“Use your head to live with heart”
— the message on my teabag today
Which reminds me to ask you: Have you ever traveled from your head to your heart?
Keep on reading, this may just change your life….
Yes, I am talking about the most important journey you can make in your life…
“The 18 inch journey from your head to your heart”, as one of my gurus would say.
Still wondering what I am talking about? Let’s look closer…
Let’s say you have a long drawn out complex patient encounter. The patient seems to be on board with you throughout the visit. At the end of the 45 minute long visit, you have given 3 referrals, filled 5 medications, and recommended a few lifestyle changes. In a quick change of mind, the patient declines the medications and referrals. He goes on to blame the office for charging him a copay for the visit where nothing is being done for him.
- How do you feel at that moment?
Shocked? Sad? Angry maybe? ….A little frustrated? …..Maybe even rejected? Is there any other emotion in your mind? Or maybe just meh? Or you are just not able to put your finger on it?
2. What is your next action?
If you are like most of us superwomen in medicine, our next steps in that order would be:
– notice you feel ‘off’
– think of all the work we need to get to
– tell yourself, “I can handle this”, “I don’t have time for this” or maybe even “Why am I feeling off, am I weak? I cannot be weak, I am a professional woman”
– stuff it to the bottom of your mind
– brush off the discomfort from your face
– put on your professional face
– get involved with the next activity
And we fool ourselves in a way, and become experts at looking good on the outside, even when we do not feel good on the inside. More so if growing up we were asked to “Grow up and deal with it”.
We have consciously sent the emotion packing, without realizing it is lurking in our emotional tank (metaphorically our heart). Like deleting something from our desktop only to find it in our recycle bin…it’s still in our system without being obvious to us.
Oftentimes we find it hard to have a few moments to ourselves to nurse our hearts, once we have taken care of the tasks in our life.
3. What happens when we keep on stuffing our emotions this way?
We teach ourselves to lose touch with our emotions. Soon we become numb to them.
Over a period of time, the unresolved emotions build up. They hint to us in many ways, asking to be released… Because it is causing us pain internally, even though we consciously try to deny it.
Some of them become emotional triggers…more on that in another post.
And some of them add stress to our daily life, speeding up our way to burnout. Which is what we are trying to prevent, Lovely!
And burnout can lead to other emotions too. If we do not process these emotions, they prolong burnout.
4. So how do we stop this whirlpool of emotions and burnout?
By getting in touch with our emotions.
Did you know that humans can experience around 34,000 emotions? Well, branching off of 6 primary emotions, that is. (Remember primary colors and secondary colors? Pretty similar!)
So you see, some emotions can be complex. If we felt ‘meh’ or had trouble identifying the emotion from the above example, chances are we were having complex emotions or being numb to our emotions. Complex emotions have several layers to the emotion at that moment.
Which makes it even more important to be in touch with our emotions.
So that we can:
- become experts at identifying them
- become experts at processing them
- so that they don’t haunt us in the future.
And at times, it takes more than one look at the emotion in any moment to unravel and decode it, to create peace from it.
We have to use our heads to make a conscious intention, to be in touch with our emotions and live from the heart.
So Beautiful, what has been your experience with emotions?
