Have you ever been in a situation where you are feeling so overwhelmed or frustrated that you’ve dropped everything and just cried? That was me, yesterday. I had a meltdown outside the bank.
And I’m here to normalize “over-reacting”. Which by the way, is a MYTH.
So, before I begin a rant about emotional healing, here are some notes about my bank meltdown.
- Day 1 – bank closed (forgot stat holiday, thanks to solopreneur life).
- Day 2 – insane lineup. Stand in queue for 1+ hour and get in minutes before closing.
- At the counter – realize I’ve forgotten my valid ID proof because I switched bags.
- Trying to convince the person helping me to accept digital ID – he declines.
As I unsuccessfully head back to my car, I have a meltdown. (Oh I cried, full on)
Writing about this right now feels like it was NO BIG DEAL. But in the moment, it was just too much. It felt like there was too much delay because of the holiday, too much waiting in line, too much anticipation for last-minute closing, and too much rigidity around regulations.
8 key takeaways about feeling overwhelmed
- Keyword from the story above – it FELT like too much (hint: emotional brain is ON).
- When emotional brain activity is heightened, we can NOT rationalize with the emotions (why are you crying over something so small) or blame ourselves for feeling a certain way (you are so stupid for overreacting / you did this to yourself).
- What we can do in that moment, is BE with our emotions.
- To BE with our emotions, we need to understand them.
- Let’s understand that emotions provide us with information about the exact state of our nervous system. Read that again.
- Let’s also understand that emotions want us to take care of our nervous system. Read that again too.
- When we don’t understand our emotions and try to repress them, we create further nervous system dysregulation.
- When we repress our emotions, we also do something called “spiritual bypassing” which actually sets us back on our spiritual journey.
The conclusion is: if you had a hysterical reaction to something or someone, without a doubt, there’s something historical that has remained unaddressed and is trying to free itself now.
How to BE with emotions & release them
In order to BE with our emotions, we need to feel safe externally and internally. I’ve heard so many people say that they can’t cry in public. So my first invitation is to practice being okay with different emotions in private.
As I came back from the bank, I sat down in my car which was my safe space. And I compassionately held the parts of me that were feeling angry, frustrated, and sad.
This technique I practiced is something I’ve developed intuitively to do over time and have started calling it Somatic Hold. In the past months, I’ve been teaching method this over and over again to my clients, my monthly tribe and to whoever else wants to develop their emotional health.
And I now have 2+ hours’ worth of self-paced, guided videos on nervous system regulation education, tools and practices to heal emotional health. You can either access this wealth of knowledge by:
- signing up for the monthly membership here (which BTW also unlocks 50+ other resources for an insanely accessible price)
- setting up a complimentary consult to explore 1:1 coaching with me here.
Here to help validate & regulate,
Vasundhra
Bonus takeaway: emotions are temporary. I was crying yesterday and in this insane video, I am dancing with absolute joy today!
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Vasundhra is the Founder & Writer of My Spiritual Shenanigans. After seeing 11:11 on the clock one fateful night, her life turned around. Ever since, she has been blending modern psychology and ancient spirituality, to help herself and people around the world elevate the quality of their lives.
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Exactly you are right. At such an outrageous time, I remind myself by saying, “Just grab the opportunity to work on ‘letting go’ and ‘not reacting.’ I always again and again repeat at that time “Grab the opportunity, Grab the opportunity, Grab the opportunity” .
If I fail to remind myself of this, it can lead to an outburst. The fault lies in our remembering. I think so.
Hi Manjeet, thanks for sharing your process! What you do is useful as long as the logical part of our brain can stay relatively “online” but would naturally become hard to remember to practice letting go if the logical brain isn’t functioning properly (memory associated with prefrontal cortex).
Here’s what I mean:
When we are emotionally heightened, our logical brain begins to shut down as a survival response. It’s not that we are “acting” emotional – typically the amygdala is alerting our body to fight/flight/freeze. Rationalizing would be very challenging as right now survival is the goal, which body does on autopilot to save time and it does not require thinking.
Only after the emotional wave has passed would it be possible to use mindset/affirmation techniques to further heal.
But as a mindfulness practice, it’s super powerful to keep reminding ourselves there’s no actual threat in many cases. Just an old trigger being activated. And then allowing ourselves space to process the trigger.