105: Why you pick even on a good day and how to stop

It's infuriating and confusing.

Why in the world, after a great day, do you end up ruining it with a big old session of picking, pulling, or biting?

The answer is actually pretty simple - you're disregulated.

AND the best way you've learnt how to calm yourself down is to squish your emotions back down into their box rather than feel them fully.

The problem is, knowing the "how" of meditation, breathwork, journaling, and going for a walk doesn't help you to know the "how" of feeling fully.

Logical understanding is not enough. There needs to be an emotional connection and understanding between your brain and your body.

In this episode:

• You'll cultivate a deep understanding of why you pick on a good day
• The broader consequences of squashing your emotions
• and I walk you through how to feel fully through cultivating a connection between your mind and body

Enjoy 💛

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My name is Raffaela Marie. I'm a holistic BFRB coach who has healed from 15 years of chronic skin picking myself and dedicated my life to helping driven women do the same. Through my podcast, free resources, and programs, I teach strategies to overcome urges, build emotional safety, and expand into authenticity. My approach goes beyond quick fixes, focusing on root causes and long-term recovery.

Transcript

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Why is it when you're feeling great, when you've had an excellent day, when you're even feeling proud about yourself, when you've achieved something big or you're just feeling good, do you end up picking, pulling, and biting at your body? What the hell is going on, man? I 110% understand the frustration and the despair that comes from this when even when we're feeling good, we end up losing ourselves in a session that damages our body. This is a topic that came up in my free support group on WhatsApp, which you are more than welcome to join. All you need to do is send me a message about why you'd like to join, and I'll send you the link. The reason why we end up in bad picking, pulling, and biting sessions, even when we're feeling good, is because of dysregulation. You're dysregulate, and dysregulation doesn't just look like feeling bad. It can look like feeling really fucking good. Being pumped up, excited, joyful, having a really packed out full day that makes you feel satisfied and fulfilled, you can still be dysregulated after that or during that. It's not a bad thing. You're just feeling big emotions. But if big emotions are not a bad thing, why do we struggle so much with them and what can you do about it? You are listening to episode 205 of Beyond Skin Picking and Hair Pulling, the place to be if you want to learn how to address the root cause of why you pick, pull, or bite at your body so that you can actually find healing from it. This is how I healed from 15 years of chronic skin picking. My name is Raphaela Marie. I am your host, and I have dedicated the past five years of my life to understanding what is really going on beneath our skin. I healed from 15 years of chronic skin picking, and now I'm here to help you to do the same. If you appreciate the work that I do and you get value out of this podcast, please make sure you hit like and subscribe, leave a five-star review, and do leave your thoughts on this episode in the comments or in a written review. Any way that you interact with this podcast really supports the work that I do and pushes this out to more people who need to hear it. Big emotions are not a bad thing. They're actually a good thing because then we get to feel excitement and joy and pride. We get to feel pumped up, we get to feel good about ourselves, really, really good about ourselves. And on the flip side of that, we also have moments where we feel really down, where we feel big pain, big hurt, big disappointment, big overwhelm. But the problem isn't the big emotions. The problem is that you never learned how to feel those big emotions. If you never learnt how to properly feel and process the big, hard emotions, then you are going to struggle with all big emotions because we can't just pick and choose what we want to feel, what we like to feel and what we don't like to feel. And when we chronically pick and bite and pull at our body, when we are feeling overwhelmed or anxious or insecure or not good enough or dysregulated from a rough day or from information overload, what these behaviors allow us to do is they allow us to squish those emotions down so they're not so intense, so we don't have to feel them so fully. And this is also what happens when we feel the big, nice emotions. Because dysregulation is dysregulation regardless of whether you like how you're feeling or not. I get pumped up every single day. Every single day I get so dysregulated and I fucking love it. It feels good, but I can also see how it makes me really unproductive and I feel fried by the end of the day. And the reason why I get so pumped up is because every day I get to come to my desk and do this kind of work. Every day I get to speak to people like you and I get to help and support people like you. I gain so much new information every single day. I'm constantly looking for new ways to communicate, to teach, to support. And when I find something, I get hyped up. Now, in the past, I was really unaware of my body. I was really unaware of noticing when I was pumped up, when I was getting really dysregulated. I didn't notice the signs, I didn't know how to respond. I kind of just went with it. I let the emotions rule my life and dictate what I did when I did them. And so when I was feeling great, I'd just be riding that wave until I crashed at some point. Typically because I was so dysregulated that I would end up chronically picking my skin or binge eating. And then I'd feel shit about myself and it'd slow me down a little bit. And it was this constant roller coaster of feeling great, then crashing, crashing back down and feeling like shit, then building my way back up to feeling great, and then crashing back down. And I rarely spent much time in the neutral, regulated space simply because I did not know how to handle the big emotions. So the big emotions handled me. They ruled my life. Now, here's what I do differently. I know through getting curious and practicing building awareness with my body, I know exactly what it feels like when I start to tip over the edge to dysregulation. I know what that feeling is in my body. It's like a rising tightness in my chest. It's that feeling you get when you get really excited and you feel like you want to jump around. But I don't jump around. I just do more and more and more and more. And then I go off in my head thinking of all these different ideas. I recognize that. And that is a cue for me that I need to take a break. Do I do that every time? No. Even in the past couple of days, I have not. But I'm very aware of it. And when I do take a break, that looks like leaving my office, going for a walk. I will prepare myself lunch and really sit down and eat without my phone. I will also take moments in the day to do nothing. I will lie on the ground and put my legs up the wall because that's another somatic practice you can do that helps to regulate your nervous system. And I will do nothing. And I don't do this perfectly. But because I have been intentionally working on this, for a year or two, I have been getting better at it. I'm a lot better at it than I was a year ago, six months ago. In the mornings, I don't turn my phone on for the first hour that I wake up. I make sure I move my body, I meditate. Even if my internal world is screaming to, let's get started, let's get going, let's go, go, go. Instead of allowing those feelings to dictate how I show up in my life and what I do, I've practiced, consistently practiced, taking a step back and slowing down and giving myself space to do nothing or do a lot less. Do things slowly. And what we're doing when we give ourselves space to do nothing is we're allowing our nervous system to actually regulate itself. Because it cannot properly regulate itself if you are constantly on go, constantly doing something, constantly jumping from one thing to the next. And not only that, but because you are jumping from one thing to the next, you're not allowing yourself those small moments of serotonin and dopamine that you get from completing a task, feeling good about actually completing that small thing, doing that thing, feeling good that you took the time to eat a proper meal, feeling good that you finished that project. Instead of giving yourself a small moment to just pause and do nothing and appreciate that, it's the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And so your brain is going to be craving dopamine because you haven't been giving yourself that space to actually feel good about what you're doing. And if you suspect or you've been diagnosed with ADHD, you absolutely can practice doing this too. I have ADHD as well, which is probably why I get so hyped up and hyper-focused on things and I don't want to take a break ever. But we are adults and we must parent ourselves to truly be able to care for ourselves. And that means giving yourself the space to actually slow down and let your nervous system do its job and regulate yourself. If you think about your average day, from the moment you wake up to the moment you get home or the moment you stop work, have you had even three seconds, three second intervals throughout the day where you've just paused and done nothing and just checked in with your body? Have you given yourself space at any point? Have you set boundaries to allow yourself to have space at any point? And I understand if you're a busy person. Most people that I talk to in this community are very busy people. I am also a very busy person. I work seven days a week. I work weekends at a restaurant, and Monday to Friday I'm here, podcasting, creating content, resources, group coaching, one-on-one clients, supporting people within the community. And when I had weak boundaries, I was almost constantly in a state of dysregulation. I had weak boundaries with my phone, I had weak boundaries with my time. And so to help yourself not to fall into picking, pulling, or biting sessions after you had a good day is to build awareness of when you are becoming dysregulated. Getting so aware of that when you notice it in your body, it's a cue for you to think, oh, I'm gonna need to take space for myself at some point today. I'm gonna need to calm down, need to go for a walk, or do some deep breathing or meditation, or I need to call a friend and just chat with them, or I need to just sit for five minutes and do nothing. Sometimes it's just simply the lack of awareness and intentional awareness because we can be aware, oh, I'm dysregulated and then have the awareness of what am I going to do about this? How am I going to support myself to decompress? Sometimes when I hang out with my friends, I'm so pumped up afterwards, especially if I haven't hung out with anyone for a while. And I know if I am spending time with them in the evening, I need to leave at a certain time to get home so I can let myself decompress before going to bed. If it were up to my feelings, I would stay and hang out with them until it's super late, then I have to rush home and get straight into bed. And trust me, I would not sleep well. I'd done it before. So give yourself the space to actually process what you're feeling. Celebrate what you're feeling. If you're feeling great, if you've achieved something great, celebrate yourself in a calm, slow, gentle, soothing way. Doesn't mean you can't have big, exciting celebrations. But if you find that you end up in bad picking, pulling or biting sessions afterwards, you also need to make space for the calmness and the space to just be and process and sit with what you're feeling. And if you have a loud inner critic, you're going to need help learning how to sit with the more difficult big emotions so that you can find it easier to sit with the more nice big emotions. And if you want support with that, that's something that I do with my one-on-one clients. We go through the process of learning how to actually truly be with yourself, truly process emotion, release the hurt that's underneath so that you can feel well in yourself. And your day doesn't get thrown off by your feelings. And if you want more support, you can just go to the show notes, click on the link that says send me a message, and send me a message. I'm here for you whenever you need it. And working with me is a lot more affordable than you think. Try this next time you're feeling really good, or you can even try it right now in this moment, if it's safe for you to do so. Just take notice of your body right now. What sensations can you notice? Are there any sensations in your back? Are there any sensations in your shoulders, your neck, your throat, maybe your chest, your sternum, your stomach. Maybe you're feeling something in your legs. Just notice what's there. Right now in my sternum, I notice a bit of tension. And that tension is excitement because I generally get really excited and pumped up when I record these episodes. And as I'm talking about that, I feel that feeling spread into my chest, the lower part of my chest, and it's warm. And that's joy because I really do love doing this. And maybe excitement and joy show up in your body in different ways. Doesn't it isn't necessarily going to look like and feel like what I just described. But if I start to observe my stomach, if you observe yours as well right now, I'm noticing there's a bit of tightness in my stomach too. And this is typically for me an indication that I'm getting a bit dysregulated. The more dysregulated I get, the more cramped my stomach will become. And it doesn't matter if I'm getting dysregulated because I'm anxious and really worried about something, or if I'm getting really pumped up and excited for something. It's the same thing. That's also why we end up picking, pulling, and biting in our skin even when we feel good, is because the sensations are often the same. We just have a different association with what we're feeling, a different story behind it. But our nervous system is just noticing, whoop, we're dysregulated. Let's fix that in the best way that we know how. Your nervous system doesn't know that you feel good about it, that you're, it doesn't recognize the stories that you tell. Only you recognize those things. It doesn't recognize that this is coming from a good place. It just recognizes that you are not in a regulated state. And its job is to keep you regulated. And the point of simply recognizing what's inside your body is purely the practice of getting curious and just recognizing what's there. It helps you to start to process and regulate that emotion without even having to fully understand it. Now, in saying that, if that emotion is attached to trauma, whether it's big T trauma, little T trauma, whether you want to call it hurt, if trauma feels like too big of a word, but it's connected to a hurt or a painful memory, that's something that you probably need support processing if you haven't done that kind of thing before, or you feel like you're stuck with it. And this is why when we have support and we learn how to feel into those places where we feel stuck, we start to expand our capacity to sit with big emotion because we're no longer stuck with it. We can experience and feel the full emotion that is there. And when you learn how to do that with anxiety or sadness or anger, you get better automatically at doing that with excitement and joy. When I feel extremely triggered by my husband and I need to take a break before we can continue our conversation. And this is a skill that everyone needs to learn. I take myself away and I focus on just sitting with and noticing what is inside my body, the sensations that are there. And this is really hard because when we feel something, we often tell ourselves something about that feeling and we get in our head and then we start to spiral in these stories. And that's those stories make us feel something more intensely. And we make an assumption of that feeling. That story tells us this, and then we keep spiraling and making assumptions and going back into our body and we loop in this process and we just get more and more upset, more and more worked up. And so the most effective way I've found to calm myself down in those moments so that my husband and I can actually move forward in a healthy conversation and heal together and grow together is I sit with and notice what's there. That's it. And every time I get stuck in my head, I bring myself back to my body and I breathe into whatever is there. And I also had someone help me do this many, many times so that I could do it on my own. So again, if you have not yet done this with someone, take that step with yourself and work with someone who can help you to sit with what's there. But again, coming back to the core point of all of this is learning to have space for yourself, to connect to your body, to become aware of it, to listen to the subtle cues, to understand what they are, to give yourself space to just be. And one last thing I want to add to this is that you can check in with your body. It doesn't have to take 15 minutes. It can take just a few seconds of just becoming aware of that you have a body, not just a head and a brain, but that you have a whole body connected to that. It's taking a few seconds to notice it. Maybe notice how your feet are on the ground, notice how the sun or the wind is brushing against your skin, notice any noises in your environment, notice your breath, how you're breathing, and then move on. And practice doing that multiple times a day. And it's okay if you forget the practice is in remembering to do it. When you learn to do this, you won't pick on good days anymore because you'll be tuned into your body, you'll notice when you're becoming dysregulated and you'll be able to respond rather than just let your subconscious mind and your emotions react for you and take care of you for you. You are actively taking care of yourself. And then even if you don't, even if you don't take time to slow down, don't take time to regulate yourself, you'll at least understand where you're at by the end of the day when you're feeling super dysregulated. You'll have more understanding and compassion for yourself. And you'll have a better idea of, okay, what can I do now? It's the lack of awareness, intentional awareness that catches us off guard and allows our subconscious to take control because we are not being intentional. You always have an opportunity. There is no failure here. There are just many opportunities where you get to choose yourself, where you get to choose being intentional rather than living on autopilot. You can do this. You are capable. And this is a core aspect of what has allowed me to thrive, to stop struggling with myself, start feeling good about myself and really enjoy my life. Enjoy those big moments, not end up crashing and burning in bad picking sessions. Handle the low moments with more grace and compassion and groundedness rather than losing myself and drowning in my feelings. Life is so much better now, and you can have that too. You absolutely can. I believe that you can. If you're here listening to this, there is a part of you that believes it too. If you took value out of this episode, hit like and subscribe, leave a five star review, and please do share your thoughts with me on what came up for you as you were listening. I wish you an absolutely wonderful rest of your week, and I'll see you next Tuesday for the next episode of Beyond Skin Picking and Hair Pulling.