Everyone knows you need to take care of your physical health. We need to exercise, eat right, go to the doctor and dentist, and generally take care of ourselves. But I would argue that maintaining your emotional health is just as important. After all, to paraphrase Dr. Peter Attia, "Who cares how healthy you are if you’re utterly miserable?"
While it's easy to list the things necessary for good physical health, it's a lot harder to list the things to do for good emotional health. Feel better? Be happier? Be less stressed? Those aren't maintenance activities, those are the results of good emotional health. So how do we go about maintaining our emotional health?
Google Maps Analogy
To answer this question, I'd like to introduce an analogy. I call this the Google Maps analogy which envisions our emotional system as a giant network of interconnected roads. And -- it also has the advantage of mirroring our actual neurobiological emotional system. In this analogy, emotional energy -- like stress, difficulty, excitement, anger, fear -- these are the cars that are on our roadways. Sometimes we have a lot more traffic than others. The goal of emotional health is to get the cars to their destinations as efficiently as possible. In other words, to quickly process that emotional energy through our systems.
Good Emotional Health
Some of us -- through luck, biology, or intentional healing -- have a traffic system that works beautifully most of the time. You can see there is a lot of green on the map below. These people have a nice, dense network of interconnected roadways. Sure, there are times and areas of more congestion and more stress, but that traffic can usually be rerouted pretty quickly and distributed across the network because there are a lot of roads and capacity. This is ideal. We can feel stress, grief, disappointment, fear -- and be able to process and integrate that energy so that we don't get stuck and act out in ways that don't serve us.
Poor Emotional Health
But most of us do not have such an efficient emotional system. This could be for a lot of reasons, many of which are beyond our control -- brain chemistry, trauma, poverty, emotional avoidance or neglect. In this case, what we have is something that looks like this -- a sparse network of roads with a lot of construction, roadblocks, and massive amounts of traffic and gridlock shown by all of the red and orange spots. Our roadways are already at max capacity and yet more cars continue to pour onto the system. It's stressful just looking at this map.
In this analogy:
Congestion - are the red and orange areas of high emotionality or stress. Losing a loved one, going through a rough patch in a relationship, having problems with a child, feeling stuck in your job, having too much to do and not enough time to do it. These all represent lots of traffic on your roadways. And unfortunately, poor emotional health leads to decision making that generates more stress and more emotional energy.
Construction Zones - represent trauma -- these are areas that are shut down with no sense of when they might open back up again. Traffic is required to detour around these areas and you lose all of that potential capacity.
Bad and Fewer Roads - And remember, in this less efficient system, we don't have a nice dense network to offload that traffic. Instead we have a sparse system of blocked, overused, not well maintained roads that are backed up for days.
What is the result of having this kind of system? We feel stuck and overwhelmed. We find ourselves reacting to this gridlock with anxiety, depression, acting out, poor relationships, bad decision making, and avoidance behaviors like too much drinking, shopping, eating, procrastination, social media, etc. How do we turn this mess of a traffic map into a dream map like the first one we discussed?
How to Improve the System
Well, what would a traffic engineer do? They might suggest the following things: more road capacity, better road maintainance, and better signs to distribute the traffic more effectively. And if you think these are analogies for emotional work -- you are right on target. Let's start with:
More Capacity (Dense Neural Networks). There are 2 parts to this and the work can be done simultaneously.
Build roads. Start building roads! And I'm literally talking about building more neural connections in your brain. We need all of the capacity we can get, so start building. The most important way to build capacity is physical movement of any kind. 85% of our brain is dedicated to movement, so it will reward us with denser brain networks when we exercise, dance, run around, and climb things. Other than physical movement, here are some other ways to naturally build denser neural networks: be social, get outside and walk in nature, read books, appreciate art, make music, listen to music, take in beauty, get enough sleep, meditate, sit in silence, eat deliberately and well, have fun, dance, write, express yourself, drink in the wonders of the world. You get the idea. All of these activities build connections in your brain, which translate into more emotional capacity. Just an aside, I know that a lot of these activities require time, money, and space – and sometimes we just don't have enough of any of these things. So, no judgment, this is simply a way to begin thinking about how to squeeze building more neural capacity into your life. And at the same time, we also want to
Remove roadblocks. There are so many things that block neural pathways and eventually result in brain atrophy. Some of these are out of our control -- like poverty, high stress, hunger, trauma, past abuse. That said, to the extent that we can, try to remove things that cause a lot of stress in our lives. Let's move away from difficult people who tax our systems. Let's take care of pain, hormone imbalance, or brain chemistry issues. Let's recognize that some of the ways we have coped (like addiction, procrastination, isolation) are now backfiring and are causing more stress. Let's try to avoid situations that cause a lot of fear and instability. In another post I will talk about facing our fear to process trauma and pain, but for now, we are just freeing up capacity by removing the roadblocks that shut down emotional energy and atrophy portions of your brain. The next step is
Road Maintenance (Self Compassion). We have all driven in areas or cities where road maintenance is not prioritized and it is rough. The road is bumpy and uneven, the signage is confusing, the potholes threaten to swallow your car. It's unpleasant, it's dangerous, and it can cause accidents and delays. It is our responsibility to maintain our roads and this is where Self Compassion comes in. Sure you can build all of the road capacity you want, but unless you practice being mindful, validating your feelings, and taking care of and talking to yourself in a loving, caring way -- the traffic isn't going to flow smoothly. It's going to be bumpy, hard going, and cause damage to your car. It's an incredibly important part of the process -- so don't forget it. And finally, we need
Good Signs (Tools and Skills for Moving Emotion). How are we going to know to take advantage of all of these new, well maintained roads unless we have some good signs to let us know when to take a detour or a different route? Signs represent the tools and skills that you learn to intentionally start processing your emotions. Gently turn toward your emotions and begin moving and unsnarling that traffic -- one car at a time. It's the journaling, talking things out with a friend or a therapist, using new skills to recognize your feelings and label them, knowing how to calm yourself and regulate your emotions, allowing your feelings without judgment and with compassion. Each of these skills allows you to distribute traffic so that you can take advantage of your growing emotional capacity. Without these skills, all of your cars will still all be stuck in gridlock on I-95 instead of using back roads to get home sooner.
We started this blog with a question about what is required to maintain emotional health. And now we know! Focus on building emotional capacity, maintain your roads with self compassion, and learn some skills to distribute and move that traffic faster through your emotional network.
In a future post, I will write more about the skills needed to get the traffic flowing better in congested areas (emotional processing) and how to work through construction zones and reclaim that neural capacity (trauma processing). Comments are always appreciated and thanks for reading.
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