35: When Life Gives You Lemons

Discussed in the episode:

🌱 What to do when you’re having a rough day

🌱 How gratitude neutralizes negativity and helps transform your state

🌱 Being in control of your emotions vs. your emotions controlling you

🌱 Why emotions don’t go away until you pay attention to them

🌱 Giving yourself space to feel your emotions

🌱 Choosing to react vs. respond

🌱 Being aware of your thoughts but not letting them consume you

& more!

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Xoxo, Reagan🤍🌱

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning, good evening, good afternoon to my friends listening to the organic podcast. I'm your host, Reagan, if you are new here, and today's episode is going to be a shorter one because I've had an experience today that one can only describe as a test of patience. A test of patience. And many times today I thought to myself, wow, this really fucking sucks. Like, wow, this is this really fucking sucks. Nonetheless, though, I was able to persevere. I have been out for I was out for 14 hours today. Um I think, yeah. Oh, for 14 hours today. It's been a very long day. And uh, you know, I could I could record these episodes sooner, but lately life has just felt it's so ironic. Just the other day I was like, wow, life is feeling really good, and then it was like here's a bunch of shit. You sure about that? Like, ha ha ha, here's a bunch of things that happened or whatever that are just like really unfortunate or just like oh my god, exhausting. But anyways, not the point. The point is I'm sharing from personal experience how when you choose to carry it sounds so ironic in the day I just had, but when you choose to carry a positive attitude, even amidst things going to absolute shit, things turn out better. And if you can actually focus on gratitude rather than being pissed off, I I noticed that it really does come to neutralize the feelings of just like pure, pure like bitterness, anger, rage, hate when you are going through a situation that's just like, oh my god, like wow, can anything else go wrong? But you don't want to say that out loud because something probably could go wrong that you didn't even know was possible. But anywho, I'm just gonna go off on this. Hopefully, you guys can relate to the experience of just having one of those days, just one of those days where life is giving you lemons at the speed of light and launching them at you like those balls that throw pitches at baseball players, except it's a lemon. Um, and there's 15 of them coming from every single possible angle that exists across 360 degrees. So, anyways, let's get into it. Welcome to the Organic Podcast. I'm your host, Reagan, mechanical engineer, lifelong athlete, and recovered overachiever, here to empower you to pursue your highest potential and live freely as your happiest, most organic self. Every week we'll dive into topics ranging from personal growth, mindset hacks, psychology, and a blend of science and spirituality to give you all the tools you need to stop living on autopilot and start creating a life of freedom, meaning, and fulfillment in your most organic self. If you're ready to become dead, ready to be yourself, and good is you lemons make lemonade. That's the last thing that you want to hear when you are pissed off at a situation, at a person, at whatever it is, or you're just you're just struggling, you're just having a day. You're having a day, you're having a a capital day. And when someone says to you, just be grateful, yeah, just like just like re respond instead of react. Like, yeah, just be chill. You just want to set the world on fire. Um, at least I do. And I had that a couple times today where going through the uh experience that I had, it was definitely some moments where I was just like, oh my god, I want to freak out right now. And you know what? I actually let myself feel it. I let myself feel annoyed or enraged or just frustrated and exhausted and whatever. And I didn't try to suppress it so much or act like it wasn't there because one thing about emotions, if you ignore them, they're they're just gonna be like someone standing in your living room in the corner that's just looking at you until you actually like give them attention. And it can literally be giving them attention for like less than a minute and then they will suddenly dissipate into the ether. It's the same exact thing with your emotions, but not necessarily as quickly or in every situation. But the only thing that causes like emotional discourse within ourselves is ignoring them. Is ignoring them because to our brains, we we get in this this thought loop of being like, oh my god, subconsciously you think that it takes so much energy, so much thought to like just feel your emotions, or it's like, I don't know, something that's scary, something that feels unfamiliar, and it just makes you avoid it because I can definitely relate to the experience of being someone who is a little itty-bitty bit avoidant, especially when it comes to feeling things. And today when I was feeling all the things, I just I tried to just let myself feel them and let myself have a moment. And I can tell you from personal experience that this actually is 1,500 times more beneficial than pretending like the emotion doesn't exist or telling yourself, I actually should be feeling a certain other way, or I should just be grateful right now, I should just be happy, I should just be positive. Like when you are going through something, you just need to let yourself feel whatever it is that you need to feel before you actually tax yourself with the responsibility or like feel the guilt for not being positive, being grateful, being whatever. So now that we've got that out of the way, with all that considered, many situations have come up in the recent past of my life where it's like, okay, all right, this is this is a challenge. This is a little bit of a uh a test, one might say. So a test of my patience. And I have two options. One, I could go immediately into victim mode. I could say, this is so not fair that this is happening, what the fuck? This is this person's problem or this person's this thing outside of me is the reason why this is happening to me. Like both basically the woe is me, why is this happening? Oh my god, blah blah blah. That's option number one, which I'm absolutely been the victim of before, so no shade. Option number two is to acknowledge the fact that you feel like that, that you feel annoyed, feel like you're in an unfair situation, feel whatever. And you take a step back and you have enough awareness and enough like internal emotional resistance or resilience to be able to say, okay, yeah, I feel like that. This is really fucking annoying. And I'm going to choose to not have a super reactive response to it. I'm gonna be neutral, I'm just gonna keep going with it. Like, yes, it is what it is, and it sucks right now, but I'm gonna move on and it's gonna be okay. And I particularly bring in gratitude as a neutralizer to such experiences and feelings because when you are grateful for something, when you like I felt this, I have felt this so deeply before. Like, even in the mornings, if I feel a little bit meh, and then I actually just take like not even five minutes to be like, wow, I really, I truly have so much to be grateful for. Like, I am so extremely blessed, and I am so happy to be living the life that I had. Like, I'm just really blessed and grateful, like, truly. When I take the time to think about that and think about all of the bajillion things that I'm grateful for, like, I can feel a shift in my state, I feel it in my body, I feel a shift in my heart. And as cheesy as that sounds, it's it's real, it's true. Because when you choose to be grateful for something and you choose to seek out, you know, reasons why you should be grateful or why you could be grateful, your brain will start looking for them more, and you can't exactly be like, woe is me, I hate everything in the world, when you're grateful. Like the two things cannot exist at the exact same time in terms of like really focusing on the feeling of gratitude. Like when you are feeling pure gratitude, you are not simultaneously feeling like disgust, bitterness, anger, whatever. Do you know what I mean? Not to say that two things cannot exist at once, or that two things can't be true at once, such as being very grateful for where you're at and your situation, and also being really pissed off, like that's absolutely true. But I'm talking on more of like a micro scale in terms of the the like concurrent emotions that you're experiencing. When you are grateful, you truly cannot feel like you're in despair at the same time, at least in my experience. So there's a little tidbit there, but in terms of reacting versus responding, I don't know if anyone's heard this before, but I have heard it from Monica Gates, I've heard her talk about it a lot. The difference between reacting versus responding, because 90%, like I feel like the grand majority of the population who is operating from kind of just like a baseline standpoint of existence, in the sense of like they're not super aware of like the patterns that run their life or where they come from. Not as self-aware, but I don't mean that in like a I don't mean that in like a oh the self-aware people are better than them. Like it's not what I mean. What I'm trying to say is that a lot of society responds to situations from a very reactive place. Someone pisses you off, you get mad, you scream at them, you do whatever, you do stupid, passive aggressive things, and then you regret the outcome, or it makes it so much worse. Like the situation just gets more heated up. And it feels like everyone is in a very reactive state because a lot of us are living in the state of like literal fight or flight half the time without even realizing it. Like, if you're someone who is constantly busy and you cannot slow down, you literally like like sitting still for longer than two seconds or just like listening to the silence in your brain makes you want to like crawl outside your skin, that's probably a good sign that like something something's going on internally that makes you feel like it's not safe to be relaxed, and that usually points to the nervous system and fight or flight responses and living in burnout, yada yada. Anyways, many people operate from a reactive state, and this means that every time a situation comes up, they are not like taking a step back or reacting with any sort of like conscious sort of intention behind it. They are just straight up, oh, this thing made me feel this way, so I'm gonna respond by lashing out, I'm gonna respond by shutting down, I'm gonna respond by whatever. It's like there's no separation between like you being able to control your emotions and also honor the fact that like you're in control of your response at the same time. Similar to what I was saying before, like you can have an emotional response to something, and you can not internalize that, but you can have like the awareness, the compassion, the self-love to give yourself space to feel it, but do it in a way that's productive and not in a way that like lashes out at other people. You know what I mean? Kind of kind of just filters in with the awareness of being like not not more chill, like I don't want to say like that, but the awareness of the fact that like you're the one in control, like you're not the one who's controlled by your emotions, you are the one who controls them. And I had this come up in many in several situations today. So if anyone's curious, I'm not trying to like be all mysterious or anything. I just had a long day um of work, which is completely fine. It happens sometimes, and I am not complaining in the slightest. It's just a great opportunity, a great experience for me to put into practice my ability to be present and stay on top of everything and acknowledge the fact that, like, yeah, sometimes you know what, things like this happen and it's not ideal, but you get through it, you get to another day, and you move on. So, yeah, if you're having a rough time, or just any time that you're having a rough day, one of those times that life is giving you lemons, I promise you, you have way more internal resilience than you give yourself credit for. And yes, you need to let yourself just be like pissed off, angry, upset, whatever. Absolutely, you need to let yourself do that. And I have faith and believe in you to have enough like internal strength to be able to feel those emotions and also still react in a way that would make you make yourself proud, like after the fact, to not be reactive, but instead choose to respond in a way that best serves the person that you want to be and best reflects them rather than being controlled by your emotions. You are the one who is actively respecting them and also being in control of your emotional responses. Okay, I'm gonna leave it at that. This is super short, but I hope everyone is doing absolutely fantastic. Um, I have been in a bit of a hermit hole, I won't lie. Like, I feel like a hermit crab. Um, just a lot, there's a lot going on right now. That is not something I wish to like. It's not even like one particular thing. I just yeah, life is just feeling really big and loud right now in my face, but like in a very internal, internal way. Um so yeah, not really things I'd like to share on like a social platform. You know what I mean? Personal stuff, guys. But we're chill, everything's fine, everything's chill. Still getting this podcast out there, even though I still have to shower, it's 10 p.m. and I still gotta do so much shit. But you know what, guys? For the pod, for the pod, I will always be here and I will always show up. So go be your most organic selves. Love you guys. I'll see you in the next one.