420. Understanding Emotional Health

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 420, Understanding Emotional Health.

This is Better Than Happy, the podcast where we study what the healthiest, most successful people in today’s world think, feel and do. And we leverage this knowledge to create our best lives. Are you ready, little bird? Let’s fly.

Hello, everybody, welcome to the podcast. I want to talk a little bit today about emotional health. And my hope is that as we all better understand what’s going on for us and the people around us with regards to our emotional health that it gives us leverage over knowing how to best treat issues and challenges and problems, how to strengthen ourselves emotionally. And how to be really as compassionate and supportive and available to those around us as possible because we’re all in different situations.

And if we’re not treating what’s going on properly, if we don’t understand the proper diagnosis, then the treatment may not be as effective. So I want to dive into it a little bit today. Before we get into it, I want to remind you that we have right around the corner, a free opportunity for you to come and try out coaching with me. And by try out coaching, the way that I coach people is both by sometimes talking to you directly about what’s going on for you, what challenges or struggles.

And also by having you listen to other people have their problems, challenges, goals, dreams, etc., addressed because literally it’s all brain work. So your brain can change by witnessing other people have conversations. It’s literally changing the way you view the world, changing the way you think about things and getting you leverage over your own emotional and mental capacities. And so that’s what you will experience.

And the reason I break it down that way is to let you know if you’re really shy and you’re thinking, I don’t want to come on a call in front of other people and get coached. That is a common thought and you don’t have to actually to get the benefit. But you also might be surprised to find once you witness it, you will see what a safe environment it is. And you may be more brave than you think. So anyway, head to jodymoore.com/trial to register. It’s happening on August 23^rd. It’s a two hour commitment and I highly recommend that you check it out if you’re considering using coaching to improve your situation.

Okay, so here’s what I want to say about emotional health is I want to begin by talking about physical health. So I think that we understand physical health better than we understand emotional health, because we’ve been talking about it longer, we’ve understood for a longer period of time the ability that we have to impact our own physical health. And so I don’t know about you, but I grew up in a world where we talked about the benefits of eating healthy and exercise and things like that.

So when you think about physical health, I want you to think about what is the opposite of being physically healthy. And in my mind, there are three possible things that we might say are somewhat opposites anyway, of optimal physical health. The first thing is sickness. Maybe I’m healthy or maybe I’m sick. Maybe I have the flu. Maybe I have COVID. Maybe I have cancer. Maybe I have some kind of immune system chronic illness. So there’s illness, sickness that we would say is somewhat the opposite of physical health.

If I have an illness or a sickness, I want to do anything I possibly can to restore as much physical health as possible. That might mean anything from just resting to more extreme severe treatment plans that I would probably map out with a doctor.

The other thing that sometimes we would say is sort of not optimal physical health anyway is some kind of an impairment or disability, some kind of atypical physical condition that maybe I was born with, maybe I gained through an injury of some sort. There may be a disability that again we would figure out how do we maximize our life experience? How do we incorporate this disability into the way that we want to live and still have the life that we want to live?

The third type of physical ‘un-health’ is a physical injury. I may break a bone or twist an ankle or blow out my knees or whatever. There might be an injury that, again, if possible, I’m going to want to have that injury treated again, possibly through rest and recovery and/or with some kind of a treatment plan that I would work with a medical professional on. All of those things I’m categorizing under un-health, physical un-health. Now, that is not proper English, I realize and it’s a gross generalization.

But what I mean by it is it requires professional medical care in many cases, unless it’s the flu and you know, you just need to rest and drink more liquids. But in many cases it requires professional medical treatment taken on a case by case basis, patient by patient, a medical professional will help us to figure out what is most likely our best treatment plan. And we would attempt it and then try something else if that doesn’t work.

But beyond that, when we are physically healthy, we’re not sick, we’re not injured, we’re not talking about some kind of impairment or an atypical physical situation. We’re just a typical healthy human. We still have pain at times. We still have physical pain.

I got to go speak to a bunch of awesome, brilliant, beautiful young women at the Sandpoint State Girls camp last night, and we talked about this. We talked about just having a body, just being in a body is physically painful. And I asked them, “Tell me about some of the pain that you experience, even though we would call you completely healthy, what kind of pain or discomfort?” And one of them said, “Sitting on these hard benches right now listening to this talk, my butt’s kind of going numb.”

Yeah, just sitting in that chair for too long if it’s not padded enough, especially, can be uncomfortable. We walk around and we stub toes and we stand up too long or we wear the wrong shoes and now our feet hurt or our back hurts or I don’t know about you, but I can injure my not even necessarily injure, just wake up uncomfortable from sleeping wrong these days at my age. So there’s all kinds of pain. We don’t get upset about it.

We’re not mad that we’re cold after we get out of the shower and our skin’s wet and we haven’t gotten to the towel yet. We know that’s part of having a body is I’m going to be uncomfortable sometimes. It’s okay, I’m in, I want this body.

Then there is physical pain that we invite on purpose, because it’s kind of cool to see what we’re capable of. We kind of want to be challenged in this way and we can use our physical bodies to see what we’re capable of and/or it’s making us stronger. It’s actually making us physically healthier. This is things like sports, the people who run marathons and do triathlons and Olympic athletes or just athletes in general.

Anybody who chooses to play a sport or chooses to exercise or work out or lift weights or even just going on a walk can be physically uncomfortable. And we’re not mad about it. We in fact choose it many times on purpose because we know it’s either good for our physical health, even though it’s short term discomfort, short term physical pain is going to create longer term physical ease and strength and/or it’s kind of fun to see what we’re capable of and challenge ourselves and usually it’s some of both.

So you probably can see where I’m going with this but let me just connect the dots for you anyway. Our mental and emotional health is the same way. So there is emotional health. And then there’s the opposite, which would be emotional sickness of some sort. This may be a diagnosed disorder or maybe an undiagnosed disorder, an anxiety disorder, a depressive disorder. It may be a mental illness that, again, may be something that developed as a result of life experience and trauma, etc., or might be something somebody was born with.

But there is such a thing as mental illness, mental sickness, mental disorder, if you will. There is also, which by the way, just like physical sickness we would want to treat in any way we possibly could. And often it requires working with a medical professional, a licensed psychotherapist or a clinician who can best try to help you map out a treatment plan. There should be no shame in this just like we’re not ashamed when we get the flu. You just need to work with a medical professional to try to treat it. That is not my area of expertise. That’s why I don’t give advice in that area.

There is also emotional or mental, what we might call impairment or disability or at least atypical mental and emotional conditions. This would be things like ADD or ADHD, things that the brain doesn’t operate in what we would describe as a quote ‘typical way’. And that’s something that we want to be aware of and make accommodations for as much as possible to still create an amazing life, which you absolutely can.

And then there is mental or emotional injury or trauma we call it. And just like with physical injury, it’s actually common. Sometimes it is really severe. Sometimes someone gets in a major accident and maybe permanently becomes disabled or loses the ability to utilize parts of their bodies or etc. There can be really severe injury, but it’s not uncommon for almost everyone in their lives to experience some kind of physical injury, to at least roll an ankle on the trampoline or sprain a knee or break a bone.

Physical injury, pretty much most likely all of us are going to experience it at some point in our lives, and same with actually emotional and mental injury or what we call trauma. And I don’t know about you, but I used to think of trauma as just something really severe, somebody that’s a victim of extreme abuse or neglect or something has trauma obviously. But the truth is, we all actually go through experiences that might be considered trauma if we think of trauma as just a rewiring of the brain due to the response of a condition.

And the brain rewires its way in an attempt to protect us that may or may not be useful. And just like a physical injury can, in many times be treated, bones can be set, knees can actually be completely replaced. And it doesn’t mean that your body necessarily is the same as it was before, but your life can be just as complete and just as full and just as amazing in many cases, in most cases. And that is true with mental and emotional injury as well.

But just as you need to see a doctor in most cases for physical injury, you will also need to see a licensed clinical psychotherapist or a professional who can help you treat trauma? But then there’s everything else after. That is where my work as a coach comes in. There is just the normal emotional pain of being a human being, just like having a body means sometimes my butt’s numb from sitting on a hard bench for too long. Or my feet hurt from standing up all night at the Taylor Swift concert. Or I stubbed my toe and maybe we would classify that under injury but it’s not serious enough to see a doctor.

I just know it’s part of having a body and living in the world and choosing to go to Taylor Swift concerts and choosing to explore the world is that I’m going to have some pain. And I’m going to have some emotional pain and that’s okay and that’s normal. And you don’t have to talk yourself out of it all the time, and you don’t have to think that you’re doing it wrong or that you should change your thinking or any of that. And just like with physical pain, a lot of things, time just heals, the same with emotional pain as well.

And then there is pain on purpose. Just like with my physical body I might choose to go lift weights or get on my Peloton and ride it really fast and hard, and I might be sore and it might be really painful and hard in the moment, but I know that’s so good for me in the long run. Same emotionally, I may choose to do things on purpose that scare me. I may choose to expose myself to situations that are uncomfortable in the name of increasing my emotional strength, increasing my mental strength.

And the truth is, the world provides us plenty of opportunities for this. It’s just that it also provides us plenty of ways to avoid it all and this avoiding of it, all it does is make us emotionally and mentally weaker. I’m not saying it’s wrong to do it. Sometimes that’s what I choose too. I choose to avoid it or I choose to allow my kids to avoid it or escape it. But I’m just saying that just like with exercise and movement of the body that strengthens us physically, exercising ourself mentally and emotionally means allowing ourselves to be stretched a little bit mentally and emotionally.

But just like if I have an injured knee, I’m not going to go jogging because I could damage that knee even more. If I have trauma in a certain area that is untreated, unhealed, I’m not going to push myself outside my comfort zone in that area either, because it may do more harm than good. So I just wanted to offer this because I’ve never quite broken it down that succinctly I don’t think before until I was preparing to speak to the young women at girls camp. And even as I was speaking to them about it, it became more clear and more simple in my own mind.

And I may in the next week or so, just share with you the whole message that I gave to those girls at girls camp. Today I just wanted to give you this little nugget and have you think about, again, not only for yourself, but for the people around you. The reason why sometimes it’s not appropriate to push your child to get outside their comfort zone is because they may be operating from a place of an atypical mental or emotional state. Or they may have some trauma or injury in a certain area, or your spouse, or your mother or whoever it is that you’re thinking, why don’t they just change their thought or why don’t they just do what I do?

If they’re not operating from the same place mentally and emotionally, if they’re operating from some kind of mental or emotional un-healthy place, then the treatment is different. The necessary treatment to get them to what we would call quote ‘healthy mentally and emotionally’ has got to take place before we move into the coaching work of then processing allowing emotions, choosing our thinking, growing stronger by pushing ourselves through goals and things like that.

Alright, thanks for joining me today, everybody, episode 420. Thank you for being here. I can’t even get over how loving this community is, how many amazing positive comments you guys leave. Thank you for the ratings and reviews. I read your comments there. Thank you for the DMs that you send me saying how the podcast helped you and it was just what you were thinking about. And those kinds of things honestly, are like fuel for me. They keep me going. They keep me thinking of new ideas.

So I would love to hear from you if you have a comment or a question about what I’ve taught you here today. Head on over to Instagram and DM me. I am on there all the time answering questions. And also if you have a request for a topic you want to hear me talk about. I always love to hear those as well. So I’m @jodymoorecoaching on Instagram. And otherwise I’ll see you at try out coaching. Don’t forget jodymoore.com/trial. Have a good one. Bye bye.

Coaching changed my life and I’ve watched it change the lives of thousands of men and women since, but is it right for you? You’ll only know by giving it a try. Try it out today at jodymoore.com/trial.