- Speaker #0
Hello and welcome to Stop Wasting Your Life, the podcast. I'm Ava Heimbach, your host and founder, and today I'm back with my wonderful friend Hannah Gerard.
- Speaker #1
Hey!
- Speaker #0
She has been on before, but I love her so much that she just had to come back. My life would not be complete without her coming back. So she is our special guest who is here to also talk about big emotions. Last week, I kind of gave you a situation that I had experienced recently and how I worked through and moved through those big emotions, which I'm not new to big emotions. I've had them my whole life. And I like to embrace those big emotions because some people just have bigger emotions and that's okay. Also, I want everyone to know, and I say this before every single episode, and I'm going to say it again. that there is no right or wrong way to live your life. The definition of a fulfilling life is unique to each person and I'm not here to tell you how to live your life but rather offer ideas, knowledge, and inspiration so that you can create a life that you think is beautiful. Welcome to Stop Wasting Your Life, the podcast that helps you break free from a life of self-doubt and distraction. and inspires you to create a fulfilling and purposeful life. Each week we dive into actionable advice, meaningful conversation, and insightful interviews to empower you to prioritize your well-being, pursue your passions, and become the best version of yourself. It's time to stop wasting your life and start building one that you are excited to wake up to. So I asked Hannah to come on because we do live together at the moment and she has experienced me experiencing big emotions. So I asked that she could come on and tell me about her big emotions. So that's what we're going to talk about today.
- Speaker #1
Yay, I'm excited. I think that a lot of the times we have these big emotions as we call it and they do carry weight and I think a lot of the Girlies and whoever listens to your podcast can just really relate. We are all feelers and we're also in a world that carries a lot of weight. And I think it's very normal to normalize big emotions without sounding repetitive. So I'm excited to get into it. I know that you did an episode last week and I liked a lot of the things that you were kind of bringing up, like giving them a name, identifying it. I think these are all. Really important tools, like to me, emotional regulation is like learning self-awareness and learning myself in a way. I don't really view emotions as something to fix. I think to me, they're messengers, like they're always signals trying to show me where my state is at, what I could be. like desiring or needing from myself or like the broader scheme of life right now. And instead of, you know, being scared of how they feel in my body, I more so appreciate or approach them with this curiosity and try to get back to that neutral state. I think I need to give a little bit background on myself and my relationship with emotions first and if you listen to our first episode I think there's a little bit more of my story there. I'm not going to go into it too much but I do have a nervous system that is definitely prone to anxiety and depression and this is something that scared me I think for a lot of my life and something that I thought needed fixing and I think with time I've started to realize that I need different things and different emotional states that I'm in. So noting how it feels in my body rather than like mentally problem solving it is something that I always like start with. I think mentally problem solving has its purpose. It's good to kind of ask ourselves what's going on and have that self-inquiry. But sometimes solving isn't needed. Sometimes we need to discharge what that feeling is or just be present with it. For me, like... if I'm anxious, it feels very like fast and flighty in my body. I, it almost feels like I'm overstimulated or there's an overwhelm. Whereas like, if I'm angry, it feels very fiery. I feel like, like I want to like growl in my shower and I feel very primal and I want to like sprint around my neighborhood and like probably should put my face in an ice bath. And like, for example, like I don't get angry a ton these days. So then when I am angry, I'm like, okay, well. What am I angry about? Like usually when I'm angry it's my sense of justice is like getting poked. I'm like something was unjust or unfair or I'm not feeling like heard then that makes me angry. Depression is like slow for me. It's sulky, weighty, a lot of despair. I feel kind of depleted and like my internal state is collapsing and I think just like knowing the difference of what this feels like and then you can kind of ask deeper questions of like okay what is making me depressed and like sometimes babe I just literally be in my hormones like I just be in my late luteal phase and then and that's not to like slap affirmations on trauma or say breath work is gonna cure clinical depression like we some of us are clawing our way out of darkness and I think that's very important to say because in this conversation like or in the conversation of like mental health I guess sometimes it seems like there's like quick fixes and I never ever want to say that so that's my little disclaimer because there's obviously so many layers when it comes to your mental health right and sometimes it's like am I actually feeling my own energy or am I feeling the pain for people in other countries going through unimaginable things or am I feeling You know, worry from something that I thought was resolved in my brain that actually isn't resolved in my brain. And this coming up is like coming up for a reason because it's just showing me that that needs more love and attention. And it really is such a process. And I think that it can be such a trap to fall into this loop of, oh, no, I feel this way. I feel this way again. It needs to go away. And it's something wrong with me. And that's why it's not going away. And I think I still feel that to this day sometimes. Like, dang, we have another depressive episode? Like, I thought we were good. I thought we were in therapy. I thought we were having a really good, like, grounding practice. Like, we've been doing our breathing. And we've been, you know, tapping and chanting. And we have healthy. People that we can reach out to where we value their opinions, like, which that is something that you build up also. Like, I think that it's so overwhelming in the beginning to start at ground one, looking at your mental health and looking at big emotions. And everyone is born into different positions and has different support systems or lack thereof. And, you know, you're you're dealt. what you're dealt and it's sometimes so overwhelming to be like I'm down in the dumps in my brain and I'm responsible for pulling myself out of this and making something of of my life like sometimes just existing is literally so much so I just want to offer words of encouragement there first and I don't really want my approach on this to feel super tool heavy just because that feels like to me like regurgitated mental health jargon like we've all heard it and it's wisdom like I'm not saying that the cliche things that people say to go do are not little nuggets of gold like yes go touch grass like yes go scream out of your car in the middle of the night if you literally need to like please but I think it can be good to not identify with it so much. I think, you know, if I told myself I'm depressed, like, that's, that's what I'm gonna continue viewing myself as, like, am I depressed? This is something I was saying to you the other week, like, am I depressed? Or am I experiencing a state of depression right now? And that is just like, that's its own battle. I guess we can step away from the focus of like just depression. And I think beyond that, there's like this level of transcendence that you sort of like, I feel like for myself, I'm aiming to like experience like I'm, I'm sort of trying now to like, not be so in it. And instead, I've done work in my nervous system and in my body to where I feel like my baseline state. is one of peace and safety that has taken me such a long way to get here and to even say confidently. But if I truly believe that my natural state is one of joy like say it's joy say it's contentment then when I waver and have these other emotions it's like knowing that that is the state that you will return to and it's just knowing the right like course of action and once you understand these emotional messages like that's when you can take more intentional and constructive actions like that's where you can choose your coping skill and strategy to get back to your baseline state, which is a state of calmness in an ideal world. And what does it take to change your actual baseline state? I think it's a lot of like body work. For me, like somatic healing has really, really helped so much in my mental health. That can be breathing, that can be like double exposure therapy, you can do a cold shower if you don't have access to something like a cold plunge or like throw yourself in a cold body of water if you live by an ocean or a river or stream ice your face you can jump up and down Ava walked in on me doing a crazy hip circle video like I don't even know what it was I just type on YouTube like workout release video like standing like swiveling my hips around like You do what you got to do. And I think that over time, it becomes like this thing where it's like, oh, I have this little menu that I can choose from. I'm like, I'm feeling this way. So what in my toolkit do I really want? Do I want to do nothing and sit in the sun and maybe drink a warm beverage? Yes, I do. You know, that's what the doctor orders. And the doctor is the little voice in my brain that I'm going to do it. And. Yeah, I think you can even like go deeper with it, like in different religions, like say like Buddhists be talking about enlightenment, like what is enlightenment? Enlightenment is like not attaching yourself to your mind, like it's literally making your mind teaching it, this is what, this is how you're going to act, like this is your state, so. You need to sit still. When I'm spiraling, I'm not trying to think my way out of it. I'm like, I'm going to drop in to my body and just try to be because that's what we are. We are being. What are other things that can be emotional, actually physical regulation? I have grounding. We already said this, but like grounding through touch, through breath, temperatures. Shaking, walking, crying, sound release. I think even like focusing on what you can control. So how can we create like little pockets of safety in our own environment? I remember like I had a turbulent time in my teen years and my room sort of became like my safe place. And I remember I just had like my little cry corner where in my cry corner, I just put like little things that made me feel. like a real person because I think sometimes like my ADD can kind of like be very disassociative where I feel really out of body and just like not a real person so it's like I had evidence in front of me that like there were times when I experienced joy so I had my little like thing I got from the carnival with friends like a little stuffed animal and then like a stone my grandpa gave me and like a picture of like my family or just like you know little things like that giving yourself that safety in your environment if you can through routine through connection with yourself going
- Speaker #0
back to the point you made about focusing on things that you can control I think that is so important and that's something that I'm just now kind of getting into because I've always been a control freak. Like I love to be in control. I like to be in control of my surroundings and my emotions. And I just want to be in control of everything. And it's not a very good trait to have, but I'm working on it. I'm working on it. And even just a couple nights ago, Hannah and I had a friend over, his name's Maddox. And I usually am in bed by like eight o'clock, but I'm pretty sure it was like nine o'clock and I like stormed out of my room and they were in here. eating popcorn or something and I brought my journal and I was like Who wants to help me write down things that I can and I can't control? So I sat there for like 15 minutes and Maddox was sitting next to me going, you can control that, but you can't control that. And we came up with this long list because it is so important to focus on things that you can control because there are so many things that we can't control. And if we sit here and try and focus on them, we're just going to spiral downward because there's nothing we can do. There are things that I wrote on that list that no matter how hard I tried, I will not be able to control.
- Speaker #1
Amen. I wish I could control shit too. And I'm like, you know what? Sometimes I'm not the one driving. Like, but you are. In Buddhism, controlling the mind is the path to enlightenment. We have no control, but simultaneously, like, we have so much control. So, like, the things that aren't in our control, we try to.
- Speaker #0
What your neighbor does. What your friends do.
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Et cetera.
- Speaker #0
What Hannah makes for dinner. If the trash smells bad.
- Speaker #1
If my fart ricochets and the neighbors literally hear it when I'm on the porch at nine at night. Like, no. There's a lot we cannot control. But simultaneously, we can control our actions. We can control what we say, what we speak. In an ideal world, we can control some of our thoughts, but this is a very long journey. One I have nowhere near mastered, but I attempt to most days, you know, because I think spaciousness, spaciousness in your processing and your emotions and how you relate and identify to them is so, so huge. Because then there's that separation of like. I'm not necessarily that. I am just me experiencing that. And that is being experienced because it is trying to tell me A, B, and C.
- Speaker #0
What if you don't know what it's trying to tell you?
- Speaker #1
I think it's like a trial and error thing over the years. Definitely was a lot of years where I didn't let the emotions in. I was a hypersensitive kid. And then I sort of viewed that as a weakness. so out of like my own protection. I shut off my emotions and that affected everything. I mean my capacity to love and feel I feel was so much smaller because I was like choosing to stay in this lower vibrational state of just like surviving. I mean that's just so sometimes like you literally just have to like adapt and that's what you have to do and I don't think I learned what each emotion meant for me. Until I like started letting myself like let them exist and not suppress and deny them. Because I think that's a really common thing. It's like we live in a hyper individualistic culture that just wants you to keep pushing. And hyper productivity comes with its own curse. Like sometimes you can keep push through and you have to push through because you have a family to take care of. And you have bills to pay and you have, you know, just. real world responsibilities. So you can't afford the luxury of like taking a break and being like, what does this feel like in my body? And why? Like, so I feel like it is just like, something that if it really is of importance to you, you can kind of start intuitively asking yourself like, or just noticing what different things feel like in your body. Like, I think all of us can know what anger feels like in our body.
- Speaker #0
So on the first episode, I kind of gave an example of recently when I had to really work through and move through these big emotions that I had experienced in the past, but it had been so long that when they came up, I was kind of like, oh my gosh, these exist. And so is there any situation in particular where you remember really needing to work through these big emotions and how did you move through these big emotions?
- Speaker #1
I feel like my whole life has been a series of mitigating big emotions, to be honest. The most recent thing I can think of is like literally last month because Ava and I moved in together. So this happened like early September, out of state move, and it really felt like this like leap of faith and kind of closing of a chapter that I was in. And I came out here and like 10 days into the move, I'm getting a call from home saying like, Your childhood dog is not doing good and anybody who knows me like that's literally my baby like I was taking care of him till the very end and it was really really hard for me to like, I knew he was old, but I couldn't like process how he had such a severe decline, like in that time of me moving. And we ended up being, I ended up being able to fly home and the whole family gathered around him. And, you know, we sent him off in the best way we know how with bacon and a park trip and so much love. And I think That brought up a lot of big emotions in me. Like anybody who's lost a pet, they just understand. And I think that had this have happened two years ago, even, I would have been in a completely different mindset with processing it. The grief and the sadness, like it was so there. And Ava definitely was watching me crash out in the days of anticipating my flight. When I got there, because sadness and grief is states I've, like, sat in before, I've experienced loss. I know what it sort of looks like and feels like at this point. It was like, hello, darkness, my old friend. Literally, it was like, holy shit, this is so profound that I can, like, hold space for this grief. And this grief is also showing me that, like, so much love. existed and you know it's I'm gonna let myself feel all of this like I'm gonna be in this experience fully and I'm gonna ugly cry to Phoebe Bridgers holding my dog as he sticks his head out the window for his last drive like I'm gonna let myself cry like now we're approaching a month since this happened and like I'm on day two of my period like I did in fact cry this morning about it and I think it's just like When it comes, you let it come. And that's something that I would encourage doing is allowing the waves and letting yourself sit in those states. Because when you sit in it long enough, it's like you don't scare me because I know you. And I've been you and part of me is you. So, hey, nice to meet you again. Funny that you're here. you know does that make sense like if i was to invite all my emotions in a room they all have their own sort of like archetype like me and my sadness looks different than me in my like absolute joy bliss ecstaticness obviously and then beyond all of that is still is still me so it's kind of like this weird dance of like Mentally knowing what's going on, but then choosing to mentally not go so deep that you lose yourself in the process and like feeling it, feeling it just period. But also like knowing what you need in different moments, because sometimes like it's OK to close it in your brain and come back and unpack it when it's like a good time to do it. Like we're approaching to in like four days, maybe. If my One Directioners, my Directioners, if you're out there, yes, we're grieving. This October, Liam Payne did pass a year ago. And, you know, I think that's a thing. It's like, like, I couldn't, I couldn't react right away immediately. Say I'm like, I wasn't in a meeting, but like, say I'm in a meeting, I would like read that text and be like, oh, fuck. So then I'm like, gonna close myself. But then I'm gonna give myself space. Because if not. the overwhelm like stays in my body and then that's going to become like my baseline state if I don't like let myself express so yeah I think that's like that's a lot of what I would say about big emotions to regurgitate what I said once more I think it's we have the identifying we have the knowing what it feels like in our body Then we're going to have our little menu, like what's my emotional toolbox? What feels good for me in this moment? What do I need? Is it to take a nap? Is it to phone a friend? Is it to get into my body and pick a X, Y, and Z, you know? And at the same time, having some type of mindfulness practice where you practice not being your brain, for lack of a better, for lack of better words.
- Speaker #0
So in my first episode, I kind of talked about how I'm just learning about mindfulness and what that looks like and how you are so good at mindfulness. And there have been many times where I'm like, please help me. How do I be mindful? But what are your... big go-to mindfulness practices. I did talk about the one that you told me about where you sit and say, you know, okay, what are five things I can hear and five things I can see? That's one that I have really enjoyed. And I was wondering what your go-to mindfulness practices are.
- Speaker #1
It's just tough. I think it's become less of like, Well, like, I'll start with meditation, I guess. I think meditation is different to everybody. For me, I was, like, actually forcing myself to 20 minutes a day, like, sit down. And that was so, so hard because I'm ADD as fuck. And literally, there'd be times where I'd, like, come out of it so exhausted because the whole time just, like, thinking of literally everything. Eventually it became a muscle that I was exercising and I was like, whoa, I just want 10 minutes and I didn't have a single thought. And then that like translates to, you know, going to the grocery store and walking down the aisle. And like, you're literally just thinking about shopping for the list that's in your hand and you're not like somewhere, somewhere else. I think presence is a huge mindfulness practice and mindfulness is like such a... It feels like such a buzzword to me, weirdly. Like, I don't really feel like it's something... I started that journey because I was, like, not in a good place, not really even thinking that I'm gonna be, like, here long term. I was just like, okay, well, I can't continue this way. So instead, I borderline went into spiritual psychosis, and I'm like... was doing like all these crazy meditations on YouTube, but then I'm like trying to freaking astral project and all this stuff. And it's like, girl, you need to touch grass. Like, so I think it's like, it's hard for me to answer that. I will always preach meditation just because I've seen so many benefits for myself for that. And if you were to just like, want to begin that practice, I think like doing something to get you in your body first, like I'm like a chronic chest slapper. Like I will ball my hands into fists and, you know, I will be chanting in the shower and shaking my ass. Like it needs to happen. That's mindful, babe.
- Speaker #0
Well, thank you again for coming on and letting me talk to you. You are definitely one of the smartest, most amazing, wisest 25-year-olds. I've ever met.
- Speaker #1
Stop, I'm gonna cry.
- Speaker #0
And it is such a blessing living with you and being able to write lists of what we can and can't control every single night before I go to bed at 8.30.
- Speaker #1
But she does go to bed at 8.30.
- Speaker #0
I am in bed at 8.30, guys.
- Speaker #1
We are literally opposites because like my ideas come to me at 10 at night. Like I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm talking to God. And like all of a sudden I need to write this project down and birth it into the world. What like? And Ava's like already in like her third dream. So
- Speaker #0
I'm in my REM sleep.
- Speaker #1
No, but seriously, anytime. I love the stop wasting your life fam. I love your brain. And I love that you're just like using your gift and your experience with your mind and sharing it with everybody. So
- Speaker #0
I love you, Pookie.
- Speaker #1
I love you, Pookie. Hopefully some nuggets of wisdom were in this. I think. I'm always all over the place when I communicate, but.
- Speaker #0
But that's why we love you.
- Speaker #1
Yeah, thanks. So is life, you know, it's crazy. I'm crazy. We're all crazy.
- Speaker #0
Rest in love, Liam.
- Speaker #1
Rest in peace, Liam Payne. And also honorable mention, Toby, my shih tzu. Thank you.
- Speaker #0
And that concludes our episode. I really hope you guys enjoyed it and learned something today. But just a little reminder to stay tuned for the next giveaway. We're still trying to finalize what that's going to be and what that's going to look like. So hopefully we will get that announced soon. Thanks for listening to today's episode of Stop Wasting Your Life. We hope that you are feeling motivated to take charge of your future and start living with purpose, intention, and authenticity. If you enjoyed today's conversation, be sure to leave us a good review. give us a follow and subscribe to our newsletter. For more information, go to www.stopwastingyourlifepodcast.com and we will see you next week.
