The most helpful skill no one taught you

I was expecting an important phone call on Friday. Thursday they text me and asked if I had 5 minutes to chat that day. 

Immediately my heart started to race, my palms got all clammy, and I burst into a cold sweet.  The nervousness of what would happen in those 5 minutes was taking over. What if the call did not go as I was hoping? What if it did? Ahhh..  

I wanted to know their response immediately, but did not want to let on how nervous I was. So I sat and just felt the nervousness for a few minutes before I called them up. 

Have you ever really tried feel your emotions on purpose? I rarely use to and honestly I’m still not that great at it, but today I decided to just feel it and not be in a hurry to make it go away.

The craziest thing happened. By purposefully feeling the emotion of nervousness, it literally passed in about a minutes. 

When you have a thought, the neurons in your brain connect and release a chemical. Your body feels and responds to that chemical.  Emotions are simply chemicals in your body. They are your brains way of keeping you safe and alive. 

When you are “feeling” your emotions, we call this processing your emotions. Learning how to literally feel your emotions is one of the most helpful skills we were never taught. Here’s how you do it. 

You have to get out of your head and into your body.  Describe the feeling in as much detail as you can. Pretend you are trying to explain it to an alien that has no concept of what a feel is. Where in your body to you feel it? Does it move? Is it a color? What texture is it? The better you can get a describing it, the more you are actually FEELING it. You stop feeling the emotion once the chemical has left your body and the more you literally feel it, the faster the chemical moves through you. 

The next time you have a negative feeling, try pausing for even just one minute and really feel it. I guarantee it will go away so much faster if you do. 

Want help applying this to your specific situation? Sign up for free coaching at www.lindsaybuchancoaching.com