WHAT CREATES YOUR EMOTIONS
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 116.
Hello, my friends. As I record this episode today, I'm on vacation with my family. You know how you can feel like you're supposed to be having fun and just happy all the time when you're on vacation? Well, I'm definitely having fun, but I've also somehow been surprised that even here on vacation, I can get caught up in the emotional rollercoaster.
Just yesterday, I woke up, it was a beautiful day, and I biked five miles to the gym, worked out, and then actually biked five miles back. I felt great about that. Then my husband, my oldest son, and I went to the beach for a lazy afternoon.
We had a great conversation, and I felt grateful that I felt like my son and I had connected on a whole new level. He expressed that he felt really comfortable talking to me about some hard things, and it meant a lot to me to hear this after the challenges we've had in the past. But later that night, the three of us went out to dinner.
My younger son has his girlfriend in town with us for a few days, so they were off on their own. So it was just my husband, my oldest son, and I going out for dinner, and we got into a conversation that, in my mind, didn't go very well. I woke up this morning feeling sad and disconnected from my son, kind of a whiplash from the really positive feelings I'd had earlier in the day.
You know, you experience your life through your emotions. And yesterday, I felt the full range of the human experience. Joy, pride, connection, motivation, calm, and gratitude, but also disconnection, frustration, hurt, and sadness.
So it's no surprise that as I reflect on my day yesterday, it feels mixed, in some ways great and in other ways terrible. And our brains want to focus on the negative. So as I woke up, I was definitely more focused on what I thought went wrong than all of the ways yesterday was fantastic.
It's just what our brains do. But our minds also have this incredible ability to take a step back and evaluate, to understand the cause of our emotions, and then make a decision about what we really want to create. Before I understood this skill set, I spent a lot of time blaming other people for the way I felt.
Even this morning, as I was reflecting on my conversation with my son, my brain wanted to blame my son for my feelings of sadness and disconnection. But the truth is, my son doesn't create my emotional experience. Not ever.
That's entirely an inside job. It's all me. So today, I want to get into the mechanics of how that's true, so that you might begin to see how you can also take control back over your own emotional experience.
So first, it's really important to recognize that the hormonal design of our bodies plays a crucial role in our survival, actually. We're physically designed to seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy. This motivational triad is essential for keeping us alive.
So for example, dopamine is released when we're engaged in pleasurable activities like eating, engaging with people socially, or achieving goals. Dopamine, in effect, rewards these positive behaviors, so we're motivated to continue to do them. In contrast, norepinephrine is a hormone that's involved in our body's fight-or-flight response.
When our brains perceive a threat, norepinephrine prepares our bodies to respond physically. Our bodies also release cortisol, the stress hormone, during times of stress or danger. These hormones increase our heart rate, our blood pressure, and glucose levels, so that we can literally fight or take flight.
Other hormones like leptin, ghrelin, and insulin are involved in helping us conserve energy through hunger and blood sugar regulation. So you can think of our bodies as these incredibly complex machines that have automatic and instinctual physical responses to our environment. These physical responses, this release of hormones, impacts how we feel in our bodies.
For example, dopamine can make us feel pleasure and motivation. This is our body's way of rewarding us for activities that keep us alive. But think of this too.
Our bodies were designed to reward us for eating food like berries, with small, natural concentrations of sugar. But in our world today, we've designed foods with super concentrations of sugar. So when we eat cookies or cake or other foods we love, our brains will still release this dopamine, in fact, in large amounts, in response to us eating these foods.
Our bodies are still rewarding this action of eating this food, even though eating this highly concentrated sugar isn't necessarily important for our survival. Do you ever have a really strong craving for something? This is our brain hooked on dopamine, wanting more of that pleasure reward. It's just interesting to point out because while our bodies are designed to help us survive, the software it's running is thousands of years out of date, in the sense that our hormones, like dopamine, don't know how to turn off our physical reward system now that getting access to food really isn't a concern for most of us.
In the same way, norepinephrine is a hormone that's intended to help us survive intense life or death situations, something that we don't come up against every day. But our bodies still physically react to our environment as if situations were life or death. Fights with someone, general life stress, anxiety over our kids.
On a physical level, our bodies are responding with hormones to this negative stress. Now there are many more hormones involved in how we physically react to our environment, but even using these two examples of dopamine and norepinephrine, you can start to see how reactive our bodies are to our environment. And generally speaking, we're experiencing these physical sensations as emotions, like pleasure and stress.
So for example, when you eat something and your body releases dopamine, you're likely to experience a happy, pleasurable feeling. And when you're faced with an uncomfortable or stressful situation, you're likely to feel an uncomfortable, anxious feeling. Now for us midlife women, let me add another level of complication to this equation, because menopause impacts all of this.
First, as we lose estrogen and menopause, this impacts our body's dopamine production. So consider the impact of this. With lower dopamine production, we're physically experiencing less pleasure from things that we used to find enjoyable.
How terrible is that? This can also cause us to feel less motivated and more tired. So if you can relate to this, you're not just making this up. So on the one hand, dopamine, our reward and pleasure hormone, may be decreasing as we age.
But norepinephrine, our stress hormone, on the other hand, can increase during menopause. Again, the decline in estrogen plays a key role here because lower estrogen impacts our body's ability to regulate norepinephrine. So then we have an increased physical stress response, leading to more anxiety and irritability.
Oh, and all of this also disrupts our sleep. Awesome. And with this conversation, I'm only covering a fraction of the hormonal disruptions that come with menopause.
I'm not sharing any of this to depress you. Actually, in some ways, I think it's helpful to understand what's going on with our bodies, because so often women come to me feeling anxious or irritable or unmotivated, and think it's because there's something wrong with them. So it's interesting to consider that on one level, this is just the biology of our bodies, a physical response to our environment and the changes taking place within our bodies as we age.
With these physical changes, each of us can explore what works best for us in terms of physically feeling better. So changes in diet might help. Physical exercise can certainly help.
Even just walking can increase serotonin and dopamine. Yoga, deep breathing, or meditation can help us regulate our stress response. This really isn't a one-size-fits-all approach, and so each of us need to explore what works best for us in terms of feeling physically well.
But since my work as a life coach focuses on the mind and how our thoughts play a role in creating our emotions, I wanted to lay the groundwork of our body's physical hormonal reality to help you see how many layers contribute to how we feel every single day. Let me use last night as an example. In my conversation with my son, things got heated.
It wasn't an actual argument. We were talking politics and debating a particular policy. I'll be honest, I was in over my head quickly with conversation.
And although I went into it feeling like I had a good handle on my point of view, I don't know that I was communicating it very effectively. Also, my son felt really passionate and I think misinterpreted my point of view. So we were kind of arguing without really disagreeing.
All of this to say, I'm sure my body's fight-or-flight response kicked in. I felt stressed and anxious. And yet, I wasn't in danger.
There was actually no fight. We were debating an issue that didn't even have a direct impact on either of our lives. And yet, my body very likely released a stress hormone during this conversation.
So here's what's really interesting. There's absolutely nothing I can do to stop this physical response in my body. I'm sure there have been many times in my life where this immediate physical response has helped me act quickly to help me stay out of danger, certainly to help my kids stay safe.
Although we don't need it all the time, our fight-or-flight response does keep us safe and alive. But we can't necessarily turn it off in day-to-day situations that stress us out. Unfortunately, without this awareness that the stress we're feeling is an instinctual physical response, but also that it's an unnecessary response in certain situations.
Meaning, in reality, in this situation with my son, there was no danger. If we don't take a mental step back and appreciate this, our brains can then start to believe that there's danger and that there's something wrong or something that we need to fix. And here's where our minds start creating narratives, interpreting the circumstances of our lives and often creating a lot of additional emotional pain.
So as I said last night in this conversation with my son, it was getting heated. I sensed myself getting stressed. My body was physically reacting to what it was perceiving as danger.
But also, my mind was looking at the situation and thinking it shouldn't be happening, that my son shouldn't be acting the way he was acting. Maybe also I was thinking I'm right and he's wrong and that I need to get him to see my perspective. It was a bummer, I'll be honest.
I'd gone into the night looking forward to having a thoughtful conversation with my very intelligent son. And quite frankly, the conversation didn't go the way that I'd hoped. I felt sad and disconnected from my son.
And you know what? None of that is his fault. This can feel like a leap when we're generally used to thinking that people should treat us in a certain way or that we deserve respect or that other people have the power to hurt our feelings. In relationships, we rarely take accountability for how much our own expectations of those relationships are actually the cause of our emotions.
Other people show up in the way that they show up. They act the way that they act. Sometimes we interpret those behaviors as great and sometimes we interpret them as wrong.
And guess what? We get to have whatever opinion we want about other people and their behavior. If you think someone else is wrong or that they did something wrong, you're 100% entitled to your opinion about that. And other people might all agree with you, but that opinion, the expectations you have for how other people act, those opinions are also creating the emotions that you're feeling.
So when I thought my son shouldn't be acting the way he was acting, essentially when I thought he was wrong, I felt angry. When I thought he was getting personal and seemed to be attacking me, well, surprise! I felt attacked and hurt. Those feelings, my anger and hurt, make perfect sense in the context of how I was thinking about the situation.
That was my experience in the moment. And last night, in the midst of that conversation, I wasn't in a place to just think happy thoughts. But I was able to take a pause and recognize my feelings weren't being caused by my son.
They were simply a result of a series of thoughts in my mind saying none of this should be happening, neither my son's words or my body's physical reaction to them. This morning I woke up still feeling a bit hurt. My son had seen that I was bummed last night and he actually apologized for getting so passionate.
It was clear he wasn't trying to attack or hurt me. None of this was personal. And yet, this morning, I still woke up feeling hurt.
What it really came down to is that I'd started this conversation. I had actually started this policy debate with my son, my friends. I had done this because I felt it would be a fun way to spend our dinner together.
OMG, was I wrong. In retrospect, it's kind of funny. I had a script in my mind about how I wanted the night to go.
I imagined respectful, thoughtful conversation. And what I got was a heated policy debate that I hadn't studied in advance to be ready for. In truth, the only thing that had happened was that the night didn't go the way I'd envisioned it would go.
If I really wanted to, I could hold on to the belief that my son should have engaged in that conversation differently. But my friends, the result of this would simply be that I would be holding on to my feelings of hurt and frustration about the evening. These thoughts about how he should have done something differently, they make me feel disconnected with my son.
Honestly, it also has the potential for me to want to disengage with my son, not wanting to get into future heated conversations with him. Look, it's human nature to blame our emotional experience on other people and the circumstances of our lives. Actually, I don't know if it's an instinct or just how we've been socialized to interpret our emotions.
But notice how blaming other people for how you feel puts you in complete dependency on the circumstances of your life going exactly the way you want them to go. I mean, it would be amazing if we could get all the people to do exactly what we want them to do. But it's so funny that even when people do what we want them to do, it's not always exactly the way we want them to do it.
How many times have you asked your teens to load the dishwasher only to go back in and rinse the plates because they didn't do it right? Just the other day I asked my younger son to come with me to the grocery store so we had supplies for a vacation and he came with me. But he was also done shopping in about 10 minutes. We're in the store, he clearly wants to leave, and I'm thinking about all of the other groceries I still hadn't put in the cart.
And there was a moment that my brain offered me that he had a bad attitude. But really, he was doing exactly what I wanted him to do, just not with the joy and excitement and spending time with his mom in the grocery store that I would have liked him to have. I've realized for much of my life I've made other people responsible for my emotions.
My bosses were supposed to treat me in a certain way so I could feel appreciated. My boyfriends were supposed to call at certain times so I could know that they liked me. My boys, when they were little, were supposed to do what they were told so I could feel calm and in control.
Only none of this worked out for me 100% of the time. Maybe not even 50% of the time. Even consider this, for those of us who tend to go out of our way to try to make other people feel better, it actually doesn't work.
How many times have you tried to make your teen better when they were feeling angry or sad? More often than not, whatever we do as moms to help our kids be happy, it's not the right thing. Or more to the point, it's not something we can control. Our kids' feelings are a response to their thoughts about their life.
And even when we try to give them better, happier thoughts, just because we offer them doesn't make our kids want to take them on, just to change their minds. Like, oh, you're right mom, I shouldn't feel hurt that my boyfriend broke up with me because I'm better off without him. I mean, hopefully they'll get there eventually, but their truth in that moment is that they're hurt because they're thinking they didn't want their boyfriend to break up with them.
There's something incredibly powerful about owning your emotions. Really understanding that your emotions come from your mind and not from your experiences. Because here's the flip side, when you make other people responsible for your emotions, you're powerless, yet desperate to exert power.
Here's how this could have looked with my son last night. We're having this conversation. I'm thinking he shouldn't be engaging in the conversation in the way he is.
I'm feeling hurt and frustrated. So when I think my feelings are my son's fault, now I need to change him to make me feel better. I need to try to control him.
So I could try to do that by fighting back in the conversation, by telling him he's wrong to be talking to me the way that he is. I could tell him he's hurting my feelings. Essentially, I could try to force him to back down or apologize so that I can feel less hurt and frustrated.
As parents, we often resort to doing this with our kids. In fact, we probably do it more with our kids than we would do with friends or other family members. But consider how demanding that someone else changes to make you feel better doesn't actually create more connection with that person.
Now look, you always get to set boundaries. You don't have to just accept terrible behavior from people. But in this situation, I'm sitting with my son, who I love, and I actually started this debate with him.
He was passionate about his views and also equipped with many more facts than I was. And as I think about it, his passion triggered my fight-or-flight response. And for a few minutes, I was fighting back, which may have triggered his fight-or-flight response.
So now we're in a heated debate that I don't want to be in. And my brain wanted to make it his fault, creating all sorts of negative emotion for me. Fortunately, before the debate went on too long, I pulled the parachute.
I excused myself from the table and recognized all of my feelings and actually didn't try to talk myself out of them. I let myself feel hurt and frustrated. But I also didn't blame any of this on my son.
You know, I didn't blame it on myself either. Taking responsibility for your emotions isn't about taking blame. It's about recognizing and validating what's true for you in a way that doesn't require anybody else or anything else to change so that you can feel better.
In essence, taking responsibility for your emotions takes away the fight. It takes away your resistance. Think about this.
If someone jumps out at you in the middle of the night, you know, when someone's walking around in the house or in the kitchen with the lights off and you're not expecting anyone to be there. So you walk into the kitchen, you see this specter of a human and you jump in surprise and your stress hormones go through the roof. You're ready to fight or flee.
Now imagine on top of this that you think this person shouldn't be up in the middle of the night and then you get angry because that person happens to be there unexpectedly. You couldn't control your stress response, but then you layer anger on top of it because of your thoughts. Now it's stress on top of stress.
But typically what we do in those types of situations is we laugh. We laugh at how quickly we reacted. We laugh at the scream we let out and the way that our heart is racing.
Once we see there's actually no danger, we immediately give our bodies a chance to down regularly. We can do this in jump scare situations. So could it be possible to also do this in situations where we're unexpectedly met with an uncomfortable situation or a stressful event? I've actually found in the work that I do with my clients, many of us have particular triggers that cause us to react or engage in fight or flight.
For some of us it's something in particular our kids or husband will say or do. It could be about drugs or money or your mother-in-law. It's interesting to consider that you might even be able to anticipate the types of situations that generally trigger your fight or flight.
What if that automatic response isn't actually a problem? Could you imagine meeting that response, really that physical hormonal response that we tend to think of as emotion, but that's really a series of sensations in our bodies related to hormones? Could you imagine meeting that physical response with total understanding and acceptance? Like, of course my body's in fight or flight right now. It makes perfect sense. In the same way my heart races when I'm watching a scary movie or I'm about to walk on stage to talk to a big group of people, we have total understanding of our body's physical response in those moments.
Could we also have the same compassion for our bodies when engaging in difficult situations, while also taking responsibility for the thoughts we have about the situation that could be layering on additional stress and anxiety for us? My friends, what we're up against is not for the faint of heart. Menopause, raising teens, approaching the empty nest, aging parents, changing relationships, any of the circumstances in life you might be facing. So much of this is out of your control.
But ironically, we cause ourselves more stress by trying to control the things not in our control so that we can feel better. There is another way. You can learn how to take control of your mind and your own emotional well-being, to take responsibility for how your mind creates your emotional experience, and to intentionally create something new.
This is the process I teach in my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0. So this morning, as I recognized all of the thoughts in my head creating my feelings of hurt and disconnection, I saw so clearly that the only thing my son had done was actively and passionately engage in a conversation that I had started. Much like my younger son at the grocery store, my older son had done exactly what I'd invited him to do, just not exactly in the way I had anticipated him doing it. He hadn't been intentionally mean.
He hadn't talked down to me. He'd simply been passionate as he talked about a complicated issue. Is that actually something I want to change about my son? In fact, it's something that I love about him.
Very quickly, I went from feeling hurt and disconnected to feeling reconnected and at peace. I see why I felt hurt, but I also see that I have an equally true path to get back to love and peace. That's the road I'm actually going to choose today.
You have more power over your emotional experience than you think you do, my friend. Until next time. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0, at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
