FEELINGS: Auditing Your Emotions + Hacking Your Hormones

November 14, 2020

As we continue to unpack the 5 Secrets for Successful Self-Care, today we’ll discuss a little more about the first secret, Mindset, and how to improve it by auditing our emotions and hacking our hormones.

In my last blog, MINDSET MAKEOVER, Change the Narrative, we learned that in order to successfully achieve our goals, the first thing we need to do is change our algorithm. The things we think, believe and have opinions on ultimately dictate whether we’ll reach our goals or not. And the reason for this is because our thoughts impact our feelings.

So, this blog is going to explain how feelings are made, and teach you how to start making yours a little juicier.

But first, we should know why feelings are important for achieving your wellness goals.

If we’re not emotionally invested in our goals, or, more accurately, emotionally invested in the PROCESS of attaining our goals, chances are we’ll never reach them, let alone maintain them.

Our feelings have to align with the ACTIONS it takes in achieving our aspirations.

For example, if you wanted to lose some weight, you really can’t feel resentful, bitter or loathsome towards healthful eating, exercise, and all of the work that comes with a weight-loss journey.

You’d be in utter hell. And it’s just not sustainable.

Instead, you have to figure out how to wrangle your brain around ways to enjoy, appreciate, and welcome the process. It’s important to develop a POSITIVE mindset so you can cultivate productive feelings…instead of shitty ones that will just hold you back.

ANYWAY, this is how feelings work.

We actually have a couple of different types of feelings. The first feelings are sensations experienced in the body. And the other are emotions.

And these two bad boys work together.

Our bodies have things called sensory organs (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin, and believe it or not, the gut). Their job is to collect information and send it to the brain. Now, depending on the stimuli, the brain will determine if the sensation is hot, cold, sharp, smooth, painful, poisonous, soothing, and you get the idea.

But these stimuli go beyond interpreting physical sensations. They also evoke emotional reactions.

When you experience life, you experience it with your WHOLE body.

Let’s think about stepping on a Lego.

Most Americans, at some point in their lives, have stepped on a Lego. Putting one’s full bodyweight onto such a small, hard thing, sets off a chain of events.

SENSATION: Searing, impossible pain shooting through your foot
REACTION: Leaping away from said Lego and cursing in agony (sympathetic/fight or flight reaction specifically). Thanks, Adrenaline.
EMOTION: Getting pissed at the kid who left it on the floor.
CONDITIONING: Cautiously scanning the floor for other lurking Legos

There’s a lot going on.

Your body reacts as a WHOLE physical thing, not just the emotions in your head.

Now we’re gonna talk about hormones for a minute.

Hormones are the magical juices that help to keep the body in homeostasis. And we love them because they regulate themselves depending on what the body needs. But I will say, there is a bit of a glitch; we like to create false needs.

I’m mainly talking about stress, here.

Too many of us have shitty attitudes about things. We like to complain about politics, the weather, the price of avocados, Facebook douche bags, cellulite, and on and on…

When we entertain negativity, it breeds more negativity. And all of this bad vibe bullshit is stressful. And when we live on a low grade, steady stream of stress like this, it keeps a light flow of cortisol running through the body.

And let me just say, a steady diet of cortisol is not healthy. <- Read More

As I mentioned in the last blog, we can change our feelings by changing our thoughts. But if you’re serious about turning your feelings around, I want to tell you, we can also hack our hormones.

There are oodles and oodles of ways to bump up your feel-good hormones, and decrease the stressy ones. And, uh, this is MAJOR when it comes to self-care.

Below is a tiny chart describing a bunch of hormones and cheat sheet for hacking your hormones. And if you want more helpful self-care tips you should totally sign up for my Newsletter...just sayin'.

CRYSTAL MCLAIN CREATIVE 6 EMOTIONAL HORMONES CHART LIST

As you can see, there's a lot of overlapping things like rest, movement, and a balanced diet. None of this is rocket science (just regular science, which you know I LOVE).

And finally, let's talk about auditing our emotions.

A lot of times we label our emotions with pretty broad terms. We might say we're sad, or happy. But wtf does that even mean? If we take the time to narrow our feelings down into specifics, we're better able to determine what our needs are.

If I say I'm feeling sad, do I really mean that I'm feeling lonely, bored, powerless? These more specific terms help ascertain which self-care tactics are more appropriate for my feelings.

And likewise, when we're auditing our emotions, we can clarify how we want to feel, and figure out how to achieve that with more ease.

So, when you audit emotions, you need to get really clear about what your most frequent feelings are, and which ones you want more of. And if you're not sure what you're feeling, I've added this handy-dandy feelings wheel!

CRYSTAL MCLAIN CREATIVE FEELINGS EMOTIONS WHEEL CHART

So let's recap...

In order to reach and maintain our wellness goals, we have to practice language that supports our mission.
We don't just experience feelings in our head, we experience them throughout the entire body.
If we want to change how we're feeling we have to audit our emotions.
Getting really specific about how we want to feel will help determine our self-care plan(s).
And when all else fails, you can totally hack your hormones. Because it's ok to fake 'til you make it.