Ep54_EmotionalRegulation
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[00:00:00] So recently I found out my daughter had not been wearing her retainer and she hadn't been wearing a retainer for five days in a row. At least that's what she actually said. I didn't handle it very well. I got frustrated. I wanted to say, you know, how much we spent on that retainer. 6,000 plus dollars. I didn't say that exactly, but I didn't rehandle it very well.

I was kind of grouchy about it. You know, it's important you wear your retainer. I can't really believe you haven't been doing it for five days. What is going on? And. It put some distance between me and my daughter. I left the room. This was right at night, and I didn't wanna leave on bad terms and everything, and so I thought about it for five minutes and then thought, you know what?

I gotta go back and tell Emerson I didn't handle that well. I was wrong. No excuses. No excuses, although in my mind I make excuses. So today we're gonna talk to you about, I'm gonna talk to you about emotion regulation. I had to regulate and didn't do the grip. Best job at regulating my emotions in that situation.

I'm gonna talk to you today about four things you can do to regulate your emotions. So, Welcome to the Decide Your Legacy podcast. I'm your host, Adam Gragg. If you haven't already done so, subscribe Apple, Spotify. Take out your phone 15 seconds, give it a review, a rating review that helps it to grow organically and reach more people.

Really appreciate it. I wanna share some risks that I've taken with you recently as I have in. Most of the last 20 episodes. One is that I connected with a buddy from high school and we are planning on getting coffee over Christmas. Christian, having seen him actually physically in 10 years, really fun, exciting.

I have gotten gifts for five different people who I normally wouldn't get Christmas gifts for and surprised them them, and that was really fun. And I ended up going to a makeup store called Ulta and Sephora to buy gifts for my daughter, which I normally wouldn't go and do, and that was cool and I actually had a good time, believe it or not, although it was awkward.

So for those of you don't know, I'm Adam Gragg and I am a legacy coach, speaker, podcaster, mental health professional for almost 25 years. My life purpose is helping people find transformational clarity that propels them forward to face their biggest fears so they can live and leave their desired legacy.

And facing fears and helping people face their fears with this clarity is my passion. I talk about stuff that your six year old can underst. For example, your six-year-old can understand that facing fears and getting to the other side is gonna lead to growth.

It may be a kid at school they're afraid of dealing with, or it may be some academic subject that they don't want to engage, or a book that they're afraid to actually sit down and read cuz it's frustrating for them. And although it may not act and seem like fear, it really is fear. I also discuss topics that I struggle with myself.

I struggle with emotion regulation. I hate to say it, I can be overreactive at times and I have overreacted in situations that have cost me. I'm working on it. I'm working progress. I also. Want to challenge you to listen as a teacher, not just as a learner. Think about something as we go through this information that you're gonna teach to somebody else today and talk about with somebody else today.

So let's go ahead and jump into the subject. Why is this so important? Well, there's great consequences to not handling your emotions well. I mean, it's gonna take a great toll on your physical health cuz cortisol isn't gonna increase and emotion. When they are, and you're in this fight or flight mode, it's not good for your body.

I mean, it wears your joints down. It can cause arthritis. It can cause heart problems. It can cause long-term physical issues when we don't manage stress well, and that's what we're talking about here. So these emotional outbursts, they trigger your amygdala. You move away from your prefrontal cortex into your limbic system.

You're just centered in this limbic system. That is why you lose your ability to problem solve, to be, to have a sense of humor. You lose your ability to enjoy people, to have fun when you're in this anxious, highly triggered emotional [00:05:00] state. So if we learn to get out of that state in healthy ways, it's ha going to have a big benefit on our life, cuz when we less likely to go to unhealthy coping skills.

To deal with situations in our life that are gonna come, triggers, let's call them, that are gonna occur in our life. And we regulate our emotions so that we have space. So if you are in a fight or flight sympathetic state, of course you're gonna be reactive. We're in danger. I'm gonna protect myself. We wanna get into a parasympathetic state, into a calmer state, and then.

We can respond, intentionally respond. So I had a client recently ask me when is it okay to have a drink with my friends over the holidays? And my thought about that, cuz really they didn't have an alcohol problem that I know of. And I said, well, it's fine to have a drink whenever you want to, as long as you're not using it to regulate your emotions.

So if you're gonna have a glass of wine and you're having that glass of wine so you can actually socialize, And feel more comfortable around people. Well do the work in advance so you can feel more comfortable around people and socialize without that glass of wine. And then have the glass of wine if you want the glass of wine.

But don't be using it as a coping skill, as something to take you from sympathetic to parasympathetic. That's where we find that addictions start. So pornography, nicotine, sex. Holism, all these things. They regulate us. They get us out of this highly triggered emotional state. And to a calm state. But that's why it's dysfunctional and addictive cuz we believe we have to have that in order to regulate our emotions.

But I'm gonna talk to you today about things you can do to regulate your emotions without substances and dysfunctional, destructive habits that you could potentially form. So it's a really important topic for that reason. And think about the cost. I mean, I can think for my own life I once. , and I've mentioned this before, I mean, I've been reactive in a number of situations in my life.

I mean, I've honestly had been close to getting beat up on a number of situations where I probably should have been beat up because I was not acting appropriately. I was overly emotional and fired up one time in my apartment complex. I. Have was noticed that somebody was smoking Pohto in front of our house and there were kids out there, and the kids asked me what that smell was, and I just kind of lost it, you know?

I went over and I said, what you guys doing? Go inside? I wasn't nice. I was pretty abreast about it. I'm like, this is not cool. There's kids, they're asking what that smell is, you know, can you guys at least go have the decency go do on the stinking balcony of your apartment? And it didn't go well. I mean, honestly, I, I could have gotten shot cuz it wasn't someone that lived in the complex.

It was like a, a relative of somebody that lived in the complex. And I don't think these are the most stable people. So we wanna, there's a major cost of not regulating our emotions well, and there's a major benefit to regulating them well. Consistently, for one is, like I mentioned, you're not gonna need substances or unhealthy things to actually cope.

You're gonna be trusted because people are gonna see consistency in you. And you're not gonna overreact to things that don't require or don't necessitate a strong reaction. It's one of the problems people have with addicts, with alcoholics and addicts in general, is they don't regulate their emotions very well without the substance.

And so they can just be very inconsistent. They blow up one day, one day, they're calm, and they don't know what they're gonna get. Rather than that stable, loving parent that's consistent or that stable loving friend that's consistent. So the major biggest benefit I believed regulating your emotions is you retain your power, your sense of dignity.

You have power that you've been given to handle situations in your life confidently. I love to ask myself when I'm feeling insecure, what would I do in this situation if I had 10 times as much conf, 10 times more confidence. And then do that thing, it's called opposite to emotion action. Oftentimes we're gonna do the opposite to how we actually feel.

So let's go ahead and there's a link in the podcast, in the show notes to a podcast I did on assertiveness. , and that is going to be helpful to you as you think about this content because there's a lot of stuff on emotional, emotional regulation in there. But the four things that you can do to regulate your emotions, number one is you can increase the positives in your life.

You wanna build a life worth living. So both short-term and then long-term positives. I encourage clients frequently to make a list of the things in their life that they enjoy doing, and they will, they will often forget that they have all these things that are exciting in their life, that are fun, that they can plan and schedule into their life that are enjoyable, but they're not actually doing it.

They're doing destructive things instead. Or they're just getting consumed by one specific thing. [00:10:00] Maybe it's video games that for an hour is gonna help. Them to regulate, but long term it's not gonna help them regulate because they can't do it all the time. I mean, they can't do it at any specific triggering situation and just pull out video games, start playing in that moment.

They have to learn to Kuhn themselves in the actual moment. So we find ways to build positives into our life every day. And you think that the healthiest of relationships have a ratio of five to one positive to negative. In their interactions. But I would suggest in your life you should have at least, at least five times as many exciting, fun things in your life.

And if your job sucks and you hate it then, and it's pretty much draining the joy and. energy outta your life and you might wanna be really looking for a new job. Cause it's long term not gonna be really good for your mental health. And so that's why people who have jobs that they really hate, they end up going home and then blowing up at little things because they're not getting to be able to regulate their emotions because there's not enough positive stuff going on in their life.

So, You gotta find ways to find long-term and short-term positives in your life. So what are you excited about over the next year, over the next two years, over the next five years? And can you think about those things and reflect on those things, which could be a short-term positive? Like looking at pictures of vacations for me is a fun, relaxing activity.

And then planning a vacation that I'm thinking about in a year. Or in two years or in five years. Cuz I'm thinking about taking my daughter to both. Although, and she listens to my podcast so I probably shouldn't say this on here, but hopefully she won't listen to this one. But I'm take, I'm considering taking my daughter on a number of really cool trips before she turns 18.

And I'm not gonna share too much about it, but just the planning and thinking about it is something enjoyable in my life and it gives me space from those emotionally triggering situations cuz they're not nearly as important to me. They don't take up, they're not nearly as triggering because they just aren't that important.

I can brush 'em off. I'm detached from them because there's enough positive stuff in my life. So number two is to prepare in advance. That's a great way to learn how to regulate your emotions, and that's why I run and do yoga, and that's why I try and get up at the same time every morning and go to bed at the same time every night.

That's why I'm in a D B T Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Group, and that's why I go to a therapist and talk to a therapist once every two weeks and sometimes once every week so that I have a chance to process through things in. To prepare in advance for those triggers that I know are gonna actually come, because there are stressful times of the year.

There are stressful seasons of your life. I have one, one of my best friends tell me the other day, emotionally as we had coffee, that I think this is probably the hard, he, he said this, this is his words. I think this is probably going to be the hardest season of my life. And you know, he has three kids. He has a, some job transitions going on.

He has. A business that his wife started. So I could see really what he was talking about was really true. And he is a runner and a biker, and he does good things in advance to prepare for those triggering situations. So I think he's doing exactly what I'm talking about, but we can do things to prepare in advance.

And one of the things that I'd encourage you to do is deal with your past. I mean, that's preparing in advance for emotionally triggering situations. So there's a link in this show notes to the podcast that I did on actually, pain is the Price of Freedom, and to the article on why you must and I you mean that deal with your past and also to a worksheet.

In that article, there is a worksheet in the articles that's called Impactful Life Events Worksheet, and so you get to process some of these very difficult things that have happened potentially in your life. That'll help you to get space, so you're not gonna be as reactive in those situations. That might be minor because a lot of times what we do is we get zoned in on situations that are kind of minor, but in the big picture, they become very, very important because we're not at a healthy place.

For example, like me, fixating on my daughter's retainer could be a distraction for me from actually focusing on the most important tasks that scare me related to my job, which happen to be often preparing content and speaking in things that I love and enjoy, but also can scare me, which I can procrastinate on.

So we prepare in advance. Recently, Emerson, she I, this was actually on Sunday, but she was talking to me on the way to a Christmas party. And we were having a really good discussion and she opened up and I believe she was just being fully transparent and she said that she doesn't feel loved by me all the time, and it makes me emotional to even really think about this.

And I asked her what she meant and she said, well, sometimes you're more like a boss than a dad. And I luckily I was just about to drop her off at this Christmas party. And [00:15:00] I did, and she got out of the car. I told her I loved her, but I had three hours to really chew on what she had just said, because I was like, wow, you know, I can't believe it.

And so I called my buddy who he's. 76 years old. His name's Don and he, he has three daughters. And I just talked to him about it and I said, man, Emerson shared some with me. That was really, really hard. And I mean, he listened very graciously and he gave me some thoughts and insight and he just said, wow, you have a smart daughter and that's a lot of courage.

And you know, don't take it so seriously and just know you're a good dad, but make the changes that are necessary and. I did. I ended up actually talking to her later, and I mean, I thought about it and thought, you know, really I coped with it emotionally well because I have been doing the exercise and I've been doing some things that are really healthy in my life.

So I wasn't consumed by it and didn't get really anxious about it. It was just really uncomfortable. To sit on that and then to know that it's gonna take time for me to make some changes in my life and to adjust my life so that she does feel loved consistently by me, which is what I want. I mean, I thought even like I want all the people 10 years after I'm gone, that's part of my legacy statement, is that they feel.

Still that I loved them and they know that because I was there for them during the most trying times in their life, and I shared it and was the most encouraging person that they know. I mean, that's one of the, I hope everyone's the most encouraging person that you know or meet or whatever, but that's one of the things that I resonate with.

Anyway, prepare in advance. Number three is growing your mastery. And these are all some things that come from D B T skills. You know, accumulate positives, prepare and advance grow in mastery. If you have a hobby and you're engaging in it consistently, that can help you to be emotionally resilient. If you're learning about things that are engaging your mind, that can help you to be emotionally resilient.

If you have had hobbies in the past that you were really focused on and you stepped away from them like you loved programming in the past, and it was a hobby, not a job, I mean it refreshed you and you got out of that, well do some things to put that in back into your life. Maybe it's just 30 minutes a week at first or an hour a week.

I mean 30 minutes a week's, probably not enough, but an hour a week, two hours a week, where you're growing in your mastery of a certain subject that you're already passionate about, can do wonders for your mental health and can do wonders for your ability to regulate yourself when these triggers come.

Because as I've shared before, we want a space between that trigger. That's stimulus and that response, you know, if there's no space, it's an unintentional reaction. If there's space, it's an intentional response. We want intentional responses in building mastery, whether it's photography, camping, hiking, skiing, fixing cars.

The list goes on and on, and I can, and we'll link to a revised. Article and it's called How to Be a Friend of Yourself, how to Be Your Own Best Friend, and in this article there are ideas. There's actually gonna be a couple hundred ideas of things you can do to build mastery or just to work into your life as self-care activities to build positives.

Into your life. So you only want to check out that article as well. And so the fourth thing that I would encourage you to do to get that space emotionally, so you're not triggered, you have these triggers and you have actual space, is to engage your prefrontal cortex. So it's to think right, think some of you need to think, you really do.

You're not thinking much, you're actually not using your brain, which is really true. You can tell your teenagers that. And I think there's definitely a lot of truth to that because their brain hasn't fully developed. To be accessed all the time. That's why they are more impulsive. That's why they are gonna do things that overreact, you know, or be overly sensitive.

In some situations, they might just be a sensitive kid, but we want to engage our prefrontal cortex. That means we engage this part of our mind, our brain. That's the last part of our brain to develop. So how do we do that? Well, we read reading, and especially reading self-help, reading about emotional regulation.

Me reading. Developing your social skills, reading about personal development, spiritual literature, you know, reading your Bible, memorizing scripture, having these favorite poems that you read potentially. You know, I have some poems that I have memorized that I think about, you know, and even one of them has just.

Just a phrase in it that I think about oftentimes and it's, it's to lie there that's disgrace, is it just reminds me that to not take action, to not do something that's the real disgrace, you know, to give into fear that's disgrace. So that one little line engages my prefrontal cortex. It's like a mantra for me.

So having journaling prompts where you have to answer out. A question, [00:20:00] even journaling about your day and things you've learned, journaling about your dreams and your vision and your goals, and writing those things down. They engage your prefrontal cortex, and I would encourage you to do so because then you're gonna think and be able to process with this amygdala and this prefrontal cortex are gonna be able to look at a situation like I did and say, you know, I didn't handle this situation with Emerson and her braces very well.

I overreacted, you know, it is something I have to say something about, but it was the way I approached it and I could have been a lot softer and kinder and I'm sorry, Emerson, or I don't need to say anything to people who are smoking Pohto in front of my apartment because. Is something that could get me shot.

I don't know what they have. I don't know. You know, it's just better for me to go to the manager, the apartment complex and say, Hey, say hey, there's kids riding around here. I'm smelling this, and is there something you can do about it? I didn't use my prefrontal cortex and engaging your prefrontal cortex is what I'm gonna encourage you and encouraging you to do.

So that's what I have for you today. So what do you wanna do? How can you better regulate your emotion? First of all, increase the positives in your life. Second, prepare in advance again, reference that podcast on assertiveness that I did. That helps you prepare in advance the Dear Man acronym. Third thing is to grow in mastery in some area of your life and always.

Have time in your week where you're growing in mastery. And number four is to engage your prefrontal cortex. Sometimes to engage your prefrontal cortex, you gotta breathe and as I said before, a four second in breath, a six second out breath, just six of those can calm you down. And there's other skills to meditation things where it can calm you down in ways in the moment.

Get you out of that emotional state and into a much more rational state. So those are the four things I have for you today. And you can even think about it this way, that you have a rational mind. You got an emotional mind that in the middle you got a wise mind. You don't wanna listen to that emotional mind all the time.

You don't wanna be so overly rational all the time. You wanna be wise and in the middle is where intuition lives. In the middle is where that internal wisdom and judgment live. So what insight did you gain from today? What was your one takeaway from. , I want you to think about that, write that down, and take action by teaching that to somebody in the next 24 hours.

I want you right now to write down something in your life that you know is going to be triggering you in the next 24 hours, most likely. And then I want you to write down an action that you can take to deal with that trigger. So you know you're gonna have to deal with that coworker, that family member.

That person, that situation like I have to deal with tomorrow is potentially having my flight canceled because of weather, so I can think about now, how am I gonna handle that? Well, I'm gonna proactively do this. I'm gonna get information. I'm gonna reschedule the flight if I have to. I'm gonna trust the pilot.

I'm gonna trust the airline, but I'm preparing in advance. If you found this podcast helpful, make sure you subscribe to Shatterproof. If you want to improve your mental health, if you want some tips to help you improve your mental health, you're not gonna wanna miss this. There's 27 items that will help you to improve your mental health.

It's called shatterproof yourself. It's a mental health stress checklist. So that is something you don't wanna miss. Subscribe in the show note. So again, making your mission live a life. Now you wanna be remembered for 10 years after you're gone live your legacy. Now you decide your legacy, you decide your future.

No one else. I appreciate you and I'll see you next time.