Want to hear something I think could possibly change your life?
It’s actually not something you can do or say or think, but rather a skill that you can practice.
Emotional resilience.
I’m sure if you’ve never heard of this term, you can infer a bit about what it means, or you can go read that in my article all about emotional resilience.
This article, however, is all about how emotional resilience can help you live a more authentic and joyful life, and I think you’re gonna see that there’s a hell of a lot of value in this seemingly simple concept once I break down.
Grab your pen.
Why Emotional Resilience is a Powerful Tool to Living More Authentically
Have you ever been really excited about something happening in your life, like a new relationship? A new job? A new city you’re about to move to?
And then as if without hesitation, you have all of these fears that if you allow yourself to feel this excited and alive and you’re let down, then it’s going to hurt big time.
So without realizing it, you dull your emotions and excitement and you don’t let yourself feel the full capacity of the joy you were feeling because if you’re let down it’s going to hurt much worse if you don’t control how you feel.
Sound familiar?
Without emotional resilience, or the awareness and resources to manage emotional changes, it can feel like you live in a world where you have to control your feelings to the scale of acceptable emotions so that you don’t go off the rails one way or the other.
When we are feeling any type of emotion, we subconsciously agree to feel equal and opposite on the other side of that emotion, I call this the emotions agreement.
It’s why the people that cause us to feel the most love, are the people who can also cause us to feel the most pain. It’s why the things that are so scary and could potentially lead to our death, like jumping out of a plane, can also be the most exhilarating and make us feel the most alive.
So therefore when you dull your feelings, you’re doing it not because you don’t want to feel excited or joyful, but because there’s a certain threshold of pain you’re comfortable with and the opposite side of that pain has to match to make the whole scale balance.
I’ll draw you a picture.
This is why cultivating the skill of emotional resiliency can allow for a higher capacity of feelings and the confidence to handle emotional changes and shifts without feeling like you’re going to be swallowed by the hurt.
When it comes to living life in your most authentic expression, letting the ‘what if’s’ impact how you feel in each moment can dampen your human experience. If you always plan for the worst case scenario, and then it never happens, then you short yourself a life full of joy and pleasure.
The most fascinating thing about all of this, is that most of it happens subconsciously. You’re (likely) not consciously choosing to lower your excitement and joy because you’re afraid of the other side. Your subconscious brain is incredibly smart and remembers patterns and history as a means to keep you safe. It’s why triggers are a thing, it’s not a means for life to torture you, but rather to keep you safe from something happening again (even if it’s only a mere resemblance of something that happened to you in the past.)
In a lot of ways, this is really helpful, it can save you a lot of pain and suffering in instances where you intuitively may know something is ‘too good to be true’ or not going to work out. But when it becomes a habit and a way of living, it can be hard to turn this part off and let your authentic self be free.
Which is what I’m here to shed some light on, how to be more authentic and free by cultivating emotional resilience.
How Feeling More is the Secret to More Authenticity
“The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.” – Homer, The Iliad
This is one of my favorite quotes because it paints the picture so well.
We aren’t guaranteed another day, we aren’t immortal beings, therefore we must live and love as wholly and fully as we can now, knowing that the next blink could be the last.
Dramatic? Maybe. But true? Definitely.
So how does feeling fit into this?
If our time is finite, then worrying about the future or holding back doesn’t serve you fully. The more you limit your feelings because you’re afraid, the more you cut off your ability to fully enjoy each and every moment as it is. Hence why feeling allows for more authenticity and emotional suppression leads to more complex challenges.
Before I bash you for not feeling as deeply as you can and living in your full authenticity, let me also state that it makes perfect sense why you likely don’t do this.
Emotions on the far end of each side of the scale, like despair and grief and bliss and joy often are coupled with a lack of productivity, which is frowned upon 5 days a week in society. Productivity is so prided that any emotion that jeopardizes it automatically gets less space to be reveled in.
So really, the emotions that live on these far ends of the spectrum have less space in the world you live in to be expressed and felt because they come with a ticking clock. Even though there are stages of grief, you’re expected to go through the stages of grief efficiently so you can get to the other side and exist in society normally again.
What happens as a result of this is that your capacity for the emotions on both ends of the spectrum is lower. If you know that these emotions don’t feel like a “good use of your time” then you’re likely not going to spend a lot of time in them so you can return back to baseline and exist again. Which means you’re also not going to give yourself a lot of space in these emotions, therefore cutting them off before they’ve fully been expressed.
A lower capacity for emotions means much more than going back to being at baseline and living a ‘normal’ life. It means your decisions, the things you do, and the people you allow yourself to meet all change because subconsciously your brain knows that if your capacity for the big emotions is low, then any opportunity that threatens the onset of these emotions must be avoided at all costs.
Think about the jobs you go for, the people you date or are interested in, the opportunities you place yourself in front of. The more that they could let you down and deeply disappoint or hurt you, the more likely you are to hold yourself back because of that fear. Again, not necessarily on purpose, but because you don’t feel fully confident in the feelings on both sides of the spectrum.
The emotions agreement is something I talk about a lot—what we agree to feel on one side of the spectrum we also agree to feel equal and opposite on the other side of the spectrum.
The relationship that brings us the most joy is going to make us feel the most pain when it’s over or when that person potentially hurts us. Even if that never happens, you still agree that it could.
If you’re always afraid of what could happen or how you could feel hurt or pain or disappointment when the shoe drops, then you’re not going to lean in as hard on the off-chance that you save yourself some of that pain IF the shoe does drop.
But you’re human, you can never predict what’s going to happen, so living like this cuts you off from being your most vibrant, bright, and authentic self, even if you have no idea that you’re doing it.
Emotional Resilience is More Than Just Having Awareness
So much of what I said so far is in relationship to having the awareness around what your emotions are, and how your decisions could potentially impact your emotions on either end of the spectrum. But emotional resilience is more than the awareness, it’s having the resources in place to know what to do with the feelings when they arise, knowing how to navigate the changes in your emotional state in a way that feels good for you.
If you start to see that you’re making certain decisions because you’re afraid of the emotions that could arise, then the next step is to figure out how you’re going to step forward and manage those emotions as they come up, rather than avoid them.
I’ve alluded to practicing building capacity. What I mean by this is increasing your ability to handle an emotion that feels uncomfortable.
For me this has actually been as simple as setting a 30-minute timer and allowing myself to completely feel that emotion without any distractions. When the timer is up, I give myself permission to go distract myself or do something that makes me feel better.
This is especially helpful when I’m deeply anxious. Rather than try and distract my anxiety away, I allow myself to be in the anxiety fully and let it express completely. The same works for total joy as well. When I feel this way, I give myself space to be in that emotion by myself (key) and see what it feels like in my body.
By being with myself in these big emotions, I let my body get used to feeling them. There’s very little input here, I don’t typically involve a friend or even my partner during these times because I know that they will influence me to some degree.
Building your emotional resilience resources is all about you, and how you can feel better equipped when these emotions come on.
If I know what to expect and I know how the emotion is going to flow through me, I am less afraid of it the next time it arises.
This is called emotional attunement—allowing yourself to get comfortable in what the emotion is, the physical sensations, what your own patterns are in that emotion, and so on. This means you can identify it more quickly if necessary, as well as build a relationship with that emotion.
This comes in handy when you’re making decisions or existing in relationships or other experiences where your emotions could be triggered, if you are less afraid of the emotions because you’re so attuned to them, then you can exist in your life in a more authentic and less fearful way.
The greater your capacity for these emotions actually means the less time you spend worrying about them subconsciously in your day-to-day life. If you’re not constantly thinking about what could hurt you or what could cause you to go off the rails, then you have way more space for the magic of life to happen. You’re paying more attention to what’s happening in front of you versus what’s happening beyond your control.
There are a lot of resources you could stack in your emotional resilience toolbox, and building capacity is one of my favorite through and through, because it really opens you up for more flexibility and the ability to be less afraid of ‘what could happen?’
Moral of the Story
Being emotionally resilient has ripple effects in your ability to show up as authentically as yourself and experience the joy of life. The more you allow yourself to feel in all directions, the more you increase your capacity for feeling joyful and authentic because you’re not worried about what may happen if you let your guard down. Think of it as a muscle that you flex, as it gets stronger, you get the feel more.
When it comes to emotions, awareness and resources are where it’s at, the more you know what emotion you’re having and what resources to put behind it, the less likely it is to rule your life.
Authenticity is much more complex than simply doing whatever you want whenever you want it, it’s about trusting yourself to be able to handle what that actually means on an emotional level.
And like I’ve mentioned before, it’s possible (even if you don’t feel like it is) to increase your capacity to feel without letting it destroy you.