And I’ve created a two part series this week and next week for you to be fully equipped on how to do that. This week I’ll talk to you about how emotions are even created in your body and how to process them. Next week, I’ll be giving you a tool that will actually help you sit with your emotions, and I’ll be sharing my experience on having some really strong emotions of loss. 

So, without further ado, bookmark this so that you have this share this widely. Because this is one of the keys to being at your healthy weight. You will hear me use the term emotions and feelings interchangeably. I’m not talking about feelings like, oh, I feel hot, or I’m feeling pain, physical pain. I’m talking about emotional feelings.

Although they can sometimes be uncomfortable and you might describe them as painful, I will be teaching you what emotions are, how they are created in your body, as well as how to process them and get them out of your body. 

But my two main goals in this series are to show you. First, that you are safe to experience an emotion. You will learn that an emotion is simply a physiological sensation in your body. It’s a physiological response to a thought and an emotion is simply sensations in your body. 

So I want you to start saying to yourself, I can feel this. I’m safe to feel this. This feeling cannot hurt me. This is a physiological response. And so just to show your brain, ’cause your brain isn’t used to feeling safe, to experience a negative emotion, that you are a hundred percent safe. It’s just a feeling it will pass. 

So number one, to continue to show your brain and teach your brain that you are safe to experience a feeling. And number two, to cultivate the willingness to feel that feeling, to experience that emotion, to let that emotion be present in you, to feel those sensations, for you to be willing to feel those sensations. 

For one to three minutes, and that willingness to allow any feeling to be inside your body and to experience it is a key to being a woman who lives at her healthy weight for the rest of your life. 

Showing your brain that you are safe to experience emotions, and that you have the willingness to feel what can sometimes be uncomfortable. And know that you’re safe will help you stay close to the Lord and not run to the pantry when you’re having a negative emotion.  

First, let’s talk about how emotions are created. Something happens, you see something, you hear something, you have a memory. Let’s just call that the trigger, and your brain will assign meaning to that trigger. You have a thought about it.Maybe you see someone frown and you think, Ugh, they’re mad at me.

Based on your interpretation or based on the thought that you had, specific areas of your brain will be activated. Okay? So your specific areas of your brain are activated. Now, I want you to imagine that at this point you have a plug and you have plugged into a specific part of your brain, and when that specific part of your brain is activated, neurotransmitters are released.

Neurotransmitters. Things like dopamine, serotonin, or cortisol and adrenaline. So it’s plugged into that part of your brain and that brain releases those chemicals and those chemicals travel down to that cord, and at the other end of that cord are different parts of your body that then receive that chemical and you start to experience physical sensations.

Physical sensations like your heart is racing, or you have a tight chest, or you feel warm in your face or your gut is tight. This is your body’s physical response to those chemicals. And once you feel that and you become aware of those sensations, you consciously label what you’re feeling as an emotion. Like I feel anxiety, I feel anger, I feel shame. I feel joy. I feel happy. It’s only a physiological response to the chemical. I want you to see that it is that simple. 

Now, what’s interesting is that the concept of, but other people don’t experience this. They don’t think that way. They don’t have this reaction. Why isn’t this a problem for them? Let’s just take for an example, something like your chaos food. Other people can see it and not have that reaction. Remember, you have a trigger that creates this entire cascade and this physiological response. 

So just know that whatever you see, you hear, or a memory, you will activate different parts of your brain based on what you are thinking about that thing. See, because your brain routes your thoughts to different areas based on. Your history, your past experiences, so I can see icing and think, oh, that is not for me. It’s just not part of my life. I can be neutral around it. Denise, before I did this work, would’ve thought I can’t stop myself. 

Same situation, different thoughts. Activating a different part of my brain. Now it activates the prefrontal lobe. That is calm thinking, remembering my long-term goals, remembering what I want for future me remembering what’s important to me. It is no longer seeing icing, activating my stress response. I gotta have it. What am I gonna do? I can’t stop.

And so I hope that shows you that it is simply retraining our brain to have different thoughts to help change our emotions. So that’s part of the work that we’re doing here in retraining our brain. But I also want to explain to you that it is not the situation that’s creating the emotion. It is your thoughts about the situation, about the thing you see, about the thing you hear, or the memory that you have.

So whatever your thought is, it will go to a different part of your brain. If it’s something that is needing, planning and strategic thinking, it’ll go to your wise owl part of your brain, and that’s where we really wanna stay. We really wanna stay in that wise owl part. If it’s fear or seeking pleasure, it goes more into our emotional part, the limbic system. 

If it’s in the memory, it’s in the hippocampus. Just know that you can be experiencing the same circumstance, but interpreting it very differently than someone else and having a different physiological response to it.  

For example, you might think I need something sweet right now. I need something sweet right now and in one person that might feel really emotional and that you start your cravings and your hunger cues because you just sweets to soothe your anxiety. that eating is an emotional relief. 

Now, another person might think, I need something sweet right now. And that thought will activate a different part of their brain. They’re wise owl, the prefrontal cortex, the decision making center of your brain because they have trained themselves to pause and evaluate, is this something I really want? Will this get me the result that I want? And eating becomes a mindful choice for them. 

Let me give you one more example. I blew it today. I might as well keep eating in one person. This hits that default mode. They’re on autopilot. They’re so used to thinking, I blew it today. Might as well keep eating. And it starts this self-critical loop in their emotional center of their brain. The limbic system reinforcing shame and nobody wants to feel shame, so then we buffer with food.

Another person can have the same thought, I blew it today. Might as well keep eating and that will activate the self-regulation part of their brain. The frontal lobe, again, that calm part of our brain, the wise owl that leads them to challenge that thought. They notice it. Is that true? What do I wanna do with thinking that thought? And that might return them back to their plan and create more of a recommitment.

The key takeaway is that how your brain routes a thought is shaped by not only your past experiences, but in the patterns that you have created, but also the patterns that you have recreated. Our brain has plasticity, which means that you can change the brain by intentionally thinking on purpose. Remember Romans 12:2 that says, “Do not conform to the ways of the world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind”, and that’s what you get to do here.

So as you get to know your feelings and increase your feeling, literacy in your workbook. This whole pattern that I just described to you in terms of what part of your brain is activated, the chemicals that are released, the part of your body that creates what sensation, and then what we typically label it as is in your workbook.

The main point is that feelings aren’t scary. Your brain thinks that you’re going to die because you have thought that so often. It has felt so scary to have a strong emotion. It feels so horrible. But becoming a woman who’s willing to feel any feeling will help you so much in keeping your weight at a healthy weight for the rest of your life. 

Start to practice thoughts of, this is a physiological response. I can handle this. Feelings come, feelings go. This will pass. I know I can handle this. It’s safe to feel this. So next I want to talk to you about how you’ll process feelings and show you a little bit more about how practicing processing your feelings will get you farther in your goal than resisting them.

So let’s talk about how to do that and why in the world you would even want to do that. The first thing is just to notice that you’re having a sensation in your body. Just notice it. Tune into that sensation. What am I feeling? My chest feels tight. My gut feels tight. My face is hot. No story. We’re not saying because, dot, dot, dot, dot. Because he did this. This happened. No story. 

We’re only naming the sensation. What do you feel and where do you feel it in your body? Then try to name the emotion that your brain believes you’re experiencing. This is sadness. This feels like shame. This feels like anxiety. Naming it will help your brain calm down. Some people say, name it to tame it. 

The third part is probably the most challenging, and that is simply to allow it to be. Don’t try to fix it. Don’t try to avoid it. Just sit with it. Breathe, relax your shoulders. Continue to breathe. Continue to say, I’m safe to feel this. This won’t last forever. This is a physiological response.

I am breathing in and allowing the chemicals to process through and metabolize through my body. That’s all this is a physiological response. You can continue to describe it. Feeling a knot in my stomach. My chest feels tight. Oh, it feels like heaviness, and you will continue this process from 90 seconds to three minutes. 

What you’re allowing the feeling to do is to move through your nervous system and metabolize the chemicals that are creating the sensation in your various body parts. That’s it, you guys. Most of the research says it takes 90 minutes for an emotional wave to process through you, to rise and to fall.

Maybe even three minutes if you stay in the emotion, if you allow the feeling without adding the story without adding more thought drama, without going into tornado thinking and reliving and rehashing the situation, simply allow the feeling to process through you. The emotion will pass.

And the reason we do this. Is because when we avoid feelings, we get scared, we push them away, we suppress them. It’s like pushing a beach ball underwater. The only way to do that is to distract ourselves, usually with a numbing activity. Over scrolling, over drinking, overeating. Yelling, overworking. 

And what you’re doing is saying, I don’t have three minutes to deal with this. It’s too scary, so I’m gonna push the ball under the water. But eventually it pops up and that’s why you can go into a greater binge because we actually haven’t processed the feeling. It will never go away. It needs to be addressed. 

This is holy work. That’s why I think it’s so important for us to always be aware of what is stealing our peace and address it, and allowing the emotion to process through you is part of that. 

Now you can do thought work later on the emotion, but simply allowing it to process through you is one tool. If you want to actually do thought work at that time, you totally can. But in this video series, I want you to just see emotions are a physiological response that you are absolutely safe to experience. Nothing bad will happen to you, to retrain your brain, to not turn to food, to allow the emotion. 

And for you to cultivate that willingness and you’ll be able to cultivate that willingness, knowing that you can pass through this. It will pass through you with a very simple three minute process. If you do not do this, the stored tension from the emotion will stay in your body and you know that. And you might wonder, why do I feel chronically tight? It can live in digestive issues. Chronic pain, fatigue. 

You also are just prone to keep repeating the same emotional patterns. The same feeling comes back and comes back and comes back. And actually it gains intensity ’cause we’re actually not dealing with it. And you know that’s true. If you’ve had a beef with somebody and you haven’t talked. To them about it, or you haven’t resolved it for yourself, it just kind of festers in the background and can come out later.

I think most important for all of us in this work is that we just don’t wanna turn to food. And if we’re suppressing feelings, our go-to is usually food, as I’ve told you. If you push the beach ball under the water, it will eventually come out and even bigger. And so let’s just start identifying our emotions, feeling them, and then we can start to decrease these emotional outbursts or these emotional huge binges. 

And then finally, when we don’t allow emotions, we are simply creating and reinforcing that habit loop, that negative emotions are scary. You’ll be stuck in tornado thinking. You’ll be stuck in self-sabotaging, self neglect, anxiety, overanalyzing. So if you struggle with any of those things, the very best thing to do is to start to tune into your emotions and get to know them.

Allow them to experience being in your body with you welcoming them. By you. I don’t wanna say embracing them all the time, but allowing them to be present and learning from them. That will be part of this work if you choose to do that. 

A helpful thought for you could be, my job is not to get rid of this emotion, it’s to feel it fully so it can move through me. If you’ve ever heard the term, the only way out is through feeling the emotions.

So I hope you see how safe feeling emotions can be and that you are fully capable to experience them and you will be safe and you don’t have to eat over them. This is a process that you will retrain your brain to do. It will not be comfortable at first, which is totally fine because being wherever you are probably doesn’t feel super comfortable either.

And we know that the Lord is always inviting us to grow and. He will give us everything we need, all the safety that we need. So stay tuned for next week. Next week I will actually give you a plug and play exercise that all you have to do is start the podcast and it will lead you through how to process in motion.It takes a whole three minutes, gang. 

Alright, have a blessed day.