Understanding Emotional Balance - YLAM230003

SPEAKER A This programme presents ways to optimise health and wellbeing. When considering lifestyle changes, please consult with your health care provider to ensure they are suitable for you. SPEAKER B Hello and welcome. I'm Kaysie Vokurka. Have you ever experienced an emotional high only to quickly plunge back down into an emotional low? I'm sure we can all relate to this in some way. This kind of experience has to do with how our emotions are balanced. Stay with us as we explore understanding emotional balance. SPEAKER A This is your lifestyle as medicine, a production of 3ABN Australia television. SPEAKER B It's good to have you with us on this programme. We look at ways that you can shape your lifestyle as medicine. Emotional wellbeing is a significant part of lifestyle medicine and a significant part of emotional wellbeing is emotional balance. We are going to seek to understand this more as we continue to talk with health psychologist Jenifer Skues. Thank you for being our guest again, Jenifer. SPEAKER C It's a pleasure. SPEAKER B So, last time we were talking about positive and negative emotions, and I'm wondering if you can share a little bit more about that just as we move into the topic of emotional balance. SPEAKER C Well, the positive and negative emotions are very relevant to getting that balance. We talked about identifying them, but there are interesting factors about positive or negative emotions. When you look at positive emotions, and this is by a group called Institute of Heart Method, done all this research and they said things like appreciation, joy and care are internal energy boosters. I think you'd agree with that. Positive emotions lift your energy and they create hormonal mixtures that nourish your cells in your mind. So they're actually a nourishment to the whole system when we use them. They've also been shown to prevent fatigue and slow down ageing. They regenerate and sustain you mentally, emotionally and physically, and I believe spiritually as well. So we underestimate the power of that emotion. But to have that positive emotion, we have to think in those terms we talked about, thoughts feed our feelings. So part of that balance, emotional balance, is not just what we're feeling, but what we're thinking that drives that feeling. On the negative side, negative emotions. And they usually, when we're stressed, we get negative emotions. When something threatens us or intimidates us, it changes the hormonal mixtures. And high stress keeps your system bathed in stress hormones and there are hundreds of them that can speed up your biological ageing clock, drain your emotional buoyancy and reduce physical vitality. So the positive emotions are energy boosters, whereas the negatives are energy drainers. And I find that when people think in negatives. Oh, I'm always so tired. I don't know what's wrong with me. And the way they're thinking and feeling is a major component. SPEAKER B Yeah. SPEAKER C So I don't know yet if you found that at all. SPEAKER B Oh, definitely. You know, as you're describing that I'm thinking about music because, you know, music is something obviously we can listen to and hear, but when you break it down, you can put it all on paper as actual notes. And I was thinking about how you're explaining how our thoughts need to be constructed to produce certain emotions. And it's kind of a little bit like an analogy to music in that sense. It is, yeah. So that's very interesting. And how extensive the impact is of those negative and positive emotions in that they're producing hormonal mixtures that go throughout our body to make us feel a certain way. SPEAKER C They certainly do. There's another very good. He's a researcher and treats people, is Doctor Mark Hyman, and he has a lot of good health nuggets and you can find him on Facebook. And it's good to read these positive things. He said, did you know that just thinking about a negative experience can set off a cascade of physiological events in the body just as if it was happening right now? And they said, that's why I encourage all of my patients to meditate, journal, or work with a life coach to help you have a more positive mindset. So the emotions are relevant to the positive mindset. So it is the cascade of not just emotions, but the cascade of the biochemistry and the hormones in the body that are very, very powerful. So we either make it or break it by the way we're feeling, which means that's also by the way we're thinking. And that also looks at time orientation because we're looking at emotional balance. How can we get that emotional balance? And so to balance emotions, we've got to be in the present moment. And I've developed and put together a very good model that is very relevant, particularly today, because there's this whole thing of being mindful. You've probably heard mindfulness is one of the therapies, but it comes back to a lot of the mindfulness, unfortunately, focuses on the eastern philosophies and religions for treatment. Whereas I believe as a Christian, our form of mindfulness is our connection with God, prayer, meditation. But when we're stressed and struggling, we lose sight of those things. So let's have a look at the past, present and future model. I know we've got it up there. And if you have a look at it, where are you at any time? You're always in the present. Okay? The present is where we have choices and we make decisions. So that means the brain and the mind, that left right brain needs to be focused and balanced in the present. Because if we balance the brain, we balance thinking and emotions. But what we tend to do is backlog or bury a lot of the past problems and experiences and traumas or rejection, abandonment, upset, they're the unresolved past baggage. And when that is sitting there in our memory, and we talked about that emotional memory as well as our thinking or contextual memory, and they're all in the five senses. When we keep focusing on and going over and over the past, in the present, we get very depressed. Depression is a past focus, okay? You listen to people who are depressed, they go, oh, life's awful. It's never been any good for me. And they go on, what's happened to them is why they're depressed. And I call it the gloom and doom thinking. And it's very much more the left brain activity. It's what we call emotional reasoning. You know, these are awful things. Therefore I feel we project it. So I don't know if you can relate to that one. SPEAKER B Definitely. SPEAKER C And then of course, the next one is in the present if we start projecting into the future. So for all of the anxiety sufferers, and I guarantee anxiety as an emotion will not be unmanageable, overtake you if you don't do this. So what we do is we do fear thinking and beliefs. When you look at the last few years, we've had a lot of fears projected onto us with our health and having the pandemic and all those things. So that's been a real problem. So when we project into the future, and like I said, it's the what if thinking, it's an unknown future projection, what happens? Anxiety sets in. I guarantee anyone who's anxious is going to be thinking about the future in terms of fear. And anyone who's depressed is ruminating on the past failures and problems and issues. Okay, so both of them, where is your focus and what can you change? Is what we're now going to talk about? SPEAKER B Your focus is really key. SPEAKER C Oh, absolutely. So when do we find ourselves, do you think? Not focused in the present. I mean, we've all had this experience. When do you know you're not doing that? I can give you some good examples. SPEAKER B Yeah, go ahead. SPEAKER C What about you? Okay, I know I'm not focused in the present, when someone says something to me and I don't hear it, for example, or I'm daydreaming, or I'm caught up in my anxiety, it's very self focused, okay? And I'm not focusing in the present. That's what I call. I'm a bit brain dead at that point of time. And what happens then? You miss things, you can't remember things easily, you get stuck in your feelings. So we want to be able to use the mind effectively by focusing on the present moment. Now, as a Christian and what we know spiritually, where is God? Where do you find God in the present? SPEAKER B He's a living God. Yeah, indeed. SPEAKER C And he knows the past, present and future, but he's in the present. So this is where our meditation and communication and learning needs to be focused in that direction. And this is where to have the mind of Christ means we have to live in the present moment. And to do that means to be able to one, recognise when I'm in the past and recognise when I'm focused in the future. And by these indicators, you will know by your mood or how you are feeling, because there's only two mainstreams. We're either depressed, living in the trauma of the past, and post traumatic stress disorder is living the past in the present. So people who have been labelled with that disorder are not able to live in the present moment. SPEAKER B They're reliving. SPEAKER C Absolutely. They're totally in the past. And until you can get them in the present, and we talked before about the conscious mind doesn't like to suffer, so it will just sit in that dissociated state, emotionally or depressed, versus resolving it. And then, of course, the other one is the anxiety side of it, the future fear, and we don't even know we're doing it. I find like an anxiety sufferer, if they have phobic about going to supermarkets and that they might have had a panic attack. They hate going to those places. They go to the fridge in the morning and there's a bottle of milk that's nearly empty. They go straight into anxiety and they have no idea why am I so anxious. Then they pick up and go, oh, I'm nearly out of milk, I've got to go to the shops. And that's their biggest fear. So they're already subconsciously and emotionally projecting into the future just by that subconscious brain is picked up, have to go to the shops, but the conscious mind delays that knowledge. Does that make sense? Yeah. SPEAKER B Yeah. SPEAKER C So if you're feeling very anxious in the present, the best way is to look at, what am I afraid of? Ask the question. When you ask yourself questions, it gives the subconscious brain an opportunity to actually pick up on it and answer the question, because we have all the knowledge in us. We've just blocked it, we know it. And I find then if once you identify what I get people to do in the present, look at your choices. Let's do a what if plan. If that actually happens, what would I do about it? So you solve the problem of the future in the present and that it's a good way to go. So they're very simple things we can do with the mind, and this is all in the thinking, but it's what's going to change the way we feel. Because if I do that, when I don't do that, I can tell you I get highly anxious when I look at maybe my workload. If I'm not careful, I project into the next week. When I look at my diary and I go, no, I'll never cope. And da da da, it changes from the morning to the evening, and I know that. So I've got to go, no, I'll deal with it on the day. And I don't know. You would know. This verse Matthew 634 says, do not worry about tomorrow for tomorrow, worry about itself or its own thing, sufficient for the day is its own trouble. We deal with today, not try and project into the future. We don't know the future. So treating anxiety is. And when you're anxious, you would have been anxious before. What is that experience like for you? Is it just a feeling or are there other things happening in you that you're in a state of anxiety because you've got lots of stress hormones? SPEAKER B Yeah. And you can feel tense. You can feel like really, like your muscles are all, you know, really tensed up. And sometimes you can get a headache if you've got, like, tension anxiety, headaches, you know, all sorts of other physiological symptoms can come along with that anxiety state, shorter breaths, like rapid breathing type things as well. SPEAKER C So when we look at this, I can't get people to focus on a plan to resolve the problem. If their body is highly anxious, when they're pumping adrenaline, cortisol, their heart rate's racing, it's spiking. So you've got to calm the physiology in the present. When it's depressed, you've got to lift it up, but when it's anxious, you've got to bring it down. Okay, because. And you can be anxious and depressed at the same time because often your anxiety. SPEAKER B Oh, boy. SPEAKER C Because often your anxiety is based on what happened in the past. SPEAKER B Yeah. SPEAKER C We're going to project it into the future. So if we solve the anxiety problem, often we can go back to depression, but then we've got to do the same thing. Well, I couldn't solve it then, but if that happened to me now, what would I do about it? So either way, we're doing it in the present moment. So what I do is, first of all, people have to calm down to balance emotions. We have to stop that adrenaline, cortisol factor and all those stress hormones, and there's so many of them to do that. And this is where the interesting research is on the heart brain connection. So this comes back to the physiology, and the heart actually is the dictator of what the brain's doing. People think in psychology, it's the brain, but it's not, it's the heart. Every murmur, every movement of the heart will indicate to the brain whether we're okay or we're in trouble. SPEAKER B Wow, that's so fascinating. I don't think that's something people usually think about. SPEAKER C I don't think about it. So if you've got an even, relatively even heartbeat where it's just. And usually the heartbeat's looking, you know, if you're looking like that, you've got an even heartbeat. So when you're doing that, you'll be calm, you'll be focused in the present. It's as simple as that. Because the brain balance, when we stress, when we're depressed and anxious, we're either too left brain or too right brain in our functioning. Okay? Because when I'm emotional anxious, my right brain's overacting, it's overreacting, and my left brain is feeding it, we think in terms of emotions. So if I'm fearful, that would be terrible. What happened? What would, you know, happen to me? If a good example of that is people who've been in accidents, that I've helped, and they don't get over it, they end up with trauma response, and it can become a disorder if they don't do something with it. And what they did at the time of it might be a near miss where they nearly got hit and they could have been wiped out or damaged. They go down the track. What if I died? What would my family do? Keep replaying the possible event if they had actually not survived or if they ended up in hospital, and it just is a nightmare. So they're replaying over and over again the what if plan or the what if event. You know what if I had had the accident instead of going, isn't that wonderful? I didn't have an accident. God's looking after me. Yeah. So what you have to do in those situations, you've now got adrenaline, cortisol is correct the heart rate, because to get that left right brain thinking thought pattern back, but also the emotional patterning back, that's the balance. Now, do you want your heart rates up? Do you know anything you can do to correct your heart rate if you're aware the heart's beating or you're not sure? SPEAKER B Well, I would think you probably, like, maybe you would breathe more deeply or go to a place where you can be more calm, like maybe out in nature or something, just to try and settle everything down. SPEAKER C That's it. Yeah, all those things. I get people to do something, and this is where mindfulness comes in, to do something mindful, an activity that focuses you in the present. If you're home and you can do that, but if not, the quickest way to correct the heart is that first option of the breathing. But when you do the slow, deep breathing, what you have to do is focus the mind on the area of the heart. Okay. Okay. SPEAKER B So while you're breathing, while you're actually breathing, you're thinking about the heart. Is that what you're doing? SPEAKER C You're thinking about. Yeah, you can't focus, but you're actually doing a big breath in right into the lungs and do it through the nose. And then you breathe out through the mouth just to slow out through the mouth to about the count of five. That slows it down, but. And when you're counting, you're focusing in the present, but also it allows the heart rate to come back into an even beat versus spiking and uneven. When you do that, the brain comes back into balance because, see, part of that survival brain, when the heart rate's all over the place or beating the wrong way is under threat. So it pumps. It fight flight pumps adrenaline, cortisol. SPEAKER B Okay, that makes sense. SPEAKER C Yeah. So we want to get off the fight flight to let the brain know everything's all right. The heart surviving, it's not going to do anything weird and wonderful or die. Correct the heart, correct the brain emotional balance. Right. Can only be done in the present moment. SPEAKER B So this is interesting, because from what I'm gathering of your explanation of how this works, it seems like there's almost two angles of attack here. You can bring it back into balance by focusing on your thinking and making sure that that is aligned. But you can also do physical, tangible things that can give your body, like a physical message to bring it back into the position of balance, if you will. Is that pretty much how it works? SPEAKER C Absolutely. It's putting yourself back in a safe zone and when the heart's right, you feel safe again. And I find people who carry trauma and have those trauma disorders when they're under threat, they don't feel safe anymore. So one of the things I do is help them to find where's your safe place? Or what's something safe you can do when you're in that space? Because then they can slow down and do that. That makes sense because it's about survival. So the more we balance the breathing and the heart, the more you're going to find that you'll get that emotional balance back again and you feel that relief, think, oh, that feels better. SPEAKER B Yes, yes. SPEAKER C And if you're not careful, what you do is then pick up the, oh, but what about tomorrow? And you go, no, bring it back to the present. SPEAKER B Yeah. So what are some good strategies for helping with the thoughts? If you're trying to bring your thoughts back into the present, what are some good ways to do that? SPEAKER C Well, one you suggested was being in nature, and if people have time when it's too much, get outside and even it's just in your neighbourhood, or a ten minute walk, do what I call a mindful walk, where you're listening to the birds, feeling the breeze, the sunshine, it might be birds around, looking at nature, the gardens or whatever, that will get the mind back into balance again. Okay, so that means your thinking is in the present. We have to bring the thinking back to the present moment. That's powerful. So that's one way of doing it. The breathing helps to refocus, but then if you keep picking it up, doing something more, even just some stretching exercises going and sitting in the sun and having a sun bath, feeling the sun on the skin, they're all very much present focused activities. And of course, as a Christian, I will pray, let's talk to God, meditate, because I've lost track of that, because I'm worrying about the what if or I'm dwelling on the past. So even studying the word, listening to good speakers, music is another one. There's some great music around that really helps to settle the heart and to focus. So it's finding your own individual programme that is very powerful. So what can you do? What do you like doing? What are your interests? Some people need it more physically active, some people need it more maybe where they're just sitting and quiet. SPEAKER B Okay. So it's very individualised, you're saying, in terms of what will work well for one person might need to be tweaked a little bit for someone else. SPEAKER C Yes, they say, but I don't like doing that. Another person loved doing it. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER C So the other one is to do with the nutrients and physiology. And a key player in stress and anxiety is the lack of magnesium. We don't make magnesium, and magnesium is a major player in the picking up the hormones and chemicals in the brain. It helps to build the brain. And because we don't make it when we're stressed, we can lose buckets of it. We can lose three, four, five times our daily dose, but because we're not making it, and now we're either. When you're stressed, you don't eat the right foods often, or don't eat enough, or not absorbing nutrients. Our soils are depleted. We often have food that's sitting on shelves and so we're just not getting it. So I always recommend a magnesium supplement. You can get very good liquids, putting it on the skin, 100% absorption. The other one are powders or in drinks. Tablets are harder to translate into the cells of the body, so, yeah. And of course, increasing your magnesium foods, particularly like leafy greens, nuts, seeds, I mean, you would understand that process. And if you're stressed, when you go to eat a meal, do some of that breathing and calming and then work at mindfully eating the meal. In other words, focus on the taste, you know, the senses, the smell, the taste, the touch. Because when you put the five senses back in the present, you're going to again get that balance back. The brain will be focused. SPEAKER B Yeah. That's so interesting. And of course, you're going to enjoy that food more because you're focused on how good it is. SPEAKER C Yeah. So what about being. We're either mindful or mindless. You're mindless when you go, hang on, I have for dinner. Yeah. That's why I just ate something. What? I don't even remember tasting it. Yeah, that's the sort of thing we do. It's true. SPEAKER B And I think I've even seen research where people who are more mindful when they eat actually absorb the nutrients. SPEAKER C Better nutrients. Absolutely. The other thing you can do is like, particularly with magnesium, have a bath. If you like baths, you get some beautiful relaxation mixtures, you know, with lavender oil. Lavender oil is another good one. Even put on the temples, on the forehead, on the area of the heart, because it's a comative anything that calms your nervous system in the heart and everything down. So they're all big positives. There's so much you can do to help yourself and it's about lifestyle now and changing. You know, food is medicine, what we do in the environment is our medicine as well, because we're looking at lifestyle and medicine. Well, this is, there are powerful things in helping you to get that emotional balance. But remember, if your emotions are taking over, you're not focused in the present and you're out of balance indicator. So where is your focus? SPEAKER B Yeah, yeah. And that's quite an amazing thing, that emotions can be an indicator because so often, even with our thoughts, we're not even analysing them in terms of just in the everyday life, we're not analysing them as to, oh, am I focused on the future right now? Am I focused on the past right now? But sometimes if we have a bad enough feeling, it'll get our attention, whereas we might not take notice otherwise. SPEAKER C So that's very interesting. Yeah. Emotions are our barometer. So if we listen to, if we identify the feeling, so some people say, well, I don't know how I feel. So we go through what would it feel like to be in that situation? Or if your friend says that to you, what might it feel like? And helping people to reconnect the thoughts to the feelings and actually feel that experience or think of something. Recently they did like, they went to the shop and the assistant was rude to them. They were angry. So let's work on that one. And just getting people to identify and be self aware, because that will tell you what you're thinking. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER C Then you go, well, you felt that way. What were you thinking? I was angry. They were so rude to me. That's what I was thinking about the person, the shop assistant who was angry. And so, okay, how can you modify that? Then we look at modifying those thoughts and beliefs. SPEAKER B Yeah, yeah. That's really powerful because that shows that, you know, the process of becoming more aware of our emotions can just start with little things in everyday life. And then as you become more attuned, you can probably discern emotions that are more deep seated. So thank you so much for sharing with us today, Jenifer. I really appreciate that topic and we will be looking at that a bit more. Emotions are an important part of our everyday lives. And just, just like every other good thing, they need to be in balance. I hope you found this programme helpful and I know you will also be interested in our next one, which builds on what we have discussed today. If you have questions or comments about this programme, or if there is a topic you would like us to discuss, then contact us on [email protected] and remember to shape your lifestyle as medicine. SPEAKER A You've been listening to Your Lifestyle as Medicine, a production of 3ABN Australia television.