Hello, hello, hello my beautiful friends- welcome back to the podcast. 

I will tell you that getting back into the groove of writing and recording the podcasts have been a little more difficult than I had expected. And it’s not a lack of “want to,” because I love writing and I love recording and getting these episodes out to you all. 1) It’s a question of logistics- we’ve had a lot going on in our family recently and carving out the time for researching, writing, and recording has been a challenge. And 2) I’ve spent a little bit of time spinning out with the “should’s.”

That’s right, friends, ya coach  is just like you. I should on myself occasionally, especially when I feel like I’ve lost momentum. Which is just a thought and I know this- that’s typically one of my signals to do some more intense thought work is when I find myself saying something like, “I’m behind” or something in that vein. Now, what I have found time and time and time again- and what I tell you all- the should’s only leave us feeling worse. They are not motivational. Sure you *might* do the thing you’re telling yoursethat lf you should, need to, or have to do but it probably won’t feel that great and it probably won’t be consistent. It is impossible to take positive action from a negative emotion. 

So, because I caught myself in the land of the “should’s” I did a ton of paper thinking- what I call journaling. 

I wrote down a bunch of thoughts around how a new mom should prioritize her day, her baby, her family. 

I wrote down a bunch of thoughts for how an entrepreneur should have prepped an absence “better” – knowing full well that “better” is completely subjective and that I took all conceivable steps to prepare my business for my prolonged absence. 

I wrote down a bunch of thoughts around my clients and potential clients. 

The thoughts were all there friends- all the same crap that your ahole brain feeds you, mine feeds me. But here is where we get to what I wanted to talk about today. 

Throughout my experience in thought work I have developed emotional resiliency. 

I think many of us have heard the word resiliency. Maybe in counseling and it’s also tossed around a lot in our cultural lexicon of words. 

The google definition of resiliency is the ability to adapt to stressful situations or crises. And I think this definition is often misunderstood and misused. So, I want to use the working definition used by one of my favorite coaches, Kara Lowenthiel- which is, the ability to maintain a calm and happy emotional state.

Now, to ensure there isn’t a misunderstanding when I describe this, let me make this ABUNDANTLY clear. When I say. It’s the ability to maintain a calm and happy emotional state, that does NOT mean all the time. There are no perfect games in thought work or emotions and that’s never the goal. 

The opposite of emotional resiliency is emotional reactivity. 

So if resiliency is the ability to (kind of) spring back to your baseline normal state after an intense situation or a trigger then reactivity is that reaction to the situation, stimulus, or trigger, where your brain tells you there is an emergency when it isn’t an emergency. 

I used get this a lot when I am running late. Full disclosure, I am not the most punctual person, like I’m not generally super late but I say that I have a five minute window plus or minus- I probably wont be there more than five minutes before, and typically no later than 5 minutes after. But it used to be, and sometimes it still happens, that regardless of when I am set to arrive, if I am telling myself that I am running late all of the alarm bells will go off in my head. Like there is a three alarm fire happening. 

Remember, our brain cannot, CAN NOT, tell the difference between a physical threat and a physiological threat so it interprets it all the same. So in my brain, whenever I’m telling myself that I’m running late my brain interprets that as “I’ve done something wrong,” or “Something has gone wrong bc I am running late” and remember this is regardless of actually being late because it’s not the time it’s my thinking. My brain, and especially my body can’t tell that it’s only my thinking. I still get the same physiological response by thinking “I’m running late” as you would if let’s say you were walking home and felt like someone was following you- that rush of adrenaline and cortisol. 

So if that is reactivity then resilience would be your ability to return to the “oh ok, I’m safe. Nothing to see here folks” state. It is important to note that there is not a threshold for time specific resilience. Like there’s no barometer or time that says you are resilient if you can bounce back within 3 minutes, or 5 minutes, or a month or whatever. That’s completely arbitrary. 

Emotional resilience is the ability to weather whatever is going on around you without deviating too, too much from your normal state- calm, steady, happy. However you might describe it. And reactivity is like constantly being flung in a million directions away from that baseline state by anything and everything that happens outside of you. 

Before I discovered coaching, my emotional resilience was not very high. I was pretty reactive. And if you were to look around you, I bet you would recognize that most people have little emotional resilience and are pretty reactive. And because so, most of us walk around talking about how stressed and burned out we all are. 

In fact, that is probably one of the biggest indicators of emotional reactivity- the constant or consistent feeling of being stressed out and burned out every or most days. Does an email or phone call throw you into a panic? Do you obsess over all the details of your IVF journey? Constantly scouring the internet for information to help you “feel better” or constantly checking th3e FB infertility, IVF groups for any nugget of information or semblance of hope?

Do you find that you can’t control your mind and that you continue to fixate or ruminate of things you’d like to STOP thinking about but you cannot stop your brain?

Do you constantly feel like you’re on an emotional rollercoster and the best you can do is hold on for dear life?

When you wake up in the morning, do you have no idea how you'll feel at the end of the day? Do you find that you're often telling people that you're too sensitive or you take things too personally, you just feel too deeply, you're too empathetic? 

These are things that we all think are good qualities, but they're actually a sign that you don't have appropriate boundaries and you don't have emotional resilience. So all of those are signs of emotional reactivity and any one of them is a sign. You don't have to have all of them, although a lot of people do. 

Emotional reactivity is caused by an out of control brain. Your brain is like a labradoodle puppy who hasn't gotten enough exercise and got out of its crate. It isn't trying to make a mess but there's going to be at least a ruined house if you don't take charge of what's going on up there. 

 Everyone’s emotional reactivity is displayed in different ways. For instance, my emotional reactivity is typically anger- which I think is a lot of people. My best friend, her emotional reactivity tends to look more like sadness and anxiety. It looks different for different people.

So regardless of how you display it, emotional reactivity is what happens when you don't manage your mind and you just act on your unconscious thoughts and you lash out at others or kind of lash inwards at yourself. You catastrophize, you take things personally, you always see the worst, you kind of freak out, all of which creates an enormous amount of emotional stress and suffering for you, especially if you're someone who finds that you often freak out and then it turns out like, nothing was really wrong. Now that doesn’t preclude the possibility of something being wrong- like you’re getting news from the clinic or waiting for a test result or something. But by and large, emotional reactivity is like the emotional labor that you do in anticipation of something.  

When you are emotional reactive, you don't have control over where you spend your emotional or even your physical energy because your emotions happen in your body. So it's using up a lot of physical energy to have those reactions. You're basically on like a hormonal rollercoaster with your stress response firing all the time. 

The other problem with emotional reactivity is that you don't have the ability to refuel yourself. So when you don't have resilience, when you are reactive, you end up always scraping the bottom of the emotional barrel. It's kind of like driving a car where the fuel gage is always on empty. So many of you, I'm sure, have been around someone like this or you may be this person where even tiny things produce huge emotional responses and dramatic meltdowns. Like a train being late or a small mistake that really isn't a big deal. 

You're unable to cope with the normal events of life and then if something extra challenging happens, you're totally fucked because you have no resilience left, you have nothing in the tank, your fuel is always empty. That's emotional reactivity. 

Emotional resilience is the ability to maintain an even emotional keel and to process emotions appropriately without being derailed by your thoughts or feelings. I like to kind of analogize it to the biological function called homeostasis. So in biology, homeostasis is the ability of an organism to maintain a consistent environment - internal environment - even in a variety of external conditions. 

One of my coaches, Kara Loewenthiel, came up with this analogy: Think about the human body, right? We all know the average human body is about 98 degrees Fahrenheit, and it really doesn't deviate that much, right? You get to 101 and that's called a fever. Like, you're sick. Three degrees up and you have an illness. Seven degrees up and you're very - you're like, likely to die. 

So it's a real narrow range around that 98 degrees. Even when it's really hot out, right? You can be in a desert where it's 120 degrees, and your body temperature will still be 98. And you can be in the Arctic where it's zero degrees and your body temperature will still be around 98. So your body is incredibly adept at maintaining its temperature, its internal condition regardless of the external stimuli. It calibrates and compensates. 

So the emotional version of this doesn't mean that you should only have like, a three-degree span of emotions, the way your body is basically within three degrees of 98 degrees. That is not what I'm saying. It's more like a rubber band that has the right amount of stretch, or anything that keeps its shape. Applying force may stretch it out a bit, but it will kind of snap right back, or gently go right back. Like, that's a little more sharp and sudden, a rubber 

band snapping, than what emotional resilience is like. But the point is that your emotional life is stable. And even when there's a disruption, you return to the baseline fairly quickly, and you can kind of stay there no matter what's going on outside of you. 

So if something pulls on you or pushes you, it doesn't bend you out of shape. Like, there's a little give and then you come right back. And emotional resilience is important because without it, you're just totally at the mercy of your brain and your emotional state can swing wildly depending on what circumstances happen around you. 

So emotional resilience makes your day to day life calmer, gives you more energy, helps you in your career, in school, makes you physically healthier, and it will also help you with any kind of buffering habits, overeating, overdrinking, over drug use, shopping for things you don't need, watching too much porn, any of these things that you do to an extreme to avoid being alone with yourself or because you don't know how to cope with your feelings. 

So, you’re probably like, ok Em, we get it, but HOW?!?! How do you develop it?

Such a great question, it’s actually developed in kind of two parts. 

The first is allowing and actually processing your emotions. I have a whole podcast episode called “Feel better NOW” that outlines the process that I teach. But most of us stop at naming the emotion. A lot of us are good at noticing, I’m feeling anxious. Maybe if you’ve done counseling or anything in the past you can Identify what you’re feeling in a given moment- and that’s great. If you don’t feel like that’s a strength of yours, I have amazing news, it’s totally learnable.  

But basically, and again for a more thorough explanation check out the Feel better NOW episode, but you want to Notice  or name the emotion- that’s the N. The O is open up to it, so you’re not resisting it, you are literally and emotionally opening yourself up to experience the emotion. And the last one is witness the emotion, that’s the W. Witnessing it is like explaining what is happening inside of your body. For instance, when I feel anxious, it feels like I am have a black, 15lb bowling ball in my stomach, but with rough edges and it feels like it is bouncing up and down. That’s what I mean by what is happening inside your body. You want to describe the phsycial sensations that you are experiencing. This is the most effective way to get the eff out of your brain, which is what is required when you are processing emotions. When I do this, I tell my clients to close their eyes, because when your eyes are open, your brian is looking for things and your brain is not invited to this party, this party ois for the body. 

This is a way to teach your brain that emotions are safe. We treat our emotions like thye are a crisis, especially anxiety. THEY ARE NOT. Your feelings cannot hurt you. I’m not saying that it doesn’t SEEM like they can hurt you. Really strong emotions like grief and anxiety- it does feel like you could be dying. But they cannot actually harm you. So physically grounding and processing your feelings by allowing them to flow through as physical sensation and describing that and allowing that and not thinking the thoughts that perpetuate it, that’s the first part of developing emotional resilience. 

Because part of what happens in emotional reactivity is you start to have a feeling and then you freak out that you're having a feeling, right? So processing the emotion kind of takes off that second freak out so that we can deal with the original freak out from the thought. 

So you process the emotion to deal with the like, physical aspect of the freak out, and then you have to manage your mind to create emotional resilience. The reason that you are emotionally reactive is that you don’t have any control over your brain, so it’s running wild and creating horrible scenarios to scare you and telling you that everyone hates you and you’re worthless and you’re going to die alone every day. It’s like your brain is creating a damn Stephen king novel at every turn. 

So when you don’t exercise any control over your brain, you have no resilience and you’re subject to its every random and destructive whim. When you learn to manage your mind, you stop being so reactive. Now, at first, that is a painstaking practice. You have to pay attention to a lot of thoughts and you have to practice noticing and shifting them. 

When you’re emotionally reactive, you are believing all your thoughts without question. You are acting like your emotions are an emergency, right. You are believing that your emotions are somehow true and valid and have to be happening and are telling you something important, and then you’re believing that thought, whatever it is, and then believing that that’s totally true. 

That’s emotional reactivity; when you are not exercising any judgment or any discretion over what you believe, you’re not taking responsibility for your own thoughts and feelings and you are just reacting to whatever comes at you, as if you’re in a batting cage without a bat, just being pelted with balls. When you are managing your mind, it’s like YOU get to decide which balls to swing at and which to let go by. Baseball players don’t take every pitch that is thrown at them, right? Some are good tosses and some are junk- your brain does the same thing. Sometimes it’s gonna offer you up a gem that’s got home run written all over it and sometimes it’s gonna toss out some trash. You don’t have to swing at everything. Emotional reactivity is swinging at every pitch, regardless. 

Even just starting with noticing the thoughts coming in and asking yourself, Is that true? How might that not be true? What else could that mean? Right, again, just not taking your thoughts to be 100% truth. 

When you are emotionally reactive, you can’t control your reactions. You feel like they happen instantaneously, but they don’t. they’re caused by thoughts; very fast subconscious thoughts that you’re not aware of yet. The better you get at noticing and changing your thoughts, the less reactive you’ll be. And these two things go hand in hand. You have to practice the emotional processing, the physical sensation describing, because that is what takes your kind of body’s reaction down so that you can actually get access to the thought. 

You have to be willing to have that feeling and kind of communicate to your brain that it’s not a big deal and that you’ve got a hold of the ship and everything’s okay, and then you can get better into what is the thought causing this feeling, what’s happening in my brain, right? 

So the better you get at noticing and changing your thoughts, the less reactive you will be overall. And eventually, you will develop true emotional resiliency and the daily irritations and frustrations and stressors will stop creating that adrenaline and cortisol and stress and anxiety response in your brain and in your body. 

So that’s emotional reactivity and emotional resilience. Most people go around in emotional reactivity all the time and the true journey towards taking responsibility for your own life is developing emotional resilience. And then once you have emotional resilience, you can create so much more in your life.

And yes, all of this can be done while going through IVF. It’s completely possible. I coach women EVERY single day on how to do this. This is a tremendous gift to give yourself. This type of peace and calm that comes with emotional resilience. It’s so beautiful. You are less bothered. You are less anxious, you’re more present. Its incredible. And that is what I want for each and every one of you. So, if this is something you are wanting, go to my website www.ivfthiscoaching, and book a free mini session and I can teach you how to do this. 

Ok, that is what I have for you today, my beautiful friends. Take care and I will tlk to you soon!