The Strength to Feel

Season 4 / Episode 1

We spend so much of our lives trying not to feel difficult emotions. We stay busy. We distract ourselves. Sometimes we numb these feelings altogether. But what if avoiding pain also keeps us from experiencing joy, creativity and genuine connection?

In this episode, I explore why emotional honesty is one of the greatest strengths a creative person can develop. Listen in to hear why feelings matter, how suppressing emotions affects us, the surprising connection between emotional health and creativity, and how to process our feelings. 

Because leaning into the spectrum of emotions is one of the clearest signs that we're fully living life.

Transcript

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Welcome back to your next chapter, the podcast for women who read, write, and live creatively. I'm your host, Rebecca Hasselak. And today we are kicking off a brand new season. Welcome to season four, with a topic that has been on my mind for quite a while, but especially recently. So here in Arizona, school starts in the middle of July for most of the kiddos, which honestly still feels a little criminal to me. My daughter just started junior high, my big guy's about to start his senior year, and I have found myself feeling everything: pride, excitement, gratitude, sadness, nostalgia, and hope. If you're a parent, you probably know exactly what I mean. But even if you're not, I think we all know what it feels like to live through seasons where emotions just seem to sit a little closer to the surface. We spend a lot of our lives trying not to feel. We distract ourselves, we numb ourselves, we stay busy, we scroll and we tell ourselves we're fine. And yet the very thing that we're trying to avoid might also be the thing that makes us fully alive. So today I want to talk about something that I think is deeply connected to creativity, which is the strength to feel. The last episode of season three, so the episode immediately previous to this one, was all about AI and creativity. And if you were with me on that one, one of the biggest themes that I talked about was that people love art because it comes from one human consciousness sharing with another. We know that the writer or the singer or the painter or the artist has struggled, has laughed, has felt joy, and we connect with their creations accordingly. So this is huge for creativity. A novel without any depth of emotion would just completely fall flat. A piece of artwork that was devoid of emotion absolutely won't hit the same way. Emotion and feeling are foundational to creativity. So it's very important to our creative lives to be able to access and feel our emotions. But it's also just important for every aspect of our lives. I want to talk a little first about the neuroscience of numbing because this is something that most of us do in one way, shape, or form. One of the reasons that numbing is so tempting is because our brains are constantly trying to regulate pleasure and pain. Whether it's alcohol, drugs, compulsive scrolling, gambling, pornography, or other highly stimulating behaviors, those experiences flood your brain's reward system with dopamine. And over time your brain adapts. So it reduces its sensitivity to those rewards in an effort to maintain balance, which means that you need more of that stimulation in order to feel something over time. So you can see what a slippery slope that would be. That's one reason that people in early recovery often experience something called anhedonia, which is a temporary period period where everyday pleasures just simply don't feel pleasurable. So it can make recovery very hard because in the beginning you're going from having all of this, all of these dopamine spikes from whatever substance you were using to basically having a lower baseline of dopamine and nothing really, really spiking it in the same way for a while. I actually just celebrated a year of sobriety from alcohol the other day, and I've I've taken months and years off before, but for me I just felt it was time to kick it to the curb for the long haul. So I am now well through the point where my dopamine has definitely resettled, and I've experienced this myself. So I'm not saying that everybody has to completely give up alcohol forever, but in general, it's important that we understand how we're using substances and other things to numb or to feel a different way than maybe what we're feeling. And when this happens, when you either are experiencing anhedonia or you've just kind of lost touch with your own uh levels of dopamine, things that once brought joy, like a sunset or a great conversation or reading a novel or even listening to music, they it can all feel kind of strangely muted for a while. But the encouraging news is that for many people, the brain does begin recovering with sustained abstinence. It doesn't happen overnight, but the ability to experience genuine pleasure gradually returns. And I think there's a broader lesson here. Whenever we constantly reach for artificial stimulation, whether it's substances or endless digital input, we risk doling our appreciation for quieter joys. And creativity usually lives in those quieter joys. There's another component here too. I started off this section by talking about numbing, but you've probably heard the phrase, and if you haven't, I am happy to introduce it to you, that says to heal, you have to feel. This is a huge kind of catchphrase with the therapy community, but it's also something that I've just really embraced. Over the last few years, I think that it's really important not to discard or suppress or dismiss difficult emotions, even though that's our natural inclination. And feeling an emotion isn't the same thing as becoming that emotion. So you can feel anxious without becoming an anxious person. You can feel grief without believing grief as your identity. And that distinction alone can be really freeing. But in order to feel and then heal, you have to sit with your difficult emotions. And I wanted to talk about that a little bit because I remember the first time I heard someone say, you have to sit with your difficult emotions, and that just sounds weird. I don't know if anybody else feels that way. But I was sort of like, what does that mean? How do I actually do it? Sounds good in theory, but it's all a little bit abstract. So I want to dig into that here and talk with you guys about what that can mean. And it's important that I note I am not a therapist. This is not medical or mental health advice for any of those things. You need to go to a licensed therapist or doctor. This is just me sharing what I've experienced and what I've learned myself. So, what it means to sit with your difficult emotions and to feel them is not immediately rushing to fix the emotion. That's our natural desire when it's an unpleasant emotion because we want to move past it. Who can blame you? But when you do that, you're not actually moving past it or through it. You're just suppressing it, which means it hasn't left you at all. It's just been smushed like down deep in your body, which is where it is going to continue to fester and impact you, whether you're consciously thinking of it or not. And I do want to mention something about that because I experienced this, it was almost three years ago. There was a friend of the family who died rather suddenly at an age that people weren't expecting, no health conditions we had known about. It ended up being something heart-related, but it was something that none of us expected. And this man was a good friend of my dad's. And so when this happened, I was really rocked by it. I it wasn't that I was particularly close with him myself. I had known him for many, many years, but he had been important to our family for a long time. And just knowing that he was a close friend of my dad made me think about my my own dad and wanting him here and his health and things like that. And when it first happened, I just remember I I sort of didn't allow myself permission to grieve that. I didn't let myself cry for some reason. I usually am very good about letting myself cry, but I didn't. I just sort of pushed it down. There was other stuff going on. I was trying to be there for my dad, who had just lost a friend, and I kind of just kept going through life, but I realized over the next month that I actually began to feel incredibly anxious and incredibly depressed, and I just felt very sort of hopeless. And it was really weird. I do feel anxious a lot, but those other things are not things I typically encounter often. And when I started to dig into it, I realized I hadn't let myself feel. And so I very intentionally started to try some tools. I also do believe in therapy, so I did speak with my therapist, and then I also worked on some things where I let myself think about him and think about what it was representing to me, and um, I let myself cry, and I let myself really, really, really cry. And it was like, it's not like oh instantly fixed once I had that emotional release, but it made a huge difference to actually sit there and confront it and allow myself to go through that process rather than just tucking it away and thinking it wasn't going to impact me because it always impacts us. So that's my little story for you guys about stuffing emotions and things like that. So, how do you actually allow yourself to feel tactically? What does this look like? The very first thing, and if you are a parent, you probably have heard the research on this, but super important, name the emotion. It can sound so basic, but it's the foundational building block of emotional literacy. Sometimes we experience an emotion first as a bodily sensation. Maybe your stomach churns or you just feel this overwhelming urge to hit something. And you don't necessarily pause to ask what it is you're actually feeling. Is it anger? Is it rage? Is it something else? I would really encourage you to look up the wheel of emotions. I was introduced to this many years ago, but I found it fascinating. It kind of starts in the middle with the big emotions, the ones that we're all very familiar with hearing about sadness, anger, fear, happiness, disgust, things like that. And then each of those branches off into several more, and each of those branches off into several more. So you can dial in to other forms of those emotions and find the deeper, more specific emotion that you're feeling. So for example, you might start with fear, you recognize some of your bodily sensations as fear, then you take it one level deeper, it might be anxiety at that deeper level, and then even one level deeper might be panicky. Another example, anticipation might be what you think it is at first. But something like that is really interesting because anticipation could actually be signaling stress or it could be signaling excitement or a few other emotions. So then you kind of dig into that and then which emotions are layered beyond that. The point is to name it, to get specific. And the reason this is important, it's not just pie in the sky of name your emotion and you'll feel better. There's actually a lot of research about this. Research from Dr. Matthew Lieberman's lab at UCLA in particular demonstrated that when people identify and name their emotions, your amygdala activity decreases while your prefrontal cortex activity increases. So it helps take you from that reptilian survival part of the brain to the executive part of the brain, which is where you're better able to reason and make sense of things. So you need to first and foremost, when you start to feel something that you are not wanting to feel, something that's unpleasant, or even something that's pleasant, try to name it and try to get as specific as possible. The other thing is giving yourself space to let those feelings go. Give them somewhere to go, give them a job. And this is where I get really excited about it because this is where the arts come in, at least for me. And I would imagine for a lot of you, and where creativity comes in. So one thing you can do when you're feeling a very strong emotion is to journal. Just write freely without editing yourself or worrying about what you're putting down. And if you are worried about someone reading it, you can shred it. You could burn it after safely, of course. But the point is to just get out all of your thoughts and all of your feelings on paper and don't even worry about your handwriting. You guys, my handwriting can look like anything from a kindergartner's handwriting to really nice when I slow down and I put time in. But usually if I'm journaling, I'm sort of just doing this cursive that is like part cursive, part print writing. It's weird. And most people probably can't read it, but it's the fastest way I can write, and it's the way I can get out all my thoughts and feelings. So do what works for you. But yes, journal. Another idea is to listen to music. You can do this if you're in the car. Of course, you don't want to be driving if you're in a very, very heightened emotional state. But you could do it in a parked car. You could do it in headphones when you're on a walk, you could listen to this music when you're in the shower, like whatever works for you. But connecting and finding music that relates to your emotional state is a way to sort of allow your body to just tap into that state a little more. So, you know, if you're heartbroken, you could listen to our song by Pink or Before You Go by Louis Capaldi. If you're feeling betrayed, you could listen to basically any Olivia Rodrigo song like Traitor or Vampire. You could listen to Didn't You Know How Much I Loved You by Kelly Pickler. If you're feeling stressed, you could listen to something more like Sweet Disposition by The Temper Trap or The Wind by Yusuf or Kat Stevens. Whatever song resonates with you and your emotional state, just give yourself permission to put it on. I think sometimes people are afraid of wallowing or getting lost in the emotion, but I have found, at least for me, that listening to music that reflects my emotional state actually helps me to feel it and to work through it. And you do have to feel it in order to heal it. So that's a bridge to get you there. And then also just whatever artistic passion soothes you, it's great to use that as a way to feel those emotions. So for instance, you can paint, you could do pottery, you could play piano, whatever helps you kind of give that emotion a place to go can work. The next way to feel is by allowing yourself a physical release. Exercise helps everything. You've heard me talk about it, you've heard everybody talk about it. It's so true. Exercise is just amazing for so many different things. In this particular application, it's helpful because it increases the production of endorphins, which we know are neurotransmitters that are associated with a positive mood and feelings of well-being. Exercise improves sleep, it reduces stress and anxiety, and it can enhance self-esteem and social support. So when you are feeling an intense emotion, exercise can be a great way to go about working through that. If you're angry, you know, for me, nothing works quite like hitting a punching bag. I have a punching bag in our backyard and I used to do some boxing and I love it. I do have hand wraps and gloves, so make sure you properly protect your hands because it can really do a number on your hands otherwise, but just go and hit that punching bag. I mean, that will help so much. Give that anger a physical place to go. If you're sad, you can dance or play piano. Just let your body do what it needs to do. And on the physical side of things, I talked about this a little before with the example from my own life. Let yourself cry. Whether you're a man or a woman, there's this whole, you know, misconception that has been bandied about for so many years about men shouldn't cry or we need to be strong, we can't let our kids see us cry. It is perfectly fine to cry. And I am not gonna remember where I heard this, but this was so great. Somebody said certain emotions are perfectly acceptable and appropriate responses to certain events. So sadness is oftentimes an appropriate response to a certain event. So is anger, so is jealousy. These are appropriate responses, even if they're unpleasant. You don't have to squash them. And same with crying, like that is perfectly acceptable in certain situations. If you feel the need to cry, let yourself cry. And I promise you, it will give you a big emotional release. And there is some research about that. Researchers have established that crying actually releases oxytocin and endogenous opioids, also known as endorphins. So these are feel-good chemicals that ease both physical and emotional pain. So I'm not just telling you to cry because I'm being hippie-dippy and I think you need to feel it, guys. I'm telling you because there's actual science behind it. And I've experienced it myself. Let it go, let it out. I promise it'll help you. The other thing to remember with all of this is that feelings are waves. You will not feel unpleasant emotion forever. You need to just ride the wave. Think about a surfer. They don't pretend the wave isn't happening. The wave is the entire point. They don't turn their head. If they do, they could get crushed by the wave. They get on their board, they ride up to the crest, they glide to the shore, sometimes they fall, sometimes they tumble around underneath the waves, but the wave never lasts forever. It flows away and another one returns. Still, seas eventually return, and more waves return. And the waves themselves are never bad, they're just emotions. They are strong emotions. They are the good ones and the unpleasant ones. When you feel overwhelmed by an emotion, consciously think to yourself, I am riding this wave. This will not last forever. It has been really helpful for me to contextualize strong emotions in that way. And I do want to make a side note. There are certain times when our strong emotions run deeper or last longer than just this typical kind of a wave analogy. So if you are struggling with depression, if you are struggling with anxiety, thoughts of self-harm, anything like that you are not able to work through on your own, remember to get help. In the US, we have 988 Lifeline, which is for mental health crises, or if you're in immediate danger, call 911, talk to a therapist or a medical doctor. Some feelings can't be managed on your own, and getting help is brave and important. I want to just make that very clear. If that is not your situation, then yes, think about it like riding the wave and it will not last forever. And so before we close out, I just want to say, what about positive emotions? Because a lot of the ones I'm talking about are the unpleasant ones, since they're the ones that we try to numb and they are the ones that we try to move on from or suppress. You need to feel your positive emotions too, you guys. What fun is life if all you're doing is dodging negative ones and not paying attention to the positive ones? So there is something though to be aware of here. We often try to minimize our positive feelings because we are afraid of losing them. I am guilty of this all the time. I'm one of those like preemptive grief people where if I'm having a really beautiful moment, my brain immediately goes, yep, but think how quickly this moment will pass and how quickly life passes, and it's just so mean. I'm like, why are you doing that to me? I just want to be in this moment and be enjoying it. Or we're afraid that something's too good to be true, and so our brains try to protect us. Brene Brown, who I've talked about a lot, she is an amazing authority on so many different things. But here's a quote from her on this topic. She says, When we lose our tolerance to be vulnerable, joy becomes foreboding. And so what we do in moments of joyfulness is we try to beat vulnerability to the punch. I'm not going to soften into this moment of joy because I'm scared it's going to be taken away. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop. And I think she has such amazing insight into that. That is exactly what I've experienced, and you probably have too. So don't just lean into the difficult emotions. Lean into all of them, the entire spectrum. Name your positive feelings too. Journal about your gratitude. Listen to joyful music when you're feeling joy. Maybe You Make My Dreams Come True by Daryl Hall and John Oates. Or wouldn't it be nice by the Beach Boys? Nothing gets me in a happy mood faster than the Beach Boys. I will tell you guys that right now. Whatever works for you, whatever your musical tastes. You can dance or paint or play piano with all the happiness bubbling up inside of you. Let it flow through you into those activities and just let it go with abandon. Spread that joy. Tell someone you love that you love them and embrace the feeling of loving life and try, try, try to not let joy become foreboding. Yes, I know, life is also like the waves of the ocean. So just like despair and hurt, we logically know that joy also won't last forever either. But even so, it will return again sometime. So lean into it and feel it and feel all of it. Feeling is what makes us human. Feeling is being alive. And feeling, really, really feeling, is what allows us as creatives to put beautiful, uniquely human works into the world for others to enjoy. And works that make others feel too. So this week, I encourage you, don't just create, feel. Feel the joy, feel the grief, feel the wonder, feel the gratitude, feel the uncertainty. Because feeling isn't the obstacle to a meaningful life. It's one of the clearest signs that you're actually living one. And I will leave you with a quick quote as always. This one comes from Madeline Langle, and she said, To be alive is to be vulnerable. I'll see you next week. Until then, keep creating and keep turning the page.