Our Modern Emotional Lives

Do you know much about the primitive brain (also known as the lizard brain)? I have found that many of my clients don't fully understand how the primitive brain not only serves them in many ways but also holds them back. It can be so helpful to understand this. One of the many ways that the primitive brain does its job is by keeping you confused via generating the thought I don't know , but this t...

We have pain, physical or emotional, and then we have thoughts about our pain. Our thoughts are like volume knobs that allow us to turn up the volume on our pain or turn down the volume. When we feel the pain of a negative emotion, we can respond in three different ways: (1) avoid it, (2) resist it, or (3) allow it. Our instinct is often to either avoid it or resist it, but so much unnecessary suf...

Some of us consider ourselves people pleasers by nature, wanting to please people at our own expense by saying yes when what we really want to say is no. Why do we do this? It's human nature to want to be liked and accepted. However, when we identify something as wrong, our frequent go-to is to do the polar opposite, but that isn't always the answer, nor does it always work. The concept of pleasin...

There are facts of life that can be proven that no one can reasonably disagree with, but we often don't talk about our lives strictly via facts. We don't always get to choose these facts, but we do get to choose what we think, and our brain often confuses facts and thoughts. Our minds often assign meaning to facts in the form of thoughts, but these are just that - thoughts. Our thoughts don't have...

Many of my clients struggle with the intense fear of making the wrong decision. Why do so many of us struggle with this fear, and why is it so intense? Listen in as I walk you through all of this, including how your childhood is linked to this fear and why women tend to struggle with this intense fear more often than men do. Based on values instilled in us in childhood, we sometimes find ourselves...

How can we know whether or not we have excellent emotional health? We often think that not feeling good is a symptom of being emotionally unhealthy, but listen in as I argue that that is a dangerous mindset and explain why. We need a more realistic view of emotional health so that we can more accurately measure it and improve it, so I share the eight principles of excellent emotional health. Under...

Today's episode is dedicated to those of you who worry about others. One of the biggest challenges of being human is wanting to help others who are in pain, especially people who are the closest to our inner orbit. Listen in as I share four principles of transforming your worry about other people. I remind you of the Thought Work that I teach and what role it plays here. Remember that we can't con...

Getting overwhelmed and exhausted is something to which a lot of us can probably relate, and many of us also likely feel that it's necessary, especially if we want to meet our goals and succeed. I am here to tell you, however, that overwhelm is something that needs to be solved, not tolerated. I teach Thought Work, and I share with you how to use it to solve for overwhelm. Listen as I share what o...

So many of us seem to do things or not do things in response to the fear of what other people might think about us, and we're working toward solving that problem today. Caring about what others think can be healthy, but it becomes a problem when it is obsessive and when it makes us vulnerable, and that is a problem worth solving. In order for us to solve this problem, we have to understand why it...

Who gets to decide what beauty is and who is beautiful and who isn't? It is arbitrary, and women have been trained to validate themselves via external metrics. Culture tells us what to think about ourselves, causing us to compare ourselves to others, and we believe what we are told because of confirmation bias. Your body does not create your feelings. Your thoughts about your body create your feel...

One of the things that I do as a behavioral specialist is to help people understand why they do what they do, and one of those things is overeating. Statistics from nutritionists can be helpful, but they don't work for everyone because of the conflict between math and the mind. Our thoughts are uniquely our own. They drive how we feel, and how we feel drives what we do. That's exactly why what we...

Letting things go can be easier said than done, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Listen in as I share how to let go of parts of our pasts that might be causing us pain, starting with letting go of small things to practice getting rid of larger things. When we can't let go of something unpleasant, that is a vibration or stuck energy. We are designed to dislike feeling negative emotions, so we...

One of several things that I teach is how to stop buffering. Buffering includes overeating, overdrinking, overshopping, overscrolling on social media, etc. - really anything that is done in excess that ultimately has a negative impact on us. Many of us buffer because we aren't allowing ourselves to feel unpleasant emotions. Instead of feeling them, we avoid them by taking part in something that te...

We are talking about all things confirmation bias today, and while you might think that you already understand this topic, this podcast episode will likely help you see it in a different way. Confirmation bias is our brain's natural tendency to recall or interpret new information in a way that confirms our already existing beliefs. We tend to see it as a character flaw, but when we do that, we don...

The last two episodes of Our Modern Emotional Lives have covered how to feel better, and I welcome you to part three. In the last episode, I covered the quantity of our thoughts about the past, and I am now moving into discussing the quality of those thoughts.  We tell ourselves stories of our past and believe that our version is accurate since it's our story, but there is still a lot of personal...

Do you spend a lot of time thinking about your past, especially parts of your past that bother you? You might feel as if you could feel better if only the past would loosen its grip on you. I am here to offer you an alternate way of thinking about that so that you have a path forward. We can't change the past, but we can change how we think about it now. Dividing this discussion into two segments...

We have come to believe that we are supposed to be happy almost all of the time with just a sprinkling of unhappiness, and that pressure has led to a lot of unnecessary emotional suffering. Our lives are designed with contrast, and realizing that is so freeing and brings so much peace. Happiness wouldn't have any value if it's all we ever experienced. Sadness is what makes happiness so wonderful....

You have probably heard the age-old saying that to err is to be human, right? It's a fundamental truth, yet some of us put pressure on ourselves to never make mistakes and to be persistently perfect, and it costs us a lot when we do that. Perfectionism is one of the biggest things that holds people back, but many perfectionists don't even realize that they're perfectionists which is why I spend ti...

Do you ever feel like you're finally getting the hang of being happy and feeling peaceful but then other people ruin it? I am really excited about this topic because it is the single biggest problem that most of us think we have: other people. It's such a big problem, in fact, that I think that if you put the tools that I share with you in this episode to use, this might just be one of the most tr...

Welcome back to Our Modern Emotional Lives where I, behavior change specialist and coach Sheila Tully, talk about mental and emotional health and how to rewire our brains so that we are happier and healthier. If you are someone who tends to do a lot of worrying, then this episode is for you because that is exactly what I am covering today â€" worrying and how to stop doing it. Believe it or not, w...

My name is Sheila Tully, and welcome to the very first episode of Our Modern Emotional Lives . This podcast will be looking at mental and emotional well-being from my perspective as a behavior change specialist and coach. I teach practical applications of the latest in neuroscience research and cognitive behavioral science to help people change how they think and feel. There has never been a bette...