Managing Your Emotional Wellness
The three step strategy I learned from my friends on Sesame Street
In honor of World Mental Health Day, I want to use this week’s post to highlight the importance of vulnerability and doing the work to manage your emotional wellness. This has been an incredibly difficult week as I’ve sat in limbo waiting for news about a loved one. Recognizing that I have been on a prolonged emotional rollercoaster for the past ten months, I decided to take a much needed mental health day. While using Instagram to numb my emotions, I received reassurance from some old familiar friends, Sesame Street.
As a child of the ‘80s, Jim Henson’s Muppets hold a special place in my heart. They are my happy place. Their warmth and encouragement have only continued to comfort me into adulthood. This morning, their Instagram feed shared an important 3-step strategy to help children and adults alike with managing complicated emotions. I’m sharing their tips here in case if you too could use support.
Step 1: Notice
I’ve talked before about the importance of developing somatic awareness. Somatic awareness is the ability to notice sensations in your body so you can identify thoughts and emotions you are feeling in the moment. The more you sit with your emotions, the more you become mindful of how they manifest in your body.
A body scan meditation can guide you in developing this awareness. Meditation can be difficult for many beginners because they believe the goal is to quiet the mind. The true goal is to raise awareness to thoughts, emotions, and feelings so that you can notice them when they arise and take steps to manage them.
Like any practice, there are good days and bad. It is normal for thoughts and feelings to flow in and out of your brain, but a body scan meditation can give you a focal point for your awareness. It is almost inevitable that your brain will go on a tangent. The key is to notice it and return to the focal point. A body scan meditation normally guides the practitioner to raise awareness to sensations in their body from head to toe. With consistency, practitioners begin to notice trends depending on their mood. Common indicators of stress or anxiety can present as butterflies in the stomach, tension in the neck/ shoulders / upper back, or clenching of the jaw. Over time, practitioners may even find themselves noticing these indicators when not meditating.
Step 2: Feel
I first started individual therapy as an adult when I found myself experiencing tremendous grief following a miscarriage. It was a time when I felt incredibly alone and impatient with my inability to just get over it already. This wasn’t the first time I experienced grief. It may not have even been the worst of it. But, I was wise enough to reach out for support from a mental health professional. Thirteen years later, and I still work with that therapist. She taught me the importance of sitting in my feelings. The ability to sit in my discomfort is a skill that I will forever be grateful to her for teaching me. Thanks to her, I’ve learned that there is no better way out than through.
Becoming one with my emotions helps me to identify what I need in the moment. For many of us, this may be easier said than done. In our house, we have an emotion wheel to help us pinpoint our feelings in the moment when it is difficult to name the emotion. Naming the emotion gives us good information on what to do next.
Typically, I find myself analyzing events that led to the emotion. Journaling or talking to a friend or therapist are fantastic tools for identifying the source of the emotion. My therapist tells me that my emotions give me good information. It’s important to zero into them so I can take in that information and learn the lesson they are offering me.
Step 3: Manage
As Big Bird teaches us in step 3, once you have identified your emotions, you can choose a strategy to manage them. This week, I’ve been experiencing an overwhelming sense of fear, anxiety, overwhelm, and worry. So, I set out to manage those emotions. I’ve continued to prioritize my morning pages and early morning walks to remove stress from my body before starting my day.
There were moments when those tools weren’t enough and sadness took over. I was able to use my emotion wheel to narrow my emotions further to feelings of isolation, powerlessness, and feeling ignored. This is when I reached out. As I wrote last week, community is incredibly important when going through trying times like these.
I took the love and support from my friends and family to give me the strength I needed to implement my newly found self-soothing techniques. I looked within to identify my needs and communicated boundaries to meet those needs. I drew a line between work and life so I have time to self soothe on an ongoing basis. I went to ballet after a particularly long work day. I reduced unnecessary calls so I could prioritize critical tasks and rest when needed. I cried when my eyes welled with tears, laughed to balance out the tears (I highly recommend Netflix’s Nobody Wants This), shared when I needed extra support, box breathed and opened my Calm app to ground myself, adhered to a 9pm bedtime to ensure I was well rested, noted what is going well in my gratitude journal, and stepped away from the people or habits that were creating more discomfort and no longer serving me.
Here are additional resources to help you and your family:
Gwen, I love this so much. Thank you for sharing these parts of you. Sesame Street teaching mental health makes me smile!