Episode 46: Just Jump In! (It's Only Freezing For a Minute)

If you’re like most people, you probably spend a lot of energy trying not to feel certain emotions—but what if the fear and resistance are actually worse than the feeling itself? This week, I’m sharing a mindset shift (and a cold plunge moment from girls' camp) that could change the way you think about discomfort. 

Join me for our August Workshop inside the Think New Thoughts Academy to go deeper on this topic!  

Schedule a free mini session to get help applying something you've heard on the podcast. 

Full Transcript:

You're listening to the Think New Thoughts Podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 46. Just jump in, it's only freezing for a minute.

I'm Emily Ricks, and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way, so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.

Hey, how's it going? What fun things are you up to this summer? Last week, I got to go camping with the girls in our youth group at church.

We call it girls camp. We got to paddleboard at a lake. We played games.

We sang silly camp songs. We had quiet time in the mountains to read scriptures and journal and pray. We gathered around the fire to talk about spiritual things.

The last day, we went whitewater rafting with the boys in our youth group at church, which was super fun. So yeah, it was a great time. I also got to teach a life coaching class, which I of course loved.

We gathered in camp chairs in a little clearing in the woods and talked about what to do with negative emotion. So for today's episode, I'm going to give you the high points of that class. The main idea is that if you're willing to lean into negative emotion and choose to fully feel it, you can actually experience more joy in your life than if you are pushing away negative emotions and trying not to feel them.

It's counterintuitive, but really powerful. So let's talk about it. I like to think of emotions like ice cream.

Some flavors taste really good and some don't. So the emotions, the ice cream flavors that most of us really like are some version of happiness. We probably like to feel excited or inspired, hopeful, trusting, calm, motivated, energized, empowered, loving.

These flavors taste good. And some emotions don't feel so good, like feeling embarrassed or discouraged, insecure, inadequate, hopeless, dejected, powerless, frustrated. If those were ice cream flavors, they wouldn't be as popular because people don't choose to feel those.

Most of us think if we could design a perfect life, it would be getting to feel positive emotions as often as possible. Like if you think of a pie chart, and so a circle where yellow is the happy emotions, the delicious ice cream flavors, and gray would be the not so happy emotions, the yucky flavors of ice cream. Like think about if you could design a perfect life, how much yellow would you want in there? And how much gray would you want in there? I think most people are like, yeah, probably a hundred percent yellow and no gray at all would be a great life.

Or maybe like 98% yellow, 95%, a little bit of negative emotion in there, but not too much. Here's what I believe is true. I learned this at the life coach school.

Real life is 50, 50. Half the time you get to feel positive emotions and half the time you're going to feel the other kind. So if you think about it in a pie graph, it's like you have a circle and literally 50% of it is yellow, happy, positive emotions.

And the other half of the circle is gray. Those ones aren't going to feel as good. And they, at the life coach school, they call that the 50, 50 rule.

So here's the thing. If you accept that and decide to be okay with it, that 50% of the time you're going to have some version of a negative emotion, then you can layer on lots of positive ice cream flavors on top of those like acceptance, which feels really good and gratitude for your whole life experience. Gratitude feels great and connection and serenity.

But if you argue with the reality, if you try to push away the 50% of negative emotion, that's just going to naturally be part of your life. And you're always trying to get it to go away so you can be happy. Then you're going to layer on frustration and self-pity and anger and resistance.

If we believe that we're supposed to be happy all the time, then when that 50% negative emotion comes along, when we feel worried or nervous or inadequate or disappointed or embarrassed or self-conscious, then we freak out and we go, Oh no, a negative emotion. Oh, this is gross. I don't want to feel it.

Make it go away. Here's the thing. An emotion is chemicals vibrating in your body.

That's it. Some of them feel great. You're going to like feeling them and some of them don't feel great and you're not going to like it, but an emotion doesn't harm you.

Your body is capable of processing the emotion. It's just chemicals vibrating in your body. But most of us have picked up the belief somewhere along the way that certain emotions are terrible and awful.

And we want to do anything we can to keep from having to feel them. And then we expend all sorts of mental, physical, and emotional energy, trying not to feel whatever emotions we don't want, thinking that this is all making our lives better. And what I say is all that energy expended trying not to feel is actually making our lives worse.

So think of an emotion or two that you really don't like to feel. Maybe you hate feeling embarrassed. Maybe you hate feeling overwhelmed.

That's fine. You're normal. What do you do when you're trying not to feel that emotion? There are three main categories of what most people do to try to not feel unpleasant emotions.

Try to not taste those flavors of ice cream that are gross. The first one is resist. So resisting is when you try to talk yourself out of experiencing the emotion.

When you believe that it's bad or wrong to feel it. This usually comes in the form of thoughts like, Oh, I shouldn't feel sad. I shouldn't be angry.

Or, Oh, I don't want to feel anxious. I'm not anxious. Resisting an emotion is sort of like pressing a beach ball down under the water.

You keep pressing it down, but it keeps coming back up. And it takes energy to press that beach ball down. It feels like it protects us from having to feel the negative emotion.

But in reality, you feel resistance and pressure and anxiety constantly when you're trying not to feel an emotion by resisting it. So that's resisting. The second thing most people do if they're trying not to feel an unpleasant emotion is avoid.

So avoiding is distracting yourself with another activity that will temporarily rescue you from having to feel the uncomfortable emotion. Okay. So if you're avoiding, you're thinking like, Oh, I don't like this emotion.

I'll think I'll just pull out my phone. Maybe I'll buy something, eat something, watch something, move on and check something else off my list. Anything to avoid having to feel that super gross emotion that I don't like avoiding is like pouring ice into a pot of boiling water.

It does get the water to cool off for a few minutes and not spill over. But once the pot heats up again, you'll just keep needing more ice. A lot of people tell me that they resist first.

And when that doesn't work, then they go into avoiding. So they try to talk themselves. Oh, I don't feel that.

I don't feel it. I want to feel that I shouldn't feel that. And then when that doesn't work, it's just like, forget it.

I'm going to go do something else. So what do you do to avoid your emotions? A lot of people end up overeating, over Facebooking, over shopping, like consuming in whatever way to try to run away from what you're feeling. And that's kind of like, if you have a broken arm and you just keep taking ibuprofen, you can get the pain to lessen.

But what you really need long-term is a cast to heal the broken bone. The pain is trying to tell you what you need, but you're not listening because you just want the pain to go away. So that's avoid.

Sometimes we call this buffering. Buffering is doing something to try to get away from feeling an emotion you don't want to feel. And then the thing you're doing has a net negative result in your life.

The third thing we do to try not to feel a negative emotion is we react. If you're reacting to your negative emotion, you try to diffuse the intensity of the emotion by throwing it on other people. Maybe you yell at somebody or slam a door.

Maybe you argue with the injustice of your life or wallow in self-pity. If you're reacting, you might gossip and spread rumors about other people or give them the silent treatment all in an attempt to scoot the emotion over to them to get it off of yourself. Like, Oh, I don't like this.

Get it off of me. Let's fling it on somebody else. So reacting is like flinging mud all over to try to get it off of you.

But in the end, you end up with even more of a mess and lots of mud everywhere. So think about how you might resist or avoid or react to your emotions. We feel these chemical vibrations in our body that feel unpleasant.

They feel uncomfortable. And so we try to press it down. We try to ignore it or we try to fling it on somebody else.

All of this energy trying to not feel emotions. But here's the thing, even with all that effort to resist or avoid or react, you still end up feeling negative emotion. The ones you're trying to push down are going to come back up.

The ones you're trying to avoid are still there deep down, even when you're ignoring them. And in the end, you'll usually feel regret or shame or frustration when you have resisted or avoided or reacted. And it doesn't work.

The girls at the camp were talking about how they sometimes will numb out by doom scrolling on their phone when they don't want to feel an emotion. And then they said, yeah, but then I feel guilty afterward. I feel so much regret, or sometimes I even feel ashamed for all that wasted time.

Maybe you felt that too. So in an attempt to try to not feel negative emotion, we actually create more. So here's what you can do instead of all that nonsense.

I learned this at the life coach school, and it's really simple, but it's amazing to me how seldom most of us use this strategy instead of resisting, avoiding or reacting instead of buffering to try not to feel. Here's what you can do. Just allow the emotion.

That's it. Don't fight it. Don't run away.

Just let it in. Allow the chemicals to vibrate in your body. Name the emotion.

Ah, this is embarrassment. It feels hot in my cheeks. It feels tight in my chest.

This is the chemical vibration that I get to feel right now. I can do it. This emotion isn't going to harm me.

It's just chemicals in my body. I can feel this. It will pass.

This is part of my life. I can experience it. Bring it on.

It's so fascinating to me. I see this in myself too. So fascinating that we would rather run to 25 distractions than simply feel the emotion and move on with life.

Feeling negative emotion is kind of like getting wet. You know, when you go to the pool or a lake or whatever, and you know, it's going to be cold to get in the water. And so you feel a little hesitant to jump in.

When we were at the lake at our camp, I definitely was like, I don't want to be cold. I don't want to get wet. I'm just going to stay dry.

And I watched one of the girls just jump right into the lake. And she was cold for a minute, but then she was having so much fun the rest of the time. The last day of our camp, we went whitewater rafting.

And as we were floating down the river, I noticed I was thinking a lot about not wanting to be wet or cold, right? Like, Oh, I don't want to get splashed. I don't want to get wet. I definitely don't want to get flipped because that would be freezing.

And then I was chuckling, thinking of my life coaching workshop and realizing that what I teach about emotions is instead of getting in the raft of life and spending your whole life, trying not to get wet, trying not to feel any negative emotion, just embrace that part of life is feeling negative emotion and you can handle it. So I was shifting as I was on the raft into, you know what? Actually, I do want to get wet because I probably am going to. That's part of the fun of it when we go through the rapids and get splashed.

So I'm probably going to get wet and that's going to be cold, but it's also going to be fun. So it'll be fine. And I was thinking like, why would I come on the raft in the first place if my primary objective is to not get wet? Like, no, I actually do want to get wet.

So seriously, as I was having these thoughts, we ended up on a rock. So the left side of our boat got stuck on a rock and our guide told everybody to lean in. And as we did, we flipped over to the right side and it was freezing.

It was shocking. I screamed. It was scary.

It was disorienting. I had to get out from under the raft. It was so cold.

I felt panic, but eventually I got my bearings, swam to shore and then got back to the boat. And about 10 minutes later, I actually felt amazing. I had this adrenaline rush.

I wasn't cold at all. I was like, I feel alive. I feel great.

And the rest of the ride, I was happy to get splashed. I was like, bring it on. I've already dunked all the way in.

At one point it was raining and I was like, yeah, this is kind of cold, but it's also really cool to see the drops on the water. And it's cool that the rain doesn't cancel our experience. They're just going to raft anyway.

And I was like, how many times in my life am I going to get the opportunity to raft in the rain? This is cool. It was fun. And after that I had zero anxiety about flipping because I was like, yep, it would be cold and it would be scary and we'd get through it and then it'll be over.

So as a human being on this planet, you're in a raft and you're in for a wild ride. It's going to be fun. It's also going to be scary sometimes, intense sometimes, really beautiful sometimes, and you're going to get wet.

You're going to feel negative emotion probably about half the time. And that's exactly how it's supposed to be. You can feel worried and anxious and resistant to this negative emotion and spend your energy trying to prevent it, which will create more anxiety and also frustration and exhaustion.

Or you can accept that negative emotion is part of your 50 50 experience in this life. And you can choose to dive in, get wet and have an amazing time. It's understandable to not want to get cold or wet.

It's understandable to not want to feel chemical vibrations in your body of the ice cream flavors that don't taste very good, but I want to invite you to just jump in. It's only freezing for a minute and then it will get better. Your emotions are there for a reason and ultimately they will help you know what you need.

And as you listen to your emotions and jump in and get wet and feel them rather than resisting or avoiding or reacting, you can then layer on positive emotions like connection and courage and faith and acceptance and gratitude. In August, inside the Think New Thoughts Academy, we'll be doing a 60-minute workshop where I'll guide you through discovering the ways you might be resisting, avoiding or reacting to your emotions. And I'll help you learn how to allow your emotions and how to feel them instead of looking to your phone or looking to your refrigerator or looking to whatever other buffers you may tend to turn to for relief.

I know it seems like it will just be cold and wet and not fun to feel your emotions, seems like it would be better to just push them away. And I'm not going to lie to you, negative emotions don't feel good. When you feel those chemical vibrations, when you fully allow them in your body, it will be unpleasant and uncomfortable, it will.

But I promise you, if you just jump in, it's only freezing for a minute and then you will feel alive and refreshed and clear-headed and ready to take on whatever rapids or adventures await you around the next bend. To join me for our August workshop, click the link in the show notes or go to emilyrickscoaching.com forward slash join. As a member of the Think New Thoughts Academy, you can come to the workshop live or get access to the replay.

This is life-changing stuff, my friend. I'd love to share it with you in more depth in our August workshop. So if you've been enjoying the podcast, come check it out.