What is your Emotional Capacity?

Today I chat about the 4 basic things that impact our emotional capacity, and one may surprise you!

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Transcript

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Welcome back to Feel and Find Out. I'm your host, Raquel Deluccia. And I know in my last episode, I said I would be doing a series on three different types of difficult conversations that couples get into. And as I was sort of preparing those episodes, I'm thinking this is more like a workshop and something that I really want to train on outside of a podcast episode. So in my true ADHD fashion, I am changing courses and directions. And today's episode is going to be a little different and about a different topic. And I will hopefully be creating something a little more in-depth regarding those difficult conversations in your relationship. So as we pivot, I would really like to talk today about something that feels kind of simple when it comes to our emotional capacity. And if you've not thought of the term emotional capacity and what that means for you, I really invite you to sit with that a bit and question what yours might be. And there are basic things in life that impact our emotional capacity and we don't even realize. So you may be asking, okay, Raquel, what does capacity for your emotions, like what does that even mean? It basically means how much space and energy do you have inside to feel and navigate and experience your own emotions and or the emotions of someone else, someone you care about. So do you have the space? Do you have the capacity, right? Like you go into, I don't know, a bar or a restaurant and it says max capacity, you know, 800 people, 50 people. Any more than that, that place is no longer safe, right? That establishment shouldn't be running past their capacity of people. So when you think of emotional capacity, we have a threshold that we reach in any given day that prevents us from taking on more. And so I want to talk about basic things that will impact the emotional capacity you have. The first on this list is sleep. Okay. I told you this was going to be basic, right? Well, I don't think we value or prioritize sleep enough. Every human being requires a different amount of rest per night to feel their best, to function most optimally the next day. Me personally, I need a lot of sleep. I need ideally eight, nine hours, maybe more, uh, of straight sleep to feel refreshed and like I am going to have a great day. When that sleep is interrupted in any way, you know, right now my dog is waking up in the night because she is having puppies, she's pregnant, and she has to go to the bathroom in the night. And that is pretty difficult for me to wake up at 2 a.m. and let her out. Now, you know, if I can fall back to sleep, I will be all right. If I for some reason can't, then I'll have kind of a difficult day the next day emotionally. And as a therapist, I really have to protect my emotional capacity, right? So other people, you know, don't need as much sleep as I do. Like I know functioning adults who are like, I'm good off of five hours. You know, five hours of sleep, I'm ready to go, I'm refreshed, I can conquer the day. Now, sometimes we can't control the amount of sleep we get. You know, some of you might be new parents out there. When I had my babies, sleep was very hard to come by. And you just have to kind of survive. But what you'll notice with maybe new parents or, you know, a puppy, right? You're waking up in the night or a sick child, or you yourself don't feel well, or your partner snores and that wakes you up consistently, right? Um you'll notice that the next day you may not have any bandwidth for a minor inconvenience, for something that creates irritability in you, for maybe something to go wrong or unexpected, for that friend to call and say, Oh my gosh, I really need support right now. You know, you may not have capacity, but guess what? If you're not aware of that, so if you don't have this true self-awareness of your own emotions and your own space to manage emotions, then you might talk to that friend and be short with them. Or you may find that you're really impatient with your kids and you can't figure out why, or you have a bad day at work, or you're just not the same, you know, empathetic, loving, caring person. Maybe you usually are. And so we really have to pay attention to are we getting quality sleep for our individual brains and bodies that allow our brains to do what it needs to do for us to be successful in our functioning. Sleep restarts everything. It's like charging your iPhone battery to 100%. You know, if you don't plug it in, guess what? It's not gonna charge, it's gonna die soon. Okay, it's gonna, it's the battery life is gone pretty quickly. It's the same thing with us. So making sure you get quality sleep if you have trouble sleeping, making it a priority to get some help around that, to look at what are my habits at nighttime, right? Am I on my phone a lot? Am I in a place of higher stress in the evening? You know, have I, you know, do I need to do something that's like taking a hot shower? Or, you know, do I need some type of grounding after the day to prepare my body and allow my body to rest? You know, sometimes seeing a doctor or seeing a therapist regarding sleep issues can be really important. Sometimes our mental health impacts our sleep, sometimes anxiety, you know, or depression, and you just feel like you can't stay asleep or fall asleep. Um, there's typically a multitude of reasons why sleep can be impacted, and I definitely suggest, you know, don't let that be something you don't pay attention to. Get help for that. So that's the first thing, okay? Getting quality sleep. The second thing is food. So I don't know about you, but if I don't eat, I get angry, hangry. I am crabby, I will be such an irritable person. Uh, my energy depletes very quickly. I'm even lightheaded. I'm someone who's super sensitive to, you know, what I'm eating or not eating and the type of food I'm eating. So it's not just eating, but also the type of food and the time of day that you're eating. So think about, you know, the last time that you got really hungry, and you know, maybe it was you didn't get to eat lunch at work, you're on your way home, you're starving. You get home, your partner's there, they just didn't get working on dinner or they weren't sure what you were doing for dinner that evening. And you're pissed. You know, like you can't even say to them, oh man, I'm just so hungry, let's figure out dinner right away. You might just be pissed and maybe snap at them when they ask how your day was, because your emotional capacity based on your lack of nutrients is low. Or you come home and your partner really had a tough day and wants to work through it with you, and you haven't eaten in hours and your body has absolutely no fuel. Food is fuel. Okay, food keeps us functioning. It's like gasoline in a car, you know, it's like getting those maintenance, oil changes, like we just need it, but we need it every day throughout the day. So if you are having difficulty with anger, with irritability, with mood swings, okay. So, you know, if you notice you have a meal and you feel pretty good, and then hours go by and you're not sure why, but suddenly you're super irritable. You have to check in with your body. Is your body giving you hunger cues? Some individuals are not really tapped into their own hunger cues and don't even notice that they're hungry. A lot of people with ADHD struggle with this, where they'll be so focused on something else that food doesn't even occur to them and then suddenly they are starving. Now, me personally, I am so like attuned with how my body feels at all times that I know the moment I'm hungry and I like have to eat. It actually sort of annoys me that I can't space it out a little bit because I will be so just emotionally unwell. And again, like I have a caseload of clients to support. I have two children to be there for. I have people in my life I care about that I'm there for and have relationships with. And I need to make sure I'm functioning and have emotional capacity for my five-year-old, for my teenager, okay, for my clients and for myself, right? You know, it helps that I can feel capable in a moment to navigate my own emotions that may, you know, shift based on any given event. You know, I went to my son's T ball practice yesterday. It was, it's five o'clock from five to six, and I was uh pretty hungry. I had a little bit of food, but definitely not enough. Like I hadn't eaten enough during the day. And it was super windy at practice. A lot of the other children were kind of being unruly. Mine was being very well behaved, which I am very proud of. But I found myself so irritated, like unreasonably irritated that it was windy, that it was colder than I thought it would be, that the sand is blowing everywhere, that my kid's hat's falling off as he's running. And I just wasn't able to sort through that and settle that in a way that would have been probably easier to do if I had eaten. So make sure you understand what you need to maintain healthy blood sugar, that you're at least trying to get in. I think three meals like breakfast, lunch, dinner, just to sustain yourself throughout an entire wake cycle, right? Like if you're awake from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., how much fuel food are you putting in your body? Same goes for water. I'll just put water in here with food, like those two things, staying hydrated and staying well fed, and also putting good things in your body, like healthier foods into your body. You know, I'm not, I will still eat snacks and things that I enjoy. So I'm not here to preach about like a total organic diet, but you will feel a difference based on whether you eat a whole bag of chips as a snack or a protein shake, right? So being mindful of the type of nutrients and balancing those nutrients between proteins, healthy fats, and carbohydrates, and learning to manipulate those in order to give you the best amount of energy is also going to help your emotional capacity. Okay, so the next basic thing that will impact emotional capacity is movement. How much are you moving in a day? And this could go either way. Maybe you're not moving enough, maybe you're moving too much, right? And so you're not even getting a moment to rest or sit down. And I think it can be either of these things in a variety of careers, you know, that we may have. I sit a lot during my day. I honestly don't get enough movement. So, you know, there was a time where I was very active. And before I hurt my shoulder, I was doing yoga a lot, at least once or twice a week. And that was enough for me, you know, as well as say walking, um, you know, after work to feel like I was moving enough where my stress and my emotions would also be able to move. Because if we, if you think about feelings, I say this often, feelings just need to move, right? We need to let them exist so they can just move from one state into the other, kind of like a wave. It's when we don't allow them to move that they get stuck and they fester. And, you know, imagine a pressure cooker that, you know, needed to be released 10 minutes ago, right? You can just see the steam coming out of that thing. So, you know, movement is of our physical body is so important for our emotions to be able to move freely and in a healthy way. So if you're not moving enough during the day, you know, at what point can you maybe take a lap around your building or outside? Or even if it's just, you know, some type of simple stretching when you wake up or before you go to bed. Or if you're on a phone call, maybe you pace around, maybe you walk as you're talking on the phone. Um, this is if you're someone who sits all day long. Now, if you're someone whose job requires you to be on your feet and, you know, walking around, running around, going from place to place, you know, making deliveries or serving food or at a hospital, right? You don't get a lot of opportunity to stop moving and to rest. And so without a balance of rest, non-movement, and movement, you will also have very little emotional capacity. So I just want you to think to yourself about, you know, how much movement exercise you get in a day, and how can you shift that a little bit to create more balance between movement and rest, and just see if there's a difference in how you respond to your own emotions and to the emotions of those around you. Okay, the last thing I'm gonna say as far as something that can impact your emotional capacity, something basic, is substance use. So drinking alcohol, marijuana, any other drugs, right? You can, you know, and we can get into a deeper conversation about substance abuse. But if we're just talking about use, right, where you're not abusing it, it's not something that is impacting your life in any negative way. Maybe you have, you know, a cocktail, a couple cocktails out. Um, you know, maybe you're someone who smokes weed to decompress, all of that. You have to understand that using substances changes your ability to respond emotionally. And using it, a lot of either of those things, again, even if you don't feel like it's impacting your functioning in any way, maybe you do just, you know, smoke a lot of weed, maybe you do drink a decent amount during the week of alcohol. I want you to think about how does that change the way that you feel when you're not under the influence? How does it change your mood? How does it change your patience and your ability to, you know, manage your feelings or be responsive and receptive to feelings of those you love? A lot of times, substances and substance use helps people numb what they feel and feel less of something. So, you know, oh wow, you know, it's such a stressful day. I can't wait to have a drink, right? I mean, how many times have you heard that or said that? And that drink becomes your release that your emotions need, but you're just getting that release because you're taking in a substance to your body that makes you feel different. So it temporarily shifts the feeling state you were in, but it doesn't help that feeling state move. Okay. It just like pauses it, like you hit the pause button. And then when it returns, when you're no longer under the influence, not only is that feeling state still there, it probably is a little bit worse because now your body no longer has that substance in it. And so you may not experience a true withdrawal, but you do experience a lack of a chemical that your body was producing because it had the substance in it. And now your body's overcompensating to try to find that. So, you know, that one might be a little bit more um, I don't know, subtle in a sense that you may not realize how substance use impacts your ability to tolerate emotions. You may feel more emotional when you're under the influence. And, you know, have you ever gotten intoxicated, say on alcohol, and suddenly you're feeling a million different things and calling people you don't usually talk to and expressing yourself. And then the next day you're full of regret and have no idea what happened and would have, you know, that whatever you share doesn't actually feel true to how you feel on a regular sober basis. So it's something to really think about. And, you know, as always, when I share these things with you, I just want you to start noticing. Notice how sleep impacts your emotional capacity. Notice how the level of hunger you have affects your emotional capacity. Notice how the amount of movement you get, whether too much or not enough, affects your emotional capacity and how any type of substances affects your emotional capacity, affects the space that you have inside to manage, regulate, be with, experience your own feelings and the feelings of those around you. You know, there's a lot happening in the world right now, and I feel like we all could use a little more emotional capacity, right? I think having, you know, setting ourselves up for success with sleep, food, movement, and minimizing substance use allows us to navigate stressors in a more effective way, right? Because it's really hard to avoid stress, but when we have emotional capacity, we can regulate our stress. We can soothe ourselves, okay, when we don't have capacity. Those, you know, coping skills or those soothing strategies sort of go out the window and we feel, you know, lost and um overwhelmed. So yeah, I invite you to notice those things. And uh, if you have any thoughts or questions about an Anything I shared in the episode, feel free to reach out to me. Um you know all my information. And as always, I'm just really grateful to have you here with me on the podcast, and we will catch up soon. Take care.