My Favorite Daily Health Habit
Today I’m going to teach you one of my favorite self-care practices which I call the Dump & Rewire….which is all about releasing stress and emotional upset so that it doesn’t build up and harm your health. If you want to hear about it in video format, check out the video below. If you want to read the info, the text version is below.
I should start by saying, it has taken me a LONG time to come to the understanding of how important a practice like this is FOR EVERYONE. Historically, I was the queen of emotional suppression, and sometimes, I still catch myself trying to push things down, distract myself, and “just get on with it” but that always backfires! For me and most of my clients, that can manifest as being irritable, distracted, socially withdrawing, engaging in addictive behavior, having difficulty sleeping, blowing up inappropriately in interactions with others, and most importantly, physical symptoms and health issues like muscle tension, headaches, brain fog, high blood pressure, digestive distress, increased inflammation or impaired ability to fight infections, and much much more.
The research data shows that our emotional reactions affect us whether we suppress them or express them. What we actually need in order for them to not continue impacting the state of our autonomic nervous system and therefore the health of every organ system in the body IS to release or transform the emotional reaction once it has been acknowledged.
How do we do that? That’s a great question too! It took me a LONG time to find something that truly worked for me and my patients to achieve that, but I did, and I would put these techniques under the blanket term of “neural retraining tools” What does that mean exactly?
Well, these are techniques that actually rewire the brain in a directed way. In most situations where we are having a stress or emotional reaction, how we respond is how we have LEARNED to respond. As an example, if you feel fear when you see a snake on the ground, at some point you learned to fear snakes, and now your subconscious is producing that fear response for you automatically. And we know this is learned because many people do NOT respond with fear to seeing a snake.
You can imagine that if you have learned to feel stressed or emotionally upset in MANY everyday contexts of life, then your nervous system is going to be dysregulated a lot of the time, and that is going to dramatically impact your health. There’s a reason that 75-90% of all doctor’s visits today are for stress-related ailments. So for everyone, whether their nervous system is consistently dysregulated or not, I think one of the BEST health habits to engage in often if not daily is to do a stress & emotion dump and rewire.
There are a lot of ways to do this and we teach several in our program, but one of our favorite ways to start the process is to journal how you’re feeling EMOTIONALLY, unfiltered, with the intent to destroy it immediately afterwards. Here we want to avoid focusing on story telling “He did this” and then “I said that” or writing a lot about physical symptoms. What is happening is not so much the point here. It’s more so to identify how you FEEL emotionally about what is happening in your life. And we want to do it in an unfiltered way - how you might express it as a child who doesn’t know what is socially acceptable or unacceptable to express. As an example, maybe you are resenting your husband right now because he’s injured and unable to help out around the house, but that seems “unreasonable” to feel because he can’t help it. These kinds of emotional reactions that we deem “inappropriate” are often the ones that dysregulate us the most because we try to stuff them down and deny them. This is the gold, the good stuff that we need to acknowledge, express, and then release for our health and wellbeing.
Ok, so once we have our unfiltered rant out on paper, and we know what we’re struggling with….now we want to help ourselves release and/or transform that emotion. You can destroy the paper before or after you do the next step, whatever is best for you. Like I said, I have found neural retraining techniques to work best here for the release part.
In our program, Wired for Wellness, we have a variety of types of guided processes that help people to do this, and not only to release it, but to actually rewire the emotional associations to that topic in the brain so that that emotional upset stops repeating itself every time you’re in that situation. We can actually teach the brain with these techniques to respond to that trigger in a better way and it’s not that difficult! Doing this rewiring work is what actually frees your nervous system to become calmer and more regulated ON ITS OWN, so that you’re not constantly putting out emotional fires from getting triggered in situations when you don’t need to. That then can dramatically improve your health.
Many techniques out there for helping you calm your nervous system and move through emotions really just work in the moment. You feel better, but it’s temporary. When you use one of our brain rewiring processes, you will see your stress/emotional reaction improve in the moment AND the next time you encounter or think about whatever triggered it. So over time, you end up needing to use those techniques less and less often, but not never because life will always throw new stressors our way. I still use the emotional dump & rewire at least once or twice a week to make sure I’m not letting stress or emotion build up and interfere with my health, but before I did a lot of neural retraining to change my stress programming, I benefited from doing this every day!
I can give you a great example from one of my clients of not only changing her stress response to a trigger in the moment, but also forever after that. When we did our free meet and greet, I led her through a very brief neural retraining process. It took 5 minutes max. She chose to do it on the panic attacks she had been having every time she tried to go to Costco. She started out with a very high anxiety reaction to even thinking about going to Costco, and within a few minutes, she could imagine walking in and shopping and feel completely calm. I gave her something to do right when she got to Costco to reinforce to her brain that it was safe, and the very next time and every time since that she has been to Costco, she has felt totally calm and fine! This is what’s possible with techniques that not only help you release the emotion, but ALSO rewire the brain.
So the main steps to remember are:
Journal how you’re feeling about what’s going on in your life
Remember to focus more on the feelings than the circumstances
Remember to do it in an unfiltered way. NO emotional reaction is unacceptable to feel or acknowledge.
Do a neural retraining process to help yourself release the current stress and emotional upset AND rewire the brain so that reaction is less likely to repeat itself in the future.
Destroy the journal entry
because it may not be helpful or appropriate to express those feelings to your loved ones, and once you’ve released it, you don’t want to stir it back up by re-reading it either.
Alright! I hope that inspired you to take a deeper look at your stress/emotional management routine, and if you don’t have a good one that’s working for you, consider trying this different approach. If you want to try our neural retraining techniques out with support and guidance, join us in the Wired for Wellness Program! The best part is, you can try it out risk free for 14 days.