Episode Transcript
What if I told you that avoiding your feelings is keeping you from toned,
sculpted arms?
Sounds extreme? It’s not.
Most women think the biggest obstacle to getting strong, lean arms is a
lack of willpower or motivation. But what if the real issue is that you're
avoiding emotions—fear, self-doubt, frustration—by skipping workouts,
staying “too busy,” or scrolling mindlessly through social media?
In this episode, we’re exposing the sneaky ways you avoid emotions and
sabotage your results without even realizing it.
Hey everyone! Welcome to The Arm Coach podcast, episode 50! Today,
we're going to talk about why you need to feel all your feelings-
especially when it comes to toning your arms and taking control of your
body.
Here are the things I'm going to cover with you today. I'm going
to talk to you, so you can get very, very clear, about what a
feeling is. What a feeling or an emotion is. And we're going to talk
about why you might avoid your negative emotions. You know if
you do. We're going to talk about the difference between pain
that we all need to feel as human beings, and pain that is not
necessary but somehow we have learned to create it. And I'm
sure when I talk about examples you'll be able to relate to them.
I'm also going to teach you and we're going to discuss what it
looks like and sounds like when you are doing something to
avoid feeling a feeling, —whether it’s reaching for food, skipping
workouts, keeping yourself overly busy, or procrastinating when
things feel overwhelming.
If you're listening to this, you know that most of the listeners who
are trying to tone and sculpt their arms, the thing that they do
when they get an uncomfortable feeling, is to eat until the
uncomfortable feeling passes or until their attention is focused
now on their overeating. Avoiding emotions can show up in many
ways, and emotional eating is just one example.
We're also going to talk about why you must experience the
clean pain of life. Why it's necessary. And what happens when
you avoid your negative emotions. And then we're going to cover
what happens when you allow yourself to feel everything, and
that's our goal, and how to do it. So stay tuned as we dive right
in and uncover why feeling your feelings is key to becoming the
strong, toned, and confident woman you want to be.
So, here's the story. Something happens in the world. There’s a
situation, a circumstance, a comment from someone. Ok. And if
you're human, and you are, you're going to have a thought about
it. If it enters your life, you're going to think about what's
happening. Well that thought that you have, and there are 1000s
of different thoughts you could have about the same situation,
but the thought that you have is what creates your feelings, your
emotions. We're going to use them interchangeably, feelings and
emotions. The important thing about the feeling, aside from how
you experience it, is that your feelings lead you to the actions
that you take, or the actions that you don't take. And when it
comes to toning your arms, this matters.
So feelings are pretty important. And if we want to make
changes, the place where we want to make them is between the
feeling and the action you take. So we're going to look into that
more and more in future sessions. But right now it's enough to
know that something happens, you have a thought about it, that
thought creates a vibration in your body. And think of the
vibrations as a dial, like a dial on a radio that adjusts the volume.
Well your emotions are just like that volume. They could be
extremely high. High vibration, like excitement or feeling frantic,
or feeling terror. Those could be extremely high. And then on the
other end of the spectrum, you could experience the vibrations in
your body as extremely low. And it could be low, peaceful. But all
the way at the low end spectrum, could be depression. And I
want to remind you that if you do feel a very strong low vibration
of depression, and it doesn't pass, and you can't seem to get rid
of it, please remember that that is when you should seek
professional help. Because it might be hard to come out of it,
because your vibration is so low, you don't have the energy to
take the steps to look at your thoughts or take different actions.
Think about your feelings, what they are. If you have a thought of,
‘Wow, I did really well at work’, then you might feel something
like pride. And what you might do when you feel pride or proud,
is you might tell people about it, you might tell some close
friends or family because you feel so good. Your thought, always
leads you to the feeling, which always leads you to something
that you do or don't do.
Let's take a look at why you avoid your negative emotions. I
mean why not just feel them? Why not just be sad when sad
feelings come up? Why do so many of us run away by grabbing
some cookies or turning on the television so that we don't have
to feel sad? A lot of it comes from our childhood. We are
conditioned to protect ourselves. And when we're very young
and we're dependent, we are conditioned to want someone to
take care of us. If we were soothed with distractions at a very
young age—whether it was food, television, or being told to
“shake it off”—that's what we're going to do for ourselves when
we grow up. So when we feel something that we're conditioned
to think is uncomfortable, like fear, discomfort, uncertainty, then
we run away from those negative feelings. And you might run
away in different ways than your friends or your neighbors. You
might eat. You might smoke when you’re feeling tension. You
might have a drink if you’re feeling socially awkward or anxious.
You might scroll endlessly on social media. You might skip
workouts, or keep yourself too busy to face what you’re feeling.
Basically doing things that are not taking you towards what
you're trying to accomplish, because you're feeling
uncomfortable and insecure about what you're going to do, and
so the action that you take, is you procrastinate.
So there's a lot of different reasons that you might avoid your
negative emotions, but the big overall umbrella is they're
uncomfortable. And for whatever reasons, you have not been
trained to be able to sit with discomfort. You possibly have been
trained to believe that you can't handle discomfort, which is
absolutely not true. But if that's the way you have grown up, and
that's what you've been taught, that whenever you have an
uncomfortable feeling, it's not going to feel good and you're
going to want to get away from it.
There is a difference between uncomfortable feelings that we
need to feel in life, and then there's uncomfortable feelings that
we create by our thoughts. So let's say that something seriously
negative happens in your life. You have a loss. There’s a person
that you are close to, who's gone from your life, whether it's the
end of a relationship or death, or you've had a major life change.
This is known as clean. Pain is pain that we are meant to feel as
humans in the world. We're not meant to run away from it. And in
fact we're equipped to handle it. But there's other pain, and that
is created pain. And what I mean by that is, something happens
in the world, any situation, and you spin it in such a negative way
that you make the situation appear worse to you. And you create
the feelings of fear and worry and anxiety, and negative, negative
feelings. This is an old saying, and I don't really know who to
attribute it to, it’s from the psychology world, but what it says is
‘pain is a part of life, but suffering is optional’. So know that
some of your pain is real. You should feel sad if somebody is not
well, or dying, or sick, or leaving your life. We're meant to feel
pain, but we're not meant to feel pain over things that are not
huge, and life changing, and things that we can handle, but we're
afraid of.
So think about what it looks like and sounds like when you do
something to avoid a painful emotion. Maybe you skip your
workout because you’re afraid of failing. Let’s say you planned to
do an arm workout, but you start thinking, “I’m too old for this.
What if I can’t keep up? What if I don’t see results?” That fear
makes you procrastinate, and before you know it, the day is over,
and you’ve skipped another workout. Or maybe you feel
overwhelmed. You think, “I have so much to do—where do I even
start?” Instead of picking up the dumbbells for a quick session,
you freeze, feeling like it’s too much. Or maybe you keep yourself
“too busy.” You fill your schedule with errands and
responsibilities so you don’t have to face the discomfort of
learning something new. Deep down, you worry that starting an
arm-toning routine might be hard, so you convince yourself you
just don’t have time. These are all ways women avoid emotions
instead of feeling them and moving forward anyway. Because it
takes you away from the pain. Temporarily, of course. But it
lessens the pain because it distracts you. It takes you away.
Why am I saying that you have to experience the clean pain of
life? Is that really true? I believe it is. I believe that part of your
human experience is to allow things to come through you, things
to pass through you. Just as your thoughts come into your mind,
and whether you act on them or not, if you just allow them, they
will pass through you. So will the feelings that your thoughts
create. Feelings don't stay, because thoughts don't stay.
Thoughts change. One of the reasons that you must experience
the clean pain of life is that you can't feel the really highs, the
positive feelings, if you avoid the negative. If you are dulling out
your feelings by escaping, then you can't selectively dull out the
negative feelings. You are also inadvertently dulling out the
positive feelings. And I know that you don't want to do that. You
know you don't want to do that. You were designed to
experience highs and lows of life. You're designed to be able to
handle all of them. It's just that at some point you were taught
that it's better to not feel that. We have to get away. We have to
escape. And that's really how numbing and emotional eating is
born.
Now, let's say that you've become really, really good at numbing
or buffering whenever negative emotion comes up.
So you've avoided for years, really facing and looking in the eye,
negative feelings. You've avoided them. That's your habit. What
happens if you do that, is that you become stuck. And you never
will grow, you never will learn how to experience them. How to
get through them. So you reinforce the habit of always avoiding
them. And you never learn how to cope. The thing is, that when
you avoid your negative emotions and you distract yourself with
food or television or scrolling, your life stays small. And you
disconnect from yourself. You disconnect because you're not
allowing your whole experience. If eating, or smoking, or
drinking, or procrastinating, or any means of distracting yourself
from a feeling is done again, and again, and again, and again,
that becomes your habit. And that habit becomes reinforced.
And it can be connected to anything that you practice. So if you
run to food when you feel any kind of an emotional distress, you
have created that habit, and then you're reinforcing the habit.
So what would happen if you allowed yourself to feel everything?
Everything. No matter how afraid you were. You would be free.
You would be connected to yourself. The good, and the bad, and
the ugly, and the wonderful part of life. And you would become a
master at living your life, at taking care of your emotional life.
You'd have no fear. There would be no extra fat and flab from
running away. You would feel proud of yourself. It's an
accomplishment to allow yourself to feel your feelings. It feels
really good. And if you're feeling your feelings, and you're not
eating emotionally or distracting yourself in some other way, what
will happen then is that it will be so much easier to take the
actions that truly support your body and your goals.
And that's your goal. You’d be free. You wouldn’t need
distractions to avoid discomfort. You’d feel strong—not just in
your arms, but in your entire life. You’d trust yourself. And that’s
what leads to real, lasting change.
Now how do you do this? Okay, I want you to purposely look for
feelings that are trying to come up in you, that you've tried to
drown out, and welcome them. Welcome all the emotions. You
can do them. Walk towards them, instead of run away from them.
It's the opposite thing that you usually do. And identify them.
Name them. Call them what they are. And look at it as an
opportunity. I'm going to do fear, I'm going to feel anger. I'm
going to feel sadness, I'm going to feel loneliness. Because when
you do, those emotions will pass through you. You won't have to
run away from them and add extra fat and flab to your body that
you don't need. You won't have to distract yourself with activities
that may not be healthy for you. You will feel these feelings, and
they will pass through you. I want you to know also, that you can
clean up your feelings by looking at your thoughts that are
creating them. You can also let them pass, and you can also
decide how you want to feel. How do you want to feel today?
What will it take? What thoughts will it take for you to feel that
feeling? And say out loud to yourself. ‘I'm feeling “blank”
because I'm thinking, “blank”. Make sure you know that those
things are connected.
So for now, what I want you to focus on is for one day, just one
day, I’d love for you to check in with yourself each hour. Set your
phone, set your computer, set a clock, set a timer, just check in
and ask one simple question. What am I feeling right now? I'm
not talking about a physical sensation like ‘I'm cold. I’m tired. I'm
hungry’. Although you do want to take care of yourself if you are.
But more of ‘what is my emotion? What is the emotion I'm feeling
right now?’ And sit with it for a few minutes, until at least you’re
able to describe it. I want you to be able to know what you're
feeling and describe it for one day.
If you’re ready to go deeper, I have a program called Arms By Kristine,
where I teach women how to break through self-doubt, stay motivated,
and create a body they love—without relying on willpower or extreme
workouts. If that sounds like something you need, check out the link in
the show notes. And if you just want to keep listening, that’s great too!
I’m so happy to have you here.
I’ll see you back next week, where we’ll continue working on creating
the arms, the body and the mindset that lets you live as the confident,
strong woman you were meant to be.
