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Ask what you want to feel
Noticing the reaction
Chelsea Ryckis picked up the pause from a therapist she admires and has come to value it over her first year of motherhood. When a reaction hits, it shows up physically: the shoulders, a clench, a nauseous stomach, whatever form it takes for that person. She notices it, stops, takes a breath, and asks herself what she wants to feel instead.
What she wants to feel
The answer changes with the situation. Sometimes she wants to feel empowered. If she is in a fight she has to fight on behalf of a client, she wants to feel aggressive. Sometimes she wants to feel grounded, and with her son she wants to feel peaceful. Then she asks what she needs to do to feel that way, and she does it.
Choosing alignment
Sometimes what she wants to feel differs from what the situation is calling for, and she still follows the feeling. Her reason is that being aligned with herself leads to a better outcome and result in the long run.
Why does the body react before thought?
The idea that bodily reactions come first dates to the 1880s, when William James and Carl Lange independently proposed that emotion is the perception of bodily changes. In the 1980s and 1990s, neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux's work on fear in rats traced a fast route from the thalamus to the amygdala that bypasses the cortex. That shortcut lets the body begin responding to a threat before the slower cortical pathway has finished processing it.
How does naming a feeling calm it?
In a 2007 UCLA study led by Matthew Lieberman, volunteers viewed emotional faces and either labeled the emotion in words or matched the faces by appearance. Labeling the emotion lowered activity in the amygdala, a brain region tied to threat, and raised activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Lieberman called this effect affect labeling.
How does one breath change the body?
Heart rate rises slightly on each inhale and falls on each exhale, a pattern called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. The slowing on the exhale is driven by the vagus nerve, part of the parasympathetic nervous system. Slow breathing lengthens the exhale, which increases this rhythm in the heart rate. Researchers measure the rhythm as heart rate variability.
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