The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Move Through Difficult Emotions

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

How To Move Through Difficult Emotions | This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley The body and the brain are inextricably linked. So when we suppress our hardest experiences and emotions, they linger in our bodies and hold more power over us. Befriending our emotions and facing them head-on provides us the support and space to heal our emotional wounds. And using our physical state to change our mental state, and vice versa, is an incredible tool for moving through difficult emotions and attending to our overall health and wellbeing. In his conversations with Tom Bilyeu and Dr. Jim Gordon, Dr. Hyman discussed specific strategies to do just that using simple physical exercises and practices. Tom Bilyeu is a filmmaker and serial entrepreneur who chased money hard for nearly a decade and came up emotionally bankrupt. To that end, he and his partners sold their technology company and founded Quest Nutrition—a company predicated not on money, but rather on creating value for people with the mission to end metabolic disease, something impacting Tom’s own family. After exiting Quest and generating extraordinary personal wealth, Bilyeu turned his attention to the other pandemic facing society, the poverty of poor mindset. To solve the mindset problem at scale and help hundreds of millions of people adopt an empowering mindset he has co-founded the media studio Impact Theory with his business partner and wife, Lisa Bilyeu. Their aim is to influence the cultural subconscious by creating content that empowers people. Dr. Jim Gordon is the author of The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma and is a Harvard educated psychiatrist and a world-renowned expert in using mind-body medicine to heal depression, anxiety, and psychological trauma. He has worked with traumatized children and families in Bosnia, Gaza, Haiti, post-9/11 New York, and Parkland, among many other areas across the world facing tragedy and trauma. Dr. Gordon also works with veterans and active-duty military to address PTSD.  Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation, “Why Your Mindset Matters If You Want Health And Wealth” with Tom Bilyeu here:  https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/TomBilyeu Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation, “Is It Possible to Truly Heal From Trauma?” with Dr. James Gordon here:  https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DrJimGordon This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley. Paleovalley is offering my listener's 15% off your entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com/hyman to check out all their clean Paleo products and take advantage of this deal. I definitely recommend trying the Grass-Fed Beef Sticks, Bone Broth Protein, and the Organ Complex.

Coming up on this mini episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. If we accept the emotions that are there, the natural process with emotions is that they come and they go. The problem is when we don't let that happen. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. So many of my patients ask me how I manage to work multiple jobs, travel frequently, spend time with my family, and still focus on my health. I know it can seem hard to eat well when you have a lot going on, but the trick is to never let yourself get into a food emergency and to stay stocked up with the right things to support your goals. When I keep nourishing snacks and the right

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and take advantage of this deal. That's paleovalley.com forward slash hymen. I definitely recommend trying the grass-fed beef sticks, bone broth protein, and the organ complex. All right, let's get back to this week's episode. Hi, I'm Kea Perowit, one of the producers of the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. Our emotional wellness is directly connected to our overall health and well-being. But when we are focused on attending to the demands and responsibilities of our daily lives, it can be easier to push aside unpleasant feelings and emotions rather than allowing them to move through us. The mind and the body are inextricably linked, and so it is necessary for our overall health that we develop practices to attend to our emotional well-being.

In his recent conversations with Impact Theory's Tom Bilyeu and trauma expert Dr. Jim Gordon, Dr. Hyman discussed strategies for moving through difficult emotions. When you change your physical state, you change your mental state. You change your mental state. So whether it's going for a run, whether it's taking a steam or whether it's jumping up and down or whether it's dancing, whatever you can do to change your physical state, it'll change your mental state. And I've learned how to do this because, you know, if I have a really tough day and I've got stressed, like I had a really challenging, you know, few situations at work recently and I you know i it was really upsetting me so i just went to a hot yoga class and i came out completely transformed and i didn't change my thinking i just changed my body which then changed my thinking dude right like if people really hear

what you just said because then you know that it can go either way so if you can't get yourself there with reason and logic jump in an ice bath laugh out loud watch a comedy go for a run lift weights like there is this feedback loop that you get into with your thoughts and your body and your body and your thoughts so the vagal nerve of course you're going to know this but the vagal nerve is something like 80 percent telling the body telling the brain what's going on versus the brain just instructing the body what to do. Like as a kid, you think, oh, the brain tells the body breathe, digest, blah, blah, blah. But in reality, it's like the brain is getting more input from the body.

And I am so grateful that there's this reciprocal feedback loop. So I know when I'm in a like a a negative place that I, all I need to do is smile. Like literally I can even think smile without actually smiling. And it makes me feel different. It is so weird. So that's super useful. Music can shift your state channeling aggression, which is something I do to like do hard things. Like there are all these feedback loops. So I try to get people to understand that. But the most important thing, the thing I always lead with is humans are the ultimate adaptation machine. So we are the ultimate apex predator for one simple reason. We adapt to change better than any other animal. In their conversation, Dr. Hyman and Dr. Gordon

dive into why it's essential that we confront our trauma and feelings head-on in order for true healing to occur. You talked about this concept of befriending your emotions and how important that is in making them your partners in healing trauma. So can you explain that? Sure. You know, fighting against our emotions is a fool's errand and trying to suppress them, which of course our culture too often tells our parents, the society, no, suck it up, go ahead, forget about it. The show must go on. Don't cry. I'll give you something you'll really cry for. All the things that are told to children and adults make us shut down our emotions.

And when we shut down our emotion, when we shut down one emotion, we shut down the others as well. So if we shut down fear, we also tend to shut down joy. We're not fully ourselves. Whereas if we can accept the emotions, and also if we shut them down, if we try to avoid them, they stay around forever. And they're always there. They're inside us. They're disturbing our digestion. They're inside us. They're disturbing our digestion. They're disturbing our brain on an ongoing basis. If we accept the emotions that are there, the natural process with emotions is that they come and they go. The problem is when we don't let that happen. So they're essentially, as I see it, there are three stages in the cycle of

accepting and moving through the emotions. The first is just to recognize that they're there. It sort of reminds me of my mother. She said, whenever I get the urge to exercise, I lay down until it goes away. So if you have a negative emotion, give it a little time and it can pass. But that's, she's right. I don't know about that. It will pass. It will pass if you allow yourself to feel it. I think, you know, even in the research that was done long ago on supposedly correlating the anger of the type A personality with heart disease.

Well, it really wasn't the anger so much. It was the resentment. It was the anger that was held inside and you couldn't let go and you were feeling it all the time. If you just get angry and you hit a punching bag for a while, it's going to go. So acceptance, relaxation. So techniques like soft belly.

You're feeling something. Relax. Be aware of it. or you're doing shaking and dancing. You're loosening up your body and you're noticing the emotions come up, let them come and let them go. And then expressing the emotion, whether you're expressing it physically. And if you're a really angry person, it's great to hit a punching bag. It's great to hit pillows, to get the anger out. And then you're a really angry person, it's great to hit a punching bag. It's great to hit pillows to get the anger out. And then you come back to relaxing again. You try, I try, anybody who's watching, spend 10 minutes going like this and pounding some pillows when you're feeling frustrated and angry.

After that, you're going to be relaxed. It's true. Just don't hit somebody else.'s just don't hit somebody else yeah don't don't hit somebody else but but that's the temptation when people have been traumatized i work with vets so much they're coming back from combat they're still so often in that state that fight or flight state so somebody brushes up against them in a store or a bar, they're ready to kill. They've got to bring that out in a way that's safe. And all of us do. Same with sadness. If sadness comes, let it come. Accept it. Relax with it. Express it as you need to.

That's so powerful. Is there anything else from your work that you want to share? Any stories, any techniques, anything that really matters that you want everybody to know about? Well, one of the techniques that we should share with people who are watching that I use all the time is the shaking and dancing. And this is really important. We talked about when we're traumatized, we're either in fight or flight and we're really tense or we're shut down, we're numbed out, we're holding the tension in our bodies, our minds are kind of frozen. What I do is I get people up shaking their bodies. You close your eyes, you put your feet shoulder width and you shake up and down for five or ten minutes and you relax for a couple minutes and have some music that you can move your body to. What happens is you begin to break up the fixed patterns,

physical as well as mental patterns that trauma creates. If you have experienced trauma, you not only need to befriend your emotions, you need to refriend your body. Because when we're traumatized, often our body becomes an enemy. I'm sure you've seen this with people with serious illnesses. You feel like, no, it's alien. I don't want to deal with it. If we've been assaulted, if we've been raped,

if we've been sexually harassed, our bodies are uncomfortable for us. So the shaking and dancing brings us back into our body. And it also brings up emotions that we've shut down. I'm constantly amazed at what human beings are capable of in terms of helping and healing themselves and reaching out to others. We have the capacity to change our brain chemistry, to change the way our GI tract works, to change the way we look at the world. So why not mobilize that capacity first?

Another tool Dr. Gordon shares is called soft belly breathing, which is simply taking a few moments to breathe in deeply through the nose and out through the mouth. Because trauma and emotion is kept both in the mind and the body, these simple tools allow us to tap into the mind-body connection to produce long-lasting healing. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length interviews with Tom Bilyeu and Dr. Jim Gordon. Until next time!