“Give yourself permission to feel emotion, get curious about it, pay attention to it, and practice. This work takes practice. Awkward, uncomfortable practice”.-Brené Brown
What happens when we ignore and bottle up our emotions? We may develop a physical illness or pain, prolong a recovery, become more anxious, stressed, or depressed, but we almost always end up exploding and having a breakdown because of it. This is why it’s so important to give yourself permission to feel emotion.
I learned this the hard way at the beginning of my car accidents recovery. I had bottled up over a year of emotions; frustration and depression regarding my painfully slow recovery as well as anger about having to recover from a TBI during my college career after I just quit soccer due to concussions. I really struggled with the fact that my life and college experience had changed not due to my own actions, but someone else’s, and I had to heal from it. Since I didn’t deal with my emotions, I ended up sick the first semester of my junior year; constant coughing, sore throat, headaches, fatigue, etc. I was so anxious by the second semester that I wasn’t sleeping or eating, which led me to having a breakdown the first week back; the bottle holding my emotions shattered.
It’s so important to acknowledge, work to understand, and release your emotions. Yet how do we do this, especially if you’re like me who thinks crying is messy and gross and has practiced bottling up for years? My answer: start small, 1% at a time. I started by journaling my emotions every Sunday for 10 minutes. I’d let any and all emotions out on the page and if I cried, I cried, but it would only be 10 minutes as the timer would go off and I’d stop. A timer helps me feel more productive and less “messy”. As I’ve gotten better at working through my emotions, I can now notice when I’m bottling up and need to work through what I am ignoring, even if it means journaling more than once a week. When I am ignoring my emotions, my body will tell me; I won’t be able to cry, don’t feel hungry, feel nauseas, struggle to sleep, feel overly stressed/anxious/unmotivated, feel extremely fatigued, and experience sinus infection symptoms. Before I would just keep ignoring and pushing, but now I pay attention to my emotions and body’s signs, take the time to work through my emotions, and release them.
Give yourself permission to feel and pay attention to your emotions as well as your signs of bottling up. It may take more time than 10 minutes per week to release your emotions, but practicing 1% at a time is a great start.
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Benson's Lifestyle 