Movement for Tough Emotions

The connection between our mind and body is pivotal, but often poorly understood. It can be all too easy to ignore the emotion-driven signals in our bodies, or isolate the processes of our mind from our physical symptoms. Symptoms of poor emotional health can include: back pain, insomnia, heart palpitations, dry mouth, fatigue, high blood pressure, and chest pain. Try as we might, our mind-body connection is non-negotiable. Fortunately, this connection can be used to your advantage. Getting in touch with your emotions through the body can be incredibly healing. Here are a few methods for working through your toughest emotions with your body. 

Grief.

Loss can be a seemingly unbearable burden, no matter how many times we’ve faced it before. The grief of a departed dream, relationship, or loved one can have us feeling depressed, unmotivated, and without hope. It’s often our first instinct when we are in the valley of our pain to lay down, take it easy, and take on a more sedentary stance to cope with our lowered energy, but the only thing spending the day in bed will prove to your body is that you are capable of spending the day in bed. If you are feeling grief deeply in your body, the best thing you can give yourself is the gift of exercise. Trying out yoga, cycling, swimming, or even just walking around your block can put you in touch with your body, and the community around you. 

The areas of the body to focus on when dealing with grief are the hips and the chest. Opening these areas up in deep stretches will help you move and release the stuck, emotional energy. Don’t be surprised if stretching your hips out in “lizard pose” stir up your emotions–it’s a good thing! You are allowing your body to work through them and release them in a healthy way.

Disgust.

Neuroscientists believe that disgust evolved in our ancestors as a coping mechanism to help us avoid eating rotten or poisonous food. Nowadays, we hopefully don’t encounter poisoned or foul food nearly as much as our ancestors did, but the impulse of disgust persists in us, sometimes to our significant detriment. If you were working on a hyperactive disgust response with a therapist, you’d undergo exposure therapy where you’d slowly build tolerance for the object of your disgust through prolonged exposure. This is ultimately to leave you with a set of tools to work through any disgust that might disrupt your daily life, so if there’s one thing you can do to help you work through your disgust response, it’s building an understanding of what can make you feel comfortable when your body feels on high alert. 

Overwhelm.

You might feel out of control, like a massive wave is crashing over you and sweeping you off to sea. When you experience high amounts of stress related to uncertainty, your mental and physical health start to deteriorate. The overwhelming feelings become a tangled ball, and the only way to unravel it is to shake it out. Get out of your head and into your body by doing a vinyasa flow, also known as “power yoga.” Tiring the body out with quick movement will help get your endorphins pumping, which will ultimately relax the mind. 

Shame.

When dealing with shame, the most important thing to do is ground yourself in the present moment. You might feel too worked up to successfully ground yourself, so it helps to release all that pent up energy that has built up by running up and down the stairs, doing jumping jacks, dancing wildly to your favorite songs, anything that is high energy and will allow you to release the excess energy that is fighting against you. Then, you breathe deeply through the nose and out the mouth until the emotions feel less intense.

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Sunny Ebsary is an educator, multi-modal artist, and writer specializing in the intersection of myth and mental health. Sunny’s writing walks the line between poetic and logical, giving readers a chance to interface with the mind and imagination. Sunny’s been putting pen to paper since he was a child, writing everything from albums, novels, and plays, to essays, interactive games, and of course, many articles! While studying both psychology and writing, he realized his real passion in life was helping others unlock their creative spark. Whether he’s leading a D&D game, directing a production, or diving deep into the brain, you can be sure Sunny will be ushering you toward finding meaning in your life.