215. Master Your Emotions: Simple Science-Backed Tips to Stay in Control

Are you struggling to manage your emotions in a world filled with stress and uncertainty?

You're not alone—many people find themselves overwhelmed by their feelings, leading to impulsive actions and prolonged distress. 

Join Dr. Adrienne Youdim as she explores the science behind emotions and shares practical strategies to regain control over your emotional responses, including the powerful practice of emotional labeling and the use of your senses to shift your mood.

Don’t forget to share this episode with friends and family who might benefit from a deeper understanding of their emotions!

What You'll Learn From This Episode:

• Understand the science of emotions: Learn how emotions are chemical responses that can impact your behavior and health.
• Reduce emotional reactivity: Discover the practice of emotional labeling to help you manage your feelings more effectively.
• Utilize your senses for emotional regulation: Explore how smell, taste, sight, sound, and touch can help shift your emotional state.
• Embrace movement and journaling: See how physical activity and writing can improve your mood and reduce ruminations.
• Reframe your emotions: Learn to view your feelings as messages that can guide you toward personal growth and connection.

"When we better regulate our emotions, we experience such a benefit to our mental, emotional health and well-being."— Dr. Adrienne Youdim

Ways that Dr. Adrienne Youdim Can Support You

1. Join the Monthly Free Mind-Body Workshops: Participate in engaging mind-body practices designed to help manage your stress response. Register here.
2. Sign Up for the Newsletter: Stay updated with valuable insights and resources by subscribing to the newsletter. Sign up here.
3. Freebie alert. Register for our monthly free MindBody Workshop and receive a downloadable guide on emotional labeling to help you manage your emotions effectively.

Connect with Dr. Adrienne Youdim

• Website :https://www.dradriennespeaks.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dradrienneyoudim/

Transcript

Hey there, friends. Those of you who've been listening here for some time know that I am fascinated by the things that make us reactive, whether it's our automatic response to hunger or the reactivity that comes as a response to our endless source of stress, which then trickles into our habits, our relationships, our professional life, and our communal life. So today I want to talk about another form of reactivity, and that is our emotions. Why do we have them? How do we manage them? And how do we manage the havoc that they sometimes seem to cause? Welcome back to Health Byte, the podcast where we will explore the intersection of science, nutrition, health, and wellbeing, and the pursuit of living well. I'm your host, Dr. Adrienne Youdim, and today we are driving into one of the most powerful forces in our lives, emotions. Why do we have them? How do they shape our behaviors, our decisions, and even our health? And maybe most importantly, how can we harness our emotions for personal and professional success instead of being controlled by them? Good stuff, don't you think? I think so. So let's get to it. And first things first, so what are emotions really? And it's interesting because for all of the weight and the gravitas that emotions carry, they're really just a bunch of chemicals. They begin with a trigger, some kind of sensory input that then is processed in the brain, specifically in this area of the brain called the amygdala, the part of the brain involved in emotional regulation. And then this trigger causes the release of these chemicals, these neurotransmitters, hormones, like adrenaline and cortisol, that then prepare our body for action. Our heart rate goes up, our muscles tense, our breathing changes. These are all part of a normal human body's adaptive response to a trigger, namely stress. And then once that trigger is removed or reassessed by the mind, the parasympathetic nervous system, that rest or relax part of our nervous system, should step in and allow the emotions to dissipate, restoring a sense of balance in the mind and in the body. And this is by design. It's kind of made to be this way in order to ensure that our emotions are temporary. They come on, they trigger us or push us towards a desired or necessary action, and then they go away, at least in the best case scenario. But more on that in a minute. So why do we have these emotions? Emotions are more than just feelings and actually emotions are not feelings. They are broader than that. Feelings are just the way in which we experience an emotion in our body. So actually while we use those words interchangeably, emotions, feelings, really feelings is a subset of our emotion. Again, the way that we experience that emotion in the body and Emotions are a survival mechanism. I've said this before. Our brains don't really care if we're happy or not. They just care that we are alive. So from an evolutionary perspective, emotions helped our ancestors make quick, life-saving decisions that quite literally made the difference between life and death. So fear meant danger. Anger mobilized energy for self-defense. And joy in relationships, that was a survival mechanism too, because it helped us connect, strengthening social bonds that are necessary for survival. And so does enjoyment of sex, by the way. It's all about survival. You get the message. And our emotions have many of the same functions now. So can you see how they may help us navigate social relationships, build relationships, and make decisions that keep us safe and aligned with our goals, with our values? But we all know that when we let our emotions go unchecked, They can also lead to reactivity, to impulsive actions and behaviors that don't serve us. Not to mention that they can keep us in a state of distress for an unnecessarily prolonged period of time. And we're gonna talk more about that later as well. So let's first go back to why emotions make us so reactive. And again, as I've shared before, this part of the brain, the emotional regulation center, the amygdala is wired to quickly react to perceived threats. So remember lions chasing our ancestors in the wild, that whole thing. The flip side to that though, is that reactivity often causes us to react emotionally to a stressor that isn't necessarily life-threatening. So for example, a difficult conversation at work or an overwhelming to-do list, this is gonna trigger that same fear-based, well, fear, the emotion, and perhaps fear-based reaction. In fact, in my monthly, free mind-body workshops, which as an aside, you guys should check out after you listen to this episode, go into the show notes. I started hosting these last month after the LA fires, just to give people an opportunity to engage in mind-body practices that can help them manage their stress response. They have been so powerful that I have decided that I'm going to do one every single month. through the end of 2025 and get this, I have this big audacious goal that we hit 500 people. So yeah, go check that out after this listen because It's really an incredible experience. Okay. So back to last week's workshop, which I just held, I shared a really simple, but effective practice of emotional labeling. So this is a strategy that helps us. dampen the reactivity of the emotional response, and it's actually pretty effective. Because research shows that simply naming our emotions, naming what it is that you are experiencing, like saying, I feel anxious, I feel angry, just saying it out loud, literally dampens the reactivity, it dampens the intensity, it takes the bite off of that emotion. And it kind of creates some space around that emotion, which allows us to think more rationally, which allows us to think more intentionally about next steps. And I think it's really important to be specific about the words you use, not only in naming the exact emotion, but also saying, I feel or I'm experiencing anxiety rather than I am anxious. Because again, you want to create distance between you and the emotion. You don't want to over identify with it because that is part of the reason that we kind of snowball into these emotions. And so when we do this, when we label emotions, it reduces the intensity. It dampens our reactivity. It allows us for more clear-headed, intentional, not only cognitive processing, but also decision-making ability. Emotional labeling has been shown to strengthen self-awareness as well as our own connection between our thoughts and our feelings. Again, that helps with the reactivity piece because imagine if something makes you angry or makes you fearful and before you have time to really process it, you're already feeling it in your body, your heart rate is up, you're panting, you're skin temperature goes up, all of these are physiologic processes that are associated with the stress response or the sympathetic response. You're feeling this in your body and you may not even know why. But again, taking time to label the emotion allows you to kind of understand this connection between what you're thinking in your mind and what you're feeling in your body. And it allows you to, again, slow down that process and have a little bit more agency, have a little bit more of control. So it reduces reactivity. Did I say it reduces ruminations? That's like the loop that goes in our head. Something happens, it makes you angry, and then you're replaying that conversation over and over and over and over again. We don't have to do that thing, right? It may be that the anger is triggered quickly, and that is a adaptive, reactive, normal human response. But what we do later with that emotion, that replaying over and over, that's on us most of the time. So again, labeling emotions allows us to reduce that not only reactivity, but reduce the ruminations, is what I was going to say. And then, like I mentioned before, it is helpful in strengthening our thinking processes and our problem-solving abilities, which has some really important implications, which we're going to talk about. So, phew, that's a lot, right? So much benefit from this one simple practice. And by the way, I did create a little guide to labeling your emotions. I gave it out after our virtual mind-body class. So if you go into the show notes, again, sign up for that free class or sign up for the newsletter. I will send you this guide to emotional labeling. There are so many physiologic and mental emotional health benefits to just this one practice. And I don't know if I shared this, but actually they have shown in or through functional MRI that labeling literally has an impact functionally on the amygdala. So this is not just stuff that is willy nilly, but is simple and yet grounded in our physiology and validated by neuroimaging tests and studies. So there's that, that is one way, but there are other strategies as well. The second strategy to managing or reeling in your emotions is utilizing your senses. So I want you to imagine, imagine a scent that takes you back to your childhood, like chocolate chip cookies, or maybe a special soup that your mother made. I have one in mind, which is a very traditional Persian Jewish dish that we prepare for Shabbat, for Friday night. Maybe it is a certain kind of tea. Maybe it's the scent of lemons. Think about a scent that reminds you of your childhood. Now, when you think about that scent or when you come across that scent of chocolate chip cookies, have you noticed that you get transported back to that time, to that memory? If it's a happy memory, then it may make you smile and it will oftentimes just completely take you off course. Like you're thinking about something, you're pissed about something, and then all of a sudden you walk into a coffee shop, you smell the aroma of a pastry or a chocolate chip cookie, and all of a sudden you're like, bam, back to your childhood. So smell is a really effective way to just abort that emotion and get you in a different headspace. And thinking about the smell is even effective. So as I name these strategies to you, I want you to just imagine how you can have greater agency around your emotions. Again, we may not be able to control how quickly they come on, but we can We do have agency on how long they linger. So your sense of smell. Similarly, your sense of taste. In that same way, you taste something and it takes you back to another, to an old memory or a happy time, site. I've shared with you in the past that nature has profound impact on our emotions, on our mood, on our nervous system. And they've shown that merely seeing visuals of nature, even on a screen, can bring about that sense of ease. So sight is also important. What else is there? Auditory. Of course, when was the last time You were feeling meh and something awesome came on the radio and you blasted it and you felt totally amped and pumped and forgot the feeling or the emotion or the mental state that you were in. Music is an incredible way to change your mood, to pump you up. So use your senses. Oh, and last but not least is touch. Don't forget Touch. The sense of touch is so powerful in changing our state. We know that touching another human Petting our dogs immediately within like microseconds causes the release of oxytocin and dopamine and all these feel-good hormones in your body. Remember, emotions are just chemicals. They are just neurotransmitters. So you are literally changing the chemistry of your brain that maps a different emotional experience. And as a bonus, you can offer this experience of soothing touch to yourself. And so one of the practices that I also teach in the mind body class is merely putting your hands on top of your heart. And if you're listening right now and you're not driving, go ahead and do that. Put your right hand over your heart, put your left hand over your right hand and just give yourself a squeeze And this is two things. One, it's really grounding to kind of press on your body in that way. And the second is you're literally giving yourself a hug. You are literally causing a release of these very same neurotransmitters as if you were being hugged by a friend or a partner or what have you. So use your senses to your benefit. Another practice that helps change your state, your emotional state, is movement. Now, you know this. You know that exercise has been associated with releasing serotonin and endorphins and all of that. But there's another way of even viewing this. And again, back to the, the resilient minds course, there's a shaking practice that we do, um, where you get people, um, to just shake vigorously to this drumming type of music really doesn't matter what kind of music it is. It's just that drum kind of gets people to do the shaking and the movement. And just that practice of like vigorously shaking your body is so exhilarating. And I am always not just amused, but fascinated by the way in which we can change our mental state, not just by going for a run or taking a yoga class or whatever, but just like shaking. So I want you guys to try this like next time you're feeling in a funk, go into a room, shut the door, put on some random music that gets you moving, and then set a timer for five minutes and just shake vigorously. Actually, if you do this, I want you to find me on Instagram at Dr. Adrienne Youdim, send me a DM and let me know how it went. So movement is also powerful. Journaling. Journaling is a really good way to just brain dump, to just offload your emotions. And because of that, it has been shown to improve mood, but it's also highly associated with reduced ruminations, which I think is awesome. offer yourself some care and compassion. So, you know, sometimes we're going through really hard things and our emotions are reflecting a message to us. And the goal isn't necessarily to move away from that emotion, right? I mean, a lot of the things I've been talking about are strategies to prevent that. unnecessary lagging of certain emotions. We can all agree that sometimes that lag is not necessary. It's not serving us in any way, but sometimes that emotion is serving us a certain way, is necessary. Like when you experience grief and loss in those moments, you can just offer yourself some acknowledgement. You can offer yourself some self-compassion. You can offer yourself some care. And then what about a reframe? So kind of taking that a little bit further, remembering that again our emotions are there for a reason. These are not just like willy-nilly things that came up out of nowhere. there is a basis, there is an evolutionary basis to our emotions. And even if we're relating to them differently than what was initially intended, still, they're there as a message. They're there to relay something to you. So try and reframe the way you perceive or judge an emotion Actually, don't judge the emotion, but ask, what is this emotion trying to tell you? Are you anxious? Perhaps this is a message that you deeply care about something and you need to pay attention to it in a different way. Are you angry? Perhaps the anger is calling you towards advocating for yourself or advocating for somebody else. Are you feeling isolated or alone? Perhaps you've missed an opportunity for connection and this emotion is giving you a nudge to pick up the phone, to call somebody, to reach out. So reframing our perception of emotions from something that we need to get away from, or something that we can't tolerate, to the very mere fact that they are there for a reason, they're there to teach us something, to share a message, and what is it that I can learn? this emotion right now? What is it asking of me? What is it asking me to do? Really powerful stuff. And finally, pivot when you can. So again, certain emotions we cannot just move out of, so I don't want to dismiss that like grief and sadness, but sometimes we unwittingly prolong the emotion by getting stuck in it. When we can use one of those strategies to pivot, we can use one of those strategies to get ourselves out of that emotional state when we recognize it's no longer serving us. Difficult emotions like anger, sadness, anxiety, grief, these are all normal, they're human, They serve a purpose and they are unavoidable and they shouldn't be avoided, but they don't have to control us. And I want to say this because here right now I'm not talking about those momentary ups and downs, and you know if you know. So please, if you are really struggling with complex emotions that you're having trouble managing on your own, get the help and support that you need. Fortunately, there are so many mental health resources that are available and they're so much more accessible. Talk therapy, Zoom, texting with a therapist. So yes, all of this is not applicable to those who are really suffering with their mental health and who would benefit from support. So if that means you, please, please seek out some help. And last but not least, when you have a so-called good or positive emotion, I don't like to label them as good or bad, but by positive, I mean those feel-good emotions that we like and we don't wanna rid ourselves of, things like joy, excitement, love, pride. When you experience emotions like that, hold onto them. put them in a bottle and savor them because we are so flippant sometimes to like, let that experience go. Oh, we did something amazing. We feel pride for a second. And then we're like, okay, off to the races off to the next thing. No, hold on to that good feeling. We know that, that these positive things that elicit positive emotions, don't happen all the time. So capture that, bottle it, savor it, harness it, recall it. So when you're in a funk, you can go back to that moment, to that experience where we felt joy and love and excitement and passion and all those good things. That in itself is an amazing way to navigate your own emotions, be your own mind and body's boss, and allow yourself to feel what you want to feel. When we do this work for ourselves, when we better regulate our emotions, we experience such a benefit to our mental, emotional health and well-being. We experience a benefit to our physical health. So being in that constant sympathetic state, high elevated heart rate, high blood pressure, rapid respiratory rate, your muscles are in like active mode, your liver is releasing all this glycogen, which is basically storage of glucose or sugar so that your muscles have enough energy to run non-essential uh systems in your body like digestive system reproductive system these are all kind of shut down because it's not necessary in a acute stress response except that often our stress response these days is not acute it's chronic and so to the degree that our emotions are impacting our physical symptoms or physical reality and we can manage our emotions so that we don't experience that harmful, constant, sympathetic response in the body, you are doing good for your physical health as well. And then finally, the benefits to our relational health, the benefits to our professional health. because when we are attuned to our own emotions, we are better able to attune to others. This is like the basis of emotional intelligence, right? So your ability to experience and navigate a wide range of emotions for yourself allows you to relate to other people in a better way. It allows you to see those emotions, to be more understanding and empathic of people who are experiencing difficult emotions because you have allowed yourself to feel them and you know how to manage and navigate them. And what happens when we navigate or we manage or regulate our own emotions? It then impacts how you treat your partner, how you treat your children, how you treat your employees, your coworkers, and your employer. When you dampen down your emotional reactivity, you level up your cognitive processes, as we discussed. You think better. You are a better decision maker. You're a more inspired contributor. you're more creative, you are a change maker in your community, in your organization, because you are better able to create positive cultures, positive work cultures, positive communal experiences that then go on to make tremendous impact. I just love this stuff. The fact that we have so much agency, so much capacity, so much capability, and so much possibility to improve our lives when we engage in this deep work. And I'm just gonna like simmer in that for a moment. I'm gonna marinate in that for a moment because that makes me feel good. knowing that just these shifts in awareness can have such an important effect on my mind and body and soul, as well as to the people around me, to the communities and organizations around me. So I hope that this episode inspires you to do this deep, meaningful work, to understand your emotions, to use some of the tools that we discussed to regulate your reactions so that you inspire greater personal health, relational health, professional health, and overall wellbeing. So I thank you. for tuning in to this week's episode of Health Byte. If you found this episode helpful, share with a friend, send it over to somebody that you love, go back over, subscribe, leave us a review that helps us get the message out. And finally, don't forget to head over to the show notes. You can find the registration link for the monthly free MindBodyZoom. You can sign up for the newsletter you will get the downloadable PDF on the guide to regulate your emotions or to emotional labeling, whatever I said before, a bunch of good stuff. So go there and come back here next week, same time, same place. In the meantime, embrace your emotions. Don't let them define you, but let them guide you. I'll see you next week.