E051 - Emotional overwhelm

In this blog, Jeremy explores what happens when we feel really emotional when we need to speak. He also shares tools for regulating our emotions and nervous systems when we feel a lot, but also need to use our voices.

You can watch the Youtube episode right here, or read the blog below:

Download a helpful worksheet with alllll the tools right here.

A lot of people ask, "Why do I get so emotional when I need to speak and when it’s important that I communicate?"

They may become very angry when they want to speak, even be overwhelmed with anger, or they may become extremely anxious and freeze and shut down, or they may speak too quickly. Or they may burst into tears when they have to speak in front of a group of people or with someone significant in their life – they are just generally overwhelmed by fear or anxiety.

Now emotions are, of course, a beautiful thing and add great value to our lives, but they can also be debilitating. If this sounds familiar to you, read on, because in this blog I explore what these overwhelming emotions are and what effect they can have on our lives. In conclusion, I offer some really concrete tools to regulate these feelings and manage this sense of excess emotion.

The first question we should ask is, do I actually have too much emotion? Our culture is very into emotionally bypassing, which means avoiding feeling. "How are you?" "I'm fine, everything's just awesome," even though my life is falling apart. So we are taught to not be angry and not be sad in front of others. And while it’s actually beautiful to share our emotions, in this instance we're talking about when it gets to be too much.

So that could just be in the form of “Blah!”—blurting everything out with anger, or it could be collapsing into a puddle of tears, or it could be freezing with anxiety or fear in the moment so that we can't express ourselves. This may be caused by many different things: it could be hormonal, for example, or it could be past trauma—stuff that happened to you as a child, or the way you were brought up. Some families are super expressive, and everything comes out. Other families have more an attitude of "We do not do feelings here. Everything is fine. Nice weather we’re having."

But it could also be what's actually happening in your life at the time, stress and anxiety in your job, in your relationship, how much work you've got, how much overwhelm you're experiencing. There are a myriad sources for this overload of emotion, and we need to take all of that into account when we look for a pattern. It's really useful to ask ourselves, is this from the past? Is this something that I’m repeating? Or is this very much tied to my current circumstances—or is it both? So that's the second question: Where is this coming from?

The third question to look at is—how is this affecting my life? For many of us, a lot of emotion coming out when we're trying to communicate with groups or individuals can be really embarrassing. It can feel like our voice is endlessly letting us down, and this can ultimately sabotage relationships or a career.

How we show up in public in our work environments may be less than optimal—or we may not show up at all, because we feel like we can't quite trust our voice. Or maybe a lot comes out and then we go into a cycle of shame, and we move into a cycle of on and off: I put myself out into the world, and then I feel like I'll embarrass myself, and then I go and hide away in my cave for a bit.

If this is debilitating for you, here’s the good news: I have a whole bunch of emotional regulation tools for communicating around other human beings.

Emotional regulation tool number one is mindfulness and meditation and/or presence. Being able to access a witnessing self—the calmer, more present aspects of ourselves that have presence, a sense of perspective. This is the self that can see the big picture and is not just mega, mega locked in on a single obstacle. It can see, "Okay, I've got that, but I've also got this." A daily meditation practice is essential to making that resource available to yourself.

The second tool is self-regulation. One of the best places to start with this is to pause and breathe. I like five-five breath, where you breathe in for five counts and then gradually slow your breathing down. Count in for five breaths and count out for five breaths. Slowly but surely, you are bringing your system into balance.

Another really beautiful self-regulation tool I teach my groups is to cross your arms at the wrist and put your hands down on your opposite thighs, and then tap your thighs very slowly—left, right, left, right, left, right. And again, breathe and slow down. This helps to regulate your nervous system out of that sense of overwhelm.

Tool number three, an absolute classic, is to do the opposite. So if you pattern is to blurt it all out, do the opposite. In that moment, it's okay for you to pause and withdraw. And if you are a withdrawer and a freezer, do the opposite. Just start speaking, even if you're not sure what you're going to say. Do the opposite of your habitual pattern if you can.

A fourth tool is to develop and enhance your emotional wisdom: to walk towards the emotion instead of trying to avoid it. Really look at it, feel it, label it—go into the nuances of what you are actually feeling. Move past the label of simply being angry or anxious and try to really get into it in depth. Journaling can really help to go deep into the feeling, to get to know it, become friends with it, instead of saying, "Oh no, I hate it when this happens," and then just moving on.

A fifth tool is to check the facts and use your critical thinking to examine the situation and assess whether what you're feeling is true. So if you move into a rage, for example, do the opposite for a moment: withdraw, think things through, and consider—is the situation really as you’re perceiving it in that moment, or has distorted thinking overtaken you. And do the same if you're full of anxiety—are you really under threat in this moment? Is it really that shameful that you’re scared, or that your voice is shaking?

We often get attached to these notions and feelings without critically evaluating whether they're true for us. With a little bit of perspective we often discover that they're not true, and we can let them go.

A really simple tool for self-regulating is the PLEASE skills, which are: take care of physical illness or physical discomfort [PL], because that will affect you. And balance your eating [E], avoid mind-altering substances like alcohol, caffeine and other drugs [A], get enough sleep [S], and exercise regularly [E]. It's just taking care of the basics—because if you're underslept, you're liable to be more emotional and lose control when you're trying to express yourself. Hormonally, it's also worth being really clear about where you are in your menstrual cycle, and then trying to consciously choose your moments to express all the things.

Another simple but beautiful practice is to accumulate positive emotions. I think the simplest way to do this is to have a gratitude practice at the beginning and end of every day to take note of what you are grateful for in this life. We often get trapped into fearful and negative perspectives, so if we don't take stock of how lucky we are and what is good and beautiful in our lives, the perspectives that arise inside us and that we share will often have a negative bias. Our brains are a little bit like that—they have a negative bias.

Finally, I want to mention my Radiant Voices "timeline process", which I teach students and clients. Emotion is already mounting when we're building up to a speaking event where we have to talk about something serious, or we have a big speech to make, or we have to share in a meeting. It could be mounting in the form of anxiety, or anger, or in whatever form it usually takes for you.

With the timeline process, the idea is to start regulating before the event, decreasing that curve so that we arrive at the event in a more relaxed frame of mind. So that we aren’t surprised by our emotions and wonder, "Why did I blurt things out?” or “Why did I freeze?" I recommend using tapping to self-regulate, but really, use any method that works for you to downregulate the emotion that's in your body before an event.

And regulate during the event as well: through breathing, tapping on your legs—using any tools you have to bring a sense of perspective, space, calm, and grounded regulation.

The last part of the timeline process is in the aftermath. If you’re feeling a lot of emotions and are thinking, "Ah, they did this, I did that. I feel ashamed, they're so bad," then that’s the next area for you to regulate: tap and move through your emotions and thoughts about the event. This is really, really important for dismantling a pattern—always check in with yourself afterwards, and use your self-regulation tools to clear any messy thoughts or feelings.

That's it: a bunch of tools for when you feel overwhelmed by emotion when you're trying to speak and communicate. You can even download a handy worksheet of the toolkit.