You’ve heard about your physical metabolism, but do you know you have an emotional one too? It’s your ability to process emotions in a way that supports your emotional wellbeing, much like your metabolism supports your physical wellbeing.
Emotions and food have similar effects on us. Positive emotions nurture and support us, like healthy foods. Highly processed or toxic foods make us sick, like negative thoughts and emotions. The stomach area (solar plexus chakra), where we process food, is also where we process self-love. It is our center of self-worth, self-love, self-confidence, and personal power. How we feed or deprive ourselves through our emotions creates a fast or slow emotional metabolism.
Obviously some emotions and foods are more enjoyable to experience and quicker to digest than others. For example, most people would prefer feeling joy and eating strawberries to feeling anxious and eating broccoli. So we avoid eating broccoli and processing our anxiety. By avoiding our anxiety, we slow down our emotional metabolism.
Additionally, blocking negative emotions, like anxiety, can lead to blocks in our lives, misdirecting our emotions, or having the emotional runs, just like our psychical body would experience constipation, the runs, vomiting, or weight gain. For example, getting angry over something (line at grocery store) that has nothing to do with our real anger (disappointment with friend).
Our relationship with choices can speed up both our physical and emotional metabolisms. Some are able to eat a few potato chips and put the bag down. Others binge until the bag is empty. Our response to emotions is a similar choice: respond mindfully or binge. Meaning, we can spend a few minutes taking in the emotion, feeling it, processing it and moving on. Or, we can avoid or fight it, letting it take over our minds, days and weeks. It’s not often the emotion keeping us stuck. It’s our mind’s obsession of the emotion that’s keeping us stuck.
As you check in on the condition of your emotional metabolism this week, use these three techniques to boost it:
- Fully digest each kind word you receive this week. Fully receive a compliment or kind word by looking at the person directly in the eye and saying, thank you. Don’t downplay the compliment. Oh this old thing, I got it on sale years ago. (I’m so guilty of this one!) Don’t avoid it by looking away or changing the topic. Thanks, did you hear about blah blah blah. Don’t dilute it by immediately throwing a comparative compliment back to the giver. Thanks, but my presentation wasn’t nearly as good as yours.
- Go on a positive affirmation binge. You’ve likely heard the stat. We have 60K thoughts per day. Ninety to 95% of which are repeated from the day before. Eighty percent of those repeated thoughts are negative. So, we have a choice. We can choose to intentionally add fresh, new, positive statements to our vocabulary diet. What’s something that feels good that you can say to yourself each morning? Throughout the day? At night? Binge away!
- Eliminate toxins from your emotional diet. Because a certain food is regularly in our diet doesn’t mean it’s good for us (for example, cookies). It’s the same with emotions. Drama is everywhere (work, mommy groups, home), and we often unintentionally get hooked on it. I’ve never known this kind of drama to produce positive emotions. This week intentionally choose to walk away from unnecessary complaining, drama or gossip.
