011: Body Image, Self-Image, & Maintaining Healthy Habits - Lesson 3 (how to feel your feelings instead of avoiding them)

A few of my favorite quotes from this episode are "you gotta feel it to heal it" and "the average emotion lasts 90 seconds if you allow yourself to feel it in your body."

Did you know that bottling up your feelings is a huge cause of some of the most common diseases? It also leads to chronic joint pain, headaches, back pain, and just generally not feeling good.

Our society has taught us to bury our feelings instead of allowing ourselves to feel them in our bodies, and this has to change.

Meditation is a great way to get better at feeling your feelings. Tune in for more on all of this!

Follow Katy on Instagram!

Learn more about The Working Mom Happiness Method course here!

To join The Working Mom Happiness Method Facebook group click here.

• Access the episode transcript here

  Hi, my name is Katy Blommer and my passion is helping women learn how to put themselves first, I learned all the tools for success on my own 12 year journey that has led me to finally figuring out how to live my best life. My journey included overcoming body image issues, and yo yo dieting, climbing the corporate ladder to a multiple six figure career, navigating mom guilt through a 60 hour workweek turning around marriage issues and much more. Now, I'm truly living my best life. And I've pretty much become obsessed with teaching others my tried and true methods for creating balance, maintaining healthy habits, improving your relationship, career development, and how to stop tying your value and worth, to the way you look and how you serve others. I'm so passionate about helping others learn this, that I created the working mom happiness method to help you get there too. So if you're ready to learn how to live your best life, pull up a chair or put on your walking shoes and get ready to dive in. This is the working mom happiness method podcast.

  Hi, welcome to the working mom happiness method podcast we are in module three, which is all about boundaries. And in each of the modules. So far in one, two, and three, I've had one episode where we focus on body image, self image and maintaining healthy habits. This is Lesson three of that series within each module. And today we're focusing on the piece of it that is maintaining healthy habits, because today we're going to talk all about how to feel your feelings instead of avoiding your feelings. This becomes a game changer for being able to maintain healthy habits. And that's because a lot of the things we use to avoid our feelings are more in the category of unhealthy habits. So in today's episode, we're going to cover feeling our feelings and why that is critical ways we avoid feeling our feelings, feeling our feelings in our bodies. And meditation, which is an amazing tool for learning how to recognize and feel your feelings. So let's go ahead and jump right in. One of my very favorite quotes related to this is you got to feel it to heal it, you've got to feel it to heal it. And I don't know who originally came up with this quote, I heard it from a therapist on a TV show that I was watching years ago and just absolutely loved it because we know that. And science has proven that when we avoid feeling and processing our feelings, and we bottle them up inside of us, that leads to feeling bad first and foremost. But it can also lead to all of the major and most common diseases, it can lead to joint pain, headaches, back pain, lots of physical ways in which bottling up our feelings inside of us manifest. So learning how to feel your feelings instead of avoiding them literally becomes life changing for relieving things like that, and literally helps you to avoid a lot of the most common diseases in our society. And not only that, but just feel better on a day to day basis. And as we discussed, going way back to module one, when we talked about some of the keys to happiness, you're not always going to feel good, happiness doesn't equal feeling happy and good all the time. One of the keys to happiness is learning how to feel and process the feelings and emotions that we've our society has defined on as and feel negative for us, right? So this becomes a game changer. Learning how to feel and process your feelings instead of sweeping them under the rug, bury them inside, letting them build up where they will create all different kinds of long term chronic pains and things like that. Okay, so you got to feel it to heal it. What are the ways that we avoid feeling our feelings? So I've got a list here of just some of the most common ways there are certainly more ways than this. But for myself and for the women who I've coached and worked with, these are some of the most common food, alcohol, social media, TV shopping, being busy and fear rabbit holes, and I'm going to tell you, we'll go more into fear rabbit holes in just a minute. Let's talk about the first one that I rattled off their food, one of the very most common and easiest ways we have in our society to avoid feeling our feelings, right? And I'm sure you know what I mean. And I am sure you've done it before. I know I certainly have. So this The key here is awareness. It's really starting to understand when and how you're using food to avoid your emotions. And the most common case is just in regular day to day life. So one example could be, you've had a stressful workday. And maybe there wasn't one big event at work that popped out as stressful, maybe it was a lot of little things, or you just had extra meetings, or you had to deal with something that was a little harder or more exhausting. Or maybe there was a big thing, maybe you feel like you said something really stupid in a meeting and you could beating yourself up all day for it, right. And that's a whole nother thing. We have to work on that what we talked about in the program, but you know, it happens, it's so frequent, especially for women. And so you come home, and you're hungry, and you're tired, and you're stressed out, you're exhausted and you walk in and kids need things, the house is maybe a mess, you know, you're trying to figure out dinner, all of those things, and you go straight to the pantry, or while you're cooking dinner, you know, you get out the chips and salsa and some snacks, and you're eating a whole meal while you're making the dinner. Right? I've done this so many times, definitely speaking from personal experience. And you don't it's not even really mindful, it's very mind LIS, but really, what you're doing is you're trying to soothe and comfort, whatever stressor or feeling that you had during the day. Okay, that's what's going on. And so the key here is that awareness is to notice that you're doing it be like, Okay, what's going on with me? Now part of it might be physical hunger. And so part of the solution here, and we've talked about this before, and we'll get to it more when we get more into the intuitive eating portion of the program. But part of the solution is not letting yourself get super hungry leading up to dinner, right, that's a very common thing that a lot of us tend to do. However, even after I started to fix and figure that out, I still noticed myself doing this sometimes where I would come home and just start just head to the pantry to start mindlessly putting food in my mouth, right? Or doing it while I cooked dinner. So pausing and having a little bit of awareness there is huge. And what I want you to try is the next time you're doing this the next time and maybe it's not when you're coming home from work, right, insert the scenario where you typically tend to more mindlessly eat right? Just pause, stop what you're doing, put it down, go to a quiet place, maybe go to your bedroom, and I just want you to sit, sit down, close your eyes. And just breathe. And just start paying attention to your breath. And then I want you to see if you can figure out what's going on. Just ask yourself a question with your eyes closed, you're breathing, you're focusing on your breath. Why am I eating all of these Oreos? Why did I walk in the door and just start putting the Oreos in my mouth one after the other? What is up with me what happened today? What's going on? Now the first time you do this, you're probably going to not know why you might if something bigger happened to you during the day. But you may not know you may not understand you're going to get better. This takes practice just like anything else you're going to get better, the more that you try it. And the more that you experiment and play with it. So take the breaths. If you can't identify what's going on. That's okay, I just want you to then just pay attention to your body. What am I feeling in my body my feeling any tension or stress in my body am I feeling a tight chest right and gently adrenaline chest or maybe a headache or tightness in my neck and shoulders or a lot of us can feel stress, you know, in our belly area, I just want you to just do a quick like scan of your body with your eyes closed while you're breathing. And if you can identify where you're feeling the stress in your body, that's it's advanced, it takes practice, then I want you to actually start pretending that you're breathing in and out of that part of your body. So if you're feeling some adrenaline or some tightness in your chest, I want you to pretend your breath is going in and out of your chest and just visualize that breath in and out of the chest as you're paying attention to your breath. Now everything I just described can be done in one to two minutes. Literally you can just go sit down be done in one to two minutes. And even if you were clueless you had no idea what was going on with you. It's totally fine. It's still massively valuable to do that exercise because I promise the more often you do it, the better you're going to get at identifying what's going on with you. Okay, it's amazing when you start to figure this out. One of the ways that I've really seen benefit here is since I've gotten a little bit better at this is when I wake up in the morning I do my workout first well not not right when I get up I do my morning routine and then I do my workout. And every single morning. I do not want to get out of the bed after my morning routine and do my workout. I just I don't ever want to I don't enjoy it. I have found things that I that I enjoy more than others and that helps, but I never want to get up right And so part of the thing that I've learned from this awareness and feeling what's going on in my body and learning to feel my feelings instead of avoiding them is in the morning, I can check in with myself and I can be I can be thinking, Okay, what's going on with me? What is up right now? Why do I not want to get out of bed? Is it because I'm just having a bad attitude? Am I stressed about something? Because we know body movement helps process stress? Am I stressed about something's going to happen later today? Am I stressed about something that happened last night and I just having a bad attitude? So I just want to like, just stay in the bed and close my eyes and not face the world yet? Or is my body truly tired, and I actually need a rest. Now, I would say the latter scenario is quite rare, right? I mean, I take care of myself pretty well, I usually have a deliberate rest day during the week. So it's usually more commonly that I'm having a bad attitude for some reason. And that getting up and getting out of bed and moving, my body is going to make me feel better. And 90 plus percent of the time it does makes me feel amazing helps me process that stress. But just this learning this skill, right, practicing this skill, and getting better at recognizing what's going on with me has been a game changer for maintaining that consistent, healthy habit of body movement. Because I'm learning instead of trying to avoid my feelings by crawling back into my bed, I'm facing them head on. And I'm better at knowing what's going on with me. And then knowing how to make the right choice to help process the feeling. Okay, so going back to the scenario where you've maybe come home from work, you're shoving the food in your face, you catch yourself, which is amazing awareness is the first step, you go sit down in your bedroom, you feel your feelings for a minute to two minutes, then after you've done that, if you still want that snack, you can go back and finish the snack. But the key is, you have to give yourself full permission to do it. There's no beating yourself up then for having this snack, because that's usually what we tend to do when we do it mindlessly, right? We eat it. And then we beat ourselves up later. Because we're like, oh, I just, I just ate all that. And I had no idea what I was doing. It was so mindless, right? It's that's such a common thing that we do. But if you go and you check in and you feel your feelings in your body, then you go back, you have permission full permission to go eat that snack, with no beating yourself up. And that's huge, because the beating up of ourselves is what creates the guilt and shame cycle that leads us to actually eat more to bury those feelings of guilt and shame, right? It's really, really common. Okay, so this becomes a game changer. And you can do this with any of the things on the list. So alcohol, right? Are you? Are you just somebody who enjoys having a glass of wine a few nights a week, maybe a glass of wine with dinner? Most nights? All those things are in the realm of fine completely fine. But are you or are you somebody who needs to get have a few glasses of wine and get buzzed every night in order to deal with your life? Right? That's, that's different. And it's actually quite common, it doesn't mean you're an alcoholic, it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. It's actually really common. We do this with food, we do it with alcohol, social media, TV, these are all things that we're using to numb out the feelings of our lives. And it is okay to use these things, sometimes food, all the things that I listed, it's okay sometimes to make a deliberate choice. That man, I am really sitting in the suck right now, I have something going on. I'm just going to choose in this moment to just enjoy this delicious meal, have whatever I want. And I know that I'm emotionally eating, and you're doing it with that awareness, you know what's going on. But what the awareness creates the huge benefit to it is Well, number one, it doesn't allow you to fully bury the feeling because you do know why you're doing it. But number two, then you can start to notice how often am I doing this? Am I doing this once a week? Or am I doing it most nights, right? And if you're doing it once a week, that's totally fine, normal, no problem with that. But if you're doing it most nights, it probably means there's something underlying in your life that you need to change, you need to change. So if you're somebody who's trying to eat more nutritiously or more mindfully or cut back on alcohol or social media or whatever, and you're really struggling to do that, it's probably because there is something going on that you're really needing to numb out that you need to change. And it may be big, it may be like you're in a relationship, that's not the right relationship for you. You're in a job that's not the right job for you. Or it may be more medium sized, right? You just don't take care of yourself well enough. You're doing everything for everyone around you. That's actually a big one. Let's just be honest, that's a big one. But it could be over on the other end of the spectrum of sort of smaller but but as equally have a equally as big of a deal. Are you just bored? Do you not have enough pleasure in your life? Are you Are you bored? Do you need to bring more deliberate pleasure into your life and we talked about that later in the program too. It could run a whole spectrum of things. And you may have no idea what it is. And that's really, really common. I had I was completely, compulsively eating massive bowls of cereal like delicious sugar cereal every night for a period of years in my life, and I could not stop until I finally figured it out that it was because my needs weren't being met in my marriage. Right. And we'll we'll talk a lot more about that once we get into the relationship component of, of module four. But there are reasons that we're using these things to avoid our feelings constantly. Because our feelings are hard. There are big and scary things underlying that are that are sitting down in our subconscious, that our conscious mind is trying to protect us from feeling right survival mode, trying to protect us from those things, when really, you know, we're not protecting ourselves, we're harming ourselves. So if you fall into that category of using these things all the time, and you've tried to stop and you're struggling, I highly recommend working with a therapist, to try to figure out what is going on with me in my life that I need to change in order to not need to rely on these things so much to avoid my feelings and learn how to feel my feelings instead. Okay. All right, I want to talk about being busy and fear rabbit holes. So being busy is one of the things that is so common for avoiding feelings. But it flies under the radar, like people don't realize they're doing it. So if you are one of these people who you're always saying how busy you are, how there aren't enough hours in the day, all all of those things, that's probably true, it's probably a true statement. And by the way, the more we say it, the busier, we're going to feel. So saying it all the time is not a great solution, if you're feeling overwhelmed and exhausted, and like you're doing all the things, but it probably is true. But the reality is you're getting some benefit from it, there's a benefit you're getting, it's not conscious, it's totally subconscious. Otherwise, you would actually change it, you would actually make the change. And one common benefit that we tend to get from from being busy all the time is we don't ever have time to slow down and actually feel our feelings and actually figure out what is going on with my life that's causing me to stay so busy that I don't have to face my feelings in my life, right and don't don't want to be scared, it could be a big thing that you need to change. And it could be more on the end of bringing more joy into your life, you're bored things like that, right. But being busy all the time is definitely a hidden feeling avoider. So pay close attention to that fear rabbit holes. So if you are a person who you'll watch the news, and you'll find whatever is going on or whatever has happened and you will go all the way down the rabbit hole. So a common one for like, like, one of the things that I definitely have done in the past is when we see a school shooting, right like just going full on down the fear rabbit hole. And that's it's normal i I don't want to make you think it's not normal to be afraid after you hear about a school shooting be afraid for your own children, that is absolutely normal. But I would take it like obsessively down the rabbit hole and get so much anxiety that I would be afraid, right like to send my kids to school.

  Anyway, we'll just take it way too far and spend way too much time researching it and looking at the information and trying to gather information. Because when we go down those rabbit holes, trying to gather information, it makes us feel like we're in control. And we're really not that's that is not real, that is not true. We're not in control. When we go down those rabbit holes. Another common one is like, you know, you have a headache that hasn't gone away and you go on WebMD. And before you know it, you're in a whole rabbit hole and you think you have a brain tumor, right? And then you picture you know, you're going to die and your children are going to be left alone. And so these are the kind of rabbit holes that I'm talking about no benefit, the kind of worry that has absolutely no benefit. If you're somebody who does that chronically you do that with everything that pops up in the news or lots of different things in your life. You could be trying to avoid something bigger that's going on in your life that you're not happy with, because it's easier to go down the illogical fear rabbit hole than it is to deal with the real life fear of dealing with real, actual hard issues that you know are keeping you from living your best life. Okay, so just some things to think about if that's going on with you. And we'll talk about meditation, which is a huge tool to deal with all of this stuff. So let's keep going. All right, another I guess it's a quote, but it's something I learned that I love. And I learned this in a mindfulness training that I took in a program called The Great Courses which are just online courses, kind of like masterclass type things. I honestly think it was like $35 and this course was amazing, taught by Dr. Ron Siegel, who's a Harvard psychologist, and the quote is his and I heard it in that training and what he says is the average emotion last 90 seconds if you allow yourself to feel it in your body, okay, I'll just read it one more time, the average emotion last 90 seconds if you allow yourself to feel it in your body. And then in that same training, he goes on to say that if you don't feel it in your body, and you feed it with negative thoughts, that average emotion instead of lasting 90 seconds can start to last days, weeks, months, years, when we feed it with thoughts, negative thoughts, and we go down the fear rabbit hole and remember, especially as women 80% of our thoughts are negative, right? So if we can pause and have awareness when something's going on with us, and we're having feelings, and we can sit and close our eyes and breathe and focus on where is this happening in my body, breathe in and out of that spot of your body, really pay attention to that for one to two minutes and feel it really feel it in your body. The happiness that can bring to life overall, it's incredible, because we're not feeding it with negativity, we're not storing it inside us, we're not holding on to it. Okay. And I do want to caveat, this is the average feeling, right? So this is the average stressor of the day, maybe a little argument with your spouse, maybe a struggle to get your kids out the door, you know, things that happen on a regular basis, maybe a meeting you didn't think you performed in so well at work, think of more of your average type of emotions and feelings. If you learn how to recognize them, have that awareness and then feel them and process them in your body. They last 90 seconds on average. And this was proven in a study that he did a scientific study. So I just think it's so fascinating and interesting, because we hold on to things for much longer than that. Okay. All right, let's talk about meditation and the benefits of meditation. Because meditation is, I think, hands down the best tool for learning how to figure out and have awareness as to what's going on with you. And then when you do not letting thoughts feed and create negativity, and not allowing you to avoid those feelings. I also think exercise is massive too. And it's right up there with meditation. Exercise helps us process stress in our body and feelings in our body. But meditation is so amazing for the awareness of what's going on. Okay, so let's talk about a few of the different ways it has benefits. So aside from helping us just learn how to feel our emotions in our bodies, it helps us to improve our mood, our energy, anxiety, depression, stress, it's a game changer for all of those things, because it calms down the body's nervous system. And those stress hormones, cortisol and adrenaline when we sit and we calmly breathe, and just focus on our breath, and let our thoughts pass, right? When we do that, it reduces those stress hormones within our body, which just generally makes us feel so much better in life and actually makes us healthier. And by doing consistent meditation, on most days, we get so good at

  being able to process thoughts that come in that are stressful. So it helps us slow down in daily life, slow our breath and get grounded in daily life. So when you're having a stressful moment at work, right, something stressful comes up. Instead of heart race and immediate sort of like panic feeling that can come up and adrenaline and cortisol, fill us, you know, fill our bodies. If you are somebody who has been having a meditation practice and consistently meditating, your initial reflexive reaction is going to be so much less than somebody with the adrenaline, the cortisol and the adrenaline than somebody who does not have a consistent meditation practice because your body is so used to seeing thoughts come in, and not going down a fear rabbit hole with those thoughts just welcoming them in letting them pass welcoming them in letting them pass. And getting good at this starts to have effects in your everyday life. And it's incredible. It has helped me tremendously with my stress level, especially related to work and kids relationship stresses, any of those things that come up in day to day life, it becomes a game changer. Now it does take quite a while to actually feel these benefits. You have to be willing to go for a long period of time. Remember, small consistent actions taken over long periods of time will change your life. You're going to hear that so many times during this program. But meditation is a perfect example of that. You do have to commit to doing it most days. For free. You can just start with five minutes. That's totally fine. Most days over a long period of time we're talking months before you're going to start to see the benefits in your life you'll be getting the benefit Before you see them, I promise, but it takes a while before you start to really consciously notice that you handle the situation with less stress, because you've been practicing meditation, alright? And it helps us also to understand that our thoughts aren't real, right? The vast majority of our thoughts aren't real. They're just not real. There lies our second voice in our head, right? We've got the two voices in our head, right? We've got who we are the conscious the conscious awareness. And then we've got the thoughts, and we know they're two different consciousnesses. I don't know if that's a word, there are two different consciousnesses because we, who we really are can notice the thoughts, right, so you can notice the thoughts in your own mind. So you've got those two different voices in your head. So what I like to think of them as and the thoughts that's not really who you are, they're crazy. They're, they're legitimately crazy, they they're lies, they're things that aren't true, we say horrible things about ourselves. weird thoughts come in weird, just the weirdest things come in, right? And they're not true. They're lies. And meditation really allows us to sit there and look at that and see that because you don't have any other distractions going on around you, you don't have a way to bury the thought, in typically in meditation, it becomes harder to feed the thought with more negative thoughts. In the beginning, you'll do that that's normal. It takes time to get better at that. But being able to notice that like, Oh, what the heck, why am I having that thought that makes no sense. And it's not true, the vast majority of our thoughts are just not true. And meditation really helps you learn that. And it helps us to go down those fear rabbit holes, or to stop us from going down those fear rabbit holes that I mentioned earlier. So if you're wondering, What the heck is she talking about, I have no idea what meditation is or how to do it.

  It's really, really quite simple. The internet makes it really easy these days. To get free guided meditations, you can just go on YouTube and search free guided five minute meditation, and you'll find lots of options. So I would start there. And a lot of the guided meditations will tell you exactly what to do. But really, it's just going to a quiet place. focusing on your breathing. It's not what meditation is not trying to clear your mind. I mean, people who are very, very advanced meditators, like monks who spend years and years and years, they are trying to clear their mind. The vast majority of us, meditation is just sitting and noticing our thoughts, and working on not letting our thoughts take us down a rabbit hole letting them pass, right. And guided meditations will teach you how to do that. They will you can just go Google a guided meditation or you can get the calm app or the headspace app, I have the calm app, I love it. And I've learned so much about meditation just from taking the daily 10 minute meditations because a lot of the meditations on there will teach you how to do meditation. So it's really cool. So you don't have to know anything about it. Also, I know meditation doesn't jive Well, or there's a negative stigma about meditation with some religions. You definitely meditation does not need to be religious doesn't have to be religious, it certainly can be. But there are so many meditations out there that are just about sitting, calming yourself down, focusing on your breath. And so I would really encourage you to try to separate religion from meditation in your mind if you have a negative connotation with that, because it really does become such a game changer. Alright. Good. So we covered a lot. And just a quick recap of some of the most important things. Feeling feelings is truly the only way to process them and cope with them. Otherwise, they just get bottled up and create disease in our bodies and make us feel bad. It's important to be mindful about when and how you're avoiding your feelings. And it's okay to do it. Sometimes we talked about right, it's okay to do it sometimes. But that awareness is amazing and will change your life. Learning how to feel your feelings within your body is critical to processing them faster and avoiding prolonged pain. Meditation is an amazing tool for getting better at this and improving overall health and happiness in so many ways. So your homework for this episode, is just start bringing meditation into your life for a couple minutes a day. If you have an Apple Watch, there's the breathe function. That's meditation, even if you just do it for one minute. That's amazing. That's such a great start. I just want you to start thinking about this maybe Google it look for a YouTube video. Just try it out. Now this concludes Module Three. And the reason I want you to start playing around with meditation is because the very first lesson in module four is creating your morning routine, which I'm so excited about because it is just such a huge part of this program and a huge part of living your best life and your happiest life and it just It's changed my life. It's changed so many of the lives of the women who I've coached and worked with, so I can't wait. And meditation is a part of the morning routine. So we will get into that more obviously into in the next episode, but I'm so excited for you to start playing around with this. As always, let me know how it goes. You can follow me on Instagram at Katy Blommer Kty BL O M M E R, please message me there. If you have any questions about any of this, you can find more information. If you're interested in taking the course one on one or with a group at my website, women's best life university.com Just go there and go to Courses. But at this point, as we head into module four, you should have your best life master plan document completed all the way through your boundaries because you're actually going to start reading that in your morning routine all the way through boundaries and we'll talk about it don't worry I I know that sounds a little bit daunting because it seems long. I promise you can do it in about 10 minutes reading that document and all all give you all the different timing options for your morning routine so when we cover it so don't worry about I'm so excited. Thank you for listening as always if you're getting value out of this please leave a review leave a comment that helps more people see it subscribe, follow like depending on where you're consuming this information. And please tell your friends and family about it because the goal is to get the information out to as many women as possible thanks so much for listening to the working mom happiness method. If you liked what you heard, please be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share it with others who might benefit from listening for show notes or to enroll in the working mom happiness method coaching courses, visit www dot women's best life university.com

Looking for more resources?