.

Your mind, brain, nervous system, hormonal system, organs, musculoskeletal and many other systems all work together, every second of your life, to help you think, speak, move, digest food, sleep, breathe and countless other things beyond your conscious awareness. So you are a system, or rather a system of systems. All, ideally, working as one.

This helps explain the impact of your thoughts and emotions on your body, something which is explained with customary skill and clarity by Dr Gabor Maté, in his seminal book When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. I am currently re-reading this book and finding it gripping, because Dr Maté makes such a strong case for the impact of both chronic stress and emotional repression on the body.

Why we repress emotion

I have explored the impact of chronic stress in numerous recent posts, so today let’s focus on the all-too-common problem of emotional repression. As with so many of the problems we experience as adults, this repression usually begins in childhood – and often as the result of trauma. If you’re told, again and again, that you are too emotional, too sensitive, naughty, or difficult when you get sad, scared, angry or hurt, over time you will learn not to show those emotions, especially to the person who is shaming and criticising you for having them. At the same time you might be praised and complimented for being rational, grown up, nice, sweet or caring, as long as you maintain a sunny, compliant, smiling disposition.

So you learn to swallow your emotions, bit by bit. For many of my clients the most common emotion to be repressed in this way is anger, which was deemed too much, too intense, and generally unwelcome in their family of origin. Over time, this emotional repression also serves to repress other systems in the body, especially your immune system (remember that these systems are interlinked – make changes in one and you inevitably affect the others). So your immune system becomes compromised, leading to a whole host of ailments, from vulnerability to viruses and infections, to skin complaints like eczema, migraines, digestive issues like IBS or acid reflux, and more serious autoimmune diseases such as MS, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

It’s important to be clear that, if you are suffering with any of these ailments or diseases, it’s not in any way your fault. I have a number of them myself, so I’m not blaming anyone – including myself – for their struggles with physical health. Also important is that there are a whole host of other reasons we become ill, from genetic inheritance to our diet, sleep, smoking, alcohol consumption, toxic chemicals in the air we breathe and water we drink. It’s just helpful to understand that chronic stress in general, and emotional repression in particular, clearly have an impact on your physical wellbeing and mine – so we should do all we can to address these problems.

The practice

Because so many of my clients struggle with their emotions, in a whole host of ways, I created this practice to explain, in a step-by-step way, the optimal way we should feel, process and release our emotions. It’s called The Four Fs and you can listen to my talk and practice in my Insight Timer collection.

Many clients have told me they found it useful in understanding how they were supposed to feel emotions, how to notice them in their body, release them and then find comfort, for example with a soothing hug. I hope you find it helpful too – and do check out Dr Maté’s book. He is a remarkable teacher, so if you haven’t soaked up his wisdom yet, I strongly recommend that you do.

Love ❤️

Dan

How to Manage Your Emotions in the Heat

Image by Clark Douglas

As I write this, I am sitting in my office in north London, struggling with the heat. It’s like an oven in here! The temperature is due to hit 33C in London today, which is crazy. Saturday will be 36C. These temperatures are not normal for a Northern European country with a temperate, maritime climate. But with climate change starting to hit us hard, sadly this is the new normal, so we all need to find ways to adapt to it.

As well as all the sweaty discomfort – especially in a country that is not geared up for hot weather – I have noticed my emotions being all over the place on these hot days. As my poor, patient wife will attest, I am definitely more irritable. I normally have a very long fuse and almost never raise my voice in anger. Most people who meet me describe me as a very calm person. But I’m not calm when it’s 33C outside!

And in many ways, this is not my fault. The human body is designed to exist in a narrow range of temperature, known as homeostasis. I just Googled a definition, which is: ‘A self-regulating process by which biological systems maintain stability while adjusting to changing external conditions’.

Translated into English, this means that we, like other animals, struggle when temperatures go above or below a fairly narrow range. We sweat. We mop our brows. We crave ice cream. And as we struggle to regulate our bodily temperature, we also struggle to regulate our emotions.

Heat makes us angry

Ever wondered why riots always happen in summer? It’s because everybody’s too damn hot. It’s also why domestic violence, air/trolley/road rage all spike on hot days and why everyone seems so impatient and irritable in London right now. Heat makes us angry, it’s that simple.

If you are struggling with your temper at the moment, start by naming what you are feeling, with as much specificity as possible. So for low-level anger you might be irritable, frustrated, annoyed, impatient or tetchy. Moving up the anger scale we hit angry, hostile or outraged. And when we hit the top of that scale we are into rage, fury, wrath and aggression.

It’s helpful to name your emotions like this, because research has shown that just doing that can help calm and reduce them.

Anger-management: some pro tips

Did you know that standard anger-management techniques often suggest cooling down physically, even on mild days? I use techniques drawn from dialectical-behaviour therapy (DBT) with my clients, because DBT is superb for emotional-regulation strategies. If you are losing your cool at the moment, here are some pro tips to help you calm down, quickly:

• If you’re getting into a heated discussion with your partner, family member or colleague, say to them, ‘I’m getting annoyed with you, and don’t want to say something I will regret, so need to take a moment to calm down.’ Leave the room. You can’t calm down if someone is still there, niggling at you. Try to cool your body down, even a little: splash cold water on your face and neck; take off any extra layers of clothing; press your face and forearms against an outside wall, which will be cool even on a hot day

• Do some deep breathing, to calm and soothe your overheated/dysregulated nervous system. I have recorded three different breathing techniques for Insight Timer, but you could try my 4-7-8 Breathing Technique first, which is incredibly effective

• Finally, here’s a weird-but-effective one: try going floppy. When we get angry we are in fight mode (the angry response in fight-flight-freeze). That means our muscles get tense and we focus on/move towards the threat, ready to fight. Do the opposite of that. Sit in a chair and let all your limbs, head and neck be floppy. Dangle over the arms of the chair. Be like a relaxed, sleepy cat

• Now try to be angry. Impossible, isn’t it? That’s because your brain has picked up on your body posture and thinks, ‘Oh, that’s fine then. We’re calm and safe. No need to fight right now.’

• When you feel cooler and calmer, rejoin the discussion, trying to listen, not interrupt, and be as assertive (not aggressive) as possible. You will probably find that the discussion goes a whole lot better than it would have done if you hadn’t calmed down first

I very much hope those techniques help. Wishing you a calm and peaceful day, wherever you are in the world right now.

Cool wishes,

Dan

Try this Step-by-Step Practice to Manage Your Painful Feelings

Image by whoislimos

As the REM song reminds us, everybody hurts sometimes. To lead a human life – with all its sorrows, as well as its joys – is to be faced with painful feelings on a daily basis. On any given day, we might feel stress, anxiety, hurt, upset, loneliness, low confidence or self-esteem, disconnection, rejection, anger, frustration, depression and boredom. Nobody likes these feelings. No-one wants to feel them. But whether we like it or not, as members of the human species we must inevitably feel them.

As I often tell my clients, if you never feel painful emotions you’re either a robot or you’re dead. And neither option is very attractive!

Another way of thinking about this is that, to live a full, rich human life, we need to feel a rainbow of emotions. Everybody likes the light-coloured ones, like joy, love, excitement, pride, pleasure and satisfaction. And no-one likes the dark ones: fear, pain, anger, sadness or loneliness. But maintaining robust mental health and wellbeing involves experiencing the full range of emotions, from light to dark.

Do you avoid feelings altogether?

Something I often notice with my clients, especially when they have a trauma history, is that they struggle with painful feelings in a variety of ways. Some people don’t feel them at all – they experience so much internal detachment and dissociation that they feel totally numb, shutdown or empty inside. And in some ways, this works well as an emotional-management strategy, because they are able to function well enough day to day, without being buffeted by unpleasant thoughts and feelings 24/7.

But the downside is that they often feel so disconnected, from themselves and other people, that life is extremely lonely. These people feel isolated and alone, even in a roomful of people. They might also struggle to feel the pleasant emotions, like happiness and love, because this internal shutdown squashes all emotions, light and dark.

Or are you overwhelmed by them?

At the other extreme, many people I work with find their feelings completely overwhelming. In schema therapy terms, their Healthy Adult part gets swamped by the intense, overpowering emotions of their Vulnerable Child part – the young, emotional, hurt child we all carry inside.

Again, if there is trauma in your background, your nervous system might be highly sensitive and easily engulfed by threat-focused emotions like anger, fear or hurt. That is not your fault, it’s just how your brain, nervous system and body were shaped by painful experiences in your childhood.

The practice

The four Fs: Find it, feel it, let it flow, find comfort

Either way, whether you feel too much or too little, you need help in managing your painful feelings. Here’s a step-by-step practice I have developed over the years, which might help.

1. Find it. If you’re experiencing any overwhelming feeling right now, first locate it in your body. For example, if you feel anxious or panicky, you will probably feel that in your gut – perhaps butterflies, a knot in your stomach or deep, sinking feeling of dread in your lower torso. If you feel angry, you might notice your muscles tensing up – especially around your upper back, arms, fists, shoulders and jaw – and a surge of heat and energy in your chest, throat and face.

   It also helps to name the emotion (research shows that just naming an emotion helps reduce its intensity) so, ‘I feel anxious/sad/upset/angry/stressed/irritable/frustrated/lonely/hurt.’

   If you tend to detach and don’t know what you’re feeling, just focus on the physical sensations in your body, however faint they may be (butterflies in your stomach, a heavy/slumpy feeling in your shoulders and upper body, and so on).

2. Feel it. It’s counterintuitive, but one reason people get so overwhelmed with emotions is because they swing between detaching, distracting or soothing (with alcohol, cigarettes, comfort-eating, prescription/non-prescription drugs, gaming, gambling or a whole host of other substances and activities) and overwhelm.

   If you just want to understand how we’re supposed to feel emotions, look at a toddler. They have no problem feeling their emotions! If they are angry, they shout, stomp their foot, scream, have a tantrum. If they are hurt or sad, they cry. If they’re scared, they run to mum for a hug. The emotions flow through them like water.

   And once they have felt and released the emotions, it’s amazing how quickly they move into a different emotional state – happy, excited, chattering, chasing a butterfly… For toddlers, emotions don’t get stuck. They feel them intensely, release them and then are perfectly fine again. It’s miraculous to see.

   Remember that feelings can’t hurt you – they are just feelings, which all humans feel and in fact let us know we are alive – so allow yourself to feel them, bit by bit.

3. Let the emotion Flow. Many of us, especially (though not exclusively) men, have trouble in expressing our emotions. We feel incredibly sad, but we don’t cry. We boil with anger, but say nothing, clamping our jaw shut, balling our fists, but carrying on as if we’re fine.

   Emotions – especially big emotions like anger or intense sadness and hurt – are designed to be released. That’s why we cry when we’re sad, so we release a mixture of emotion and stress hormones. And when we have cried enough, we feel a sense of relief.

   If you’re angry, find some safe, non-destructive methods for releasing anger and letting it Flow out of your body (here’s a recent post I wrote about that). Learn to communicate assertively. Write angry letters you never send. Find ways that work for you of healthily releasing your anger, so it flows out and doesn’t fester inside, because that’s not good for your physical or mental health.

4. Find Comfort. Think about that toddler again. When he was scared, he ran to mum for a big hug. If his sister fell over and banged her knee, she would run to mum, or dad, or a grandparent for a big hug, soothing/reassuring words and perhaps some milk and cookies. This is the Find Comfort part of the practice. Once you have allowed yourself to Find and Feel it, then let the emotion Flow, Find Comfort either from someone else or yourself.

   Because unlike toddlers, adults can self-soothe – we can give ourselves a hug, by placing a hand over our heart and thinking kind, comforting, reassuring thoughts. This might be tough for you. But it’s a skill that needs to be learned, perhaps with the help of a mental-health professional. And you can learn it, so you then have the option of seeking comfort from a partner, family member, friend or therapist, or of giving it to yourself.

I very much hope you find that helpful – remember that, like all practices, it takes practice. That’s why it’s called a practice! Because you need to do it, repeatedly, for it to become more effective. And watch this space for more emotion-focused practices you can add to your mental-health toolkit in future.

Warm wishes,

Dan

How to Manage Your Pandemic-Related Anxiety

Image by Miguel A Amutio

As I write this, I have just had to close my therapy office again – having only started in-person sessions around a month ago, after 18 months of Zooming. It’s extremely disheartening, for myself and my lovely clients – it was such a joy to see them, as fully formed, three-dimensional humans again, instead of just a head-and-shoulders view on a screen.

But just when we thought we might be turning a corner, Omicron happened. And in some ways, it feels like we’re back to square one. In the UK, that means offices closing, people being advised to work from home, parties and dinners cancelled, back to wondering whether we will see our loved ones over the holidays. It’s hard to keep your spirits up, to avoid feeling gloomy and wondering if it will ever end.

Reasons to be hopeful

And yet, there are reasons for hope, even in these challenging times. I, like millions of other people in my country, have been triple-jabbed. I am so profoundly grateful for that – and know how incredibly lucky I am. Billions of people around the world haven’t had a single dose of vaccine, let alone three. And my remarkable good fortune – being born in the right place, at the right time, with access to miraculous and life-changing vaccines – means I am around 97% protected against the Delta variant and 75% against Omicron.

What a blessing. And, although I will have to go back to seeing my clients on a screen again, what a miracle it is that we even have technologies like Zoom! Otherwise this last 18 months would have been infinitely harder, for them and for me. Another blessing.

Also, in the UK, we have a free National Health Service. Let me say that again, for those of us who take this amazing, life-saving wonder for granted. We have a health service that is not only word-leading in many ways, staffed by the most skilled, patient, compassionate, heroic people I could ever hope to meet – but it’s free. My jabs were free. The ICUs that have saved countless lives in the UK are free. The GPs who have also saved thousands upon thousands of lives, also free. The ambulances that rushed people to receive life-preserving treatment. Free.

It’s OK to feel anxious

Please remember this and try to find reasons for gratitude, especially on the darker days. (Research shows that gratitude is a great antidote for depression, among other beneficial effects). At the same time, I don’t want you to force yourself into feeling fake-positive, if that’s the last thing you feel right now. A global pandemic is deeply anxiety-provoking for us all, in different ways and to different degrees. So it’s OK to feel anxious.

In fact, it’s healthy to feel anxious, sad, upset, lonely, hurt, grieving, angry, frustrated, down or whatever emotions might be running through you right now. As I’m always telling my clients, emotions are what make us human. Of course, we all like the positive ones – joy, excitement, love, pleasure, pride… But in order to feel the good stuff I’m afraid you also need to feel the bad, because if you suppress, detach or dissociate from your negative emotions, I’m afraid that you won’t feel many of the good ones either.

That’s because the part that detaches is a bit of a blunt instrument – it just pushes all emotion down, good and bad. So it’s fine to feel anxious right now – I certainly do. And it’s also helpful to remember that getting through this pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint (and yes, that’s what the image is for). I know it already feels endless, but it will take time for Covid to become endemic, like flu or the common cold. Time, as well as vaccinating everyone (including those billions of people in poorer countries), mask-wearing, social distancing, room-ventilating and all of the other stuff we should be doing right now.

I hope that all helps, a little. And I would like to send warm, loving, compassionate thoughts to you, whoever you are and wherever you’re reading this around the world.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Hardwiring Positive Experiences and Emotions in Your Brain

Image by Mi Pham

One of my favourite techniques to use with my schema therapy clients is psychologist Rick Hanson’s neuroscience-based approach to ‘hardwiring’ positive experiences and emotions. As he explains in his excellent book, Hardwiring Happiness: the New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm and Confidence, the human brain is designed with an in-built negativity bias.

This means that our attention is directed towards negative thoughts, feelings and experiences such as failing at an exam, being rejected for a job or left by a partner.

Human brains were built over millions of years of evolution, which were mostly spent in environments of extreme threat – wild animals trying to eat us, other tribes wanting to bash us over the head with clubs, poisonous snakes and spiders underfoot, simple injuries and diseases meaning certain death because we lacked effective medicine.

So our threat system became the dominant system in the brain – and consequently 21st-century humans pay a great deal of attention to anything that could be threatening, hurtful or upsetting.

How schemas affect us

To an extent, this is how schemas work – affecting our information-processing systems, memory, attention, and so on to make us focus excessively on negative or upsetting things. I see this all the time in my practice – and I’m sure you do too.

Someone comes in talking at great length and in fine-grained detail about some incident where they felt someone rejected them; or a time when they messed up at work and felt terrible about it. As well as giving plenty of space for that (which is, after all, what therapy is mostly about!) I always get people to make the most of positive experiences too.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say James tells me about getting a Distinction for an assignment on his Master’s. He then quickly whizzes on to the next thing, an upsetting story about his brother. I get him to pause, slow down, and tell me more about getting the news about his Distinction – I often use imagery to get him to relive the experience, closing his eyes and describing where he is, what he’s thinking when he reads the email and, most importantly, how he feels.

James tells me he feels happy and proud, so I ask him where he feels that in his body. James says in his chest and throat, so I get him to focus on those bodily sensations for one minute (anything from 10 seconds up works, but longer is better).

After he does this, I get him to open his eyes and explain that we just hardwired those positive feelings to the memory – so now every time he thinks about it, he will feel happy and proud again.

Repetition is key

I just love this technique – and so do my clients. It feels great and is a really simple thing to give them for homework – just repeat, as often as possible, any time they have a positive experience. The more they do it, I explain, the more they are rewiring their brain to take more notice of and enjoy good experiences; and to be less sensitive to the bad ones.

Over time, this creates feelings of calm, confidence, satisfaction, pride, self-compassion, and so on.

Warm wishes,

Dan