How are emotions tied to energy?
While most people think of energy in physical terms, there is actually a level of emotional energy that we all have, and it is one of the most important forms of human energy. A lot of the time, people think we get our energy from food or from the amount of sleep we get. I can tell you as someone who has done a lot of fasting over the last 5 years that it is not necessarily true. Think about family holiday dinners like Thanksgiving that’s just around the corner – after you eat turkey, potatoes, veggies and pumpkin pie, you certainly don’t feel like going for a walk or run, you want to just lay down and even have a nap! With regards to sleep, how many of you have slept for 8 hours and woke up tired or think of a time you were going on a holiday and you had to get up for an early morning flight and had no trouble doing that after only a few hours of sleep. You had a ton of energy to get to where you were going because you had something to look forward to. It has everything to do with how you feel. The word emotion comes from the Latin “energy in motion”. The quality of your life is the quality of your emotions, and, if you can manage and harness your emotional energy, it can propel you toward great transformation for a happier life. The mental emotional state we are in determines how we feel and how we feel determines how we act and ultimately what we do. We measure our life by the way we feel and for most of us, we are not emotionally fit. Emotional fitness is a state of readiness, such as – I am ready to do this now, not tomorrow or maybe the next day but now because I know it’s the right thing to do to get me closer to my goals. Getting yourself into this state of readiness emotionally, to do the action you need to do, whatever that is for that specific situation, and if you do this repetitively, you will find everything in your life changes.
It’s obvious that if you are in a bad mood or funk, you have low energy but if you are excited about something and happy, then you have all the energy in the world to get lots done. Our emotional energy is immense and dynamic and like any energy force, it can be constructive or destructive at the same time. If we learn to recognize it we can put that energy to good use and improve our relationships, career and any other area of your life. If you aren’t already someone who is consistently a high energy person, I have a few suggestions to help get you into that state, so you can see life through a different set of glasses! There is lots of information out there that teach how high-energy people outsmart emotional fatigue and tips on how to live your best life, and I thought I would pull some of that information together to make this easier to implement into everyday life.
For so long I lived my life in fight or flight mode. I would cram the night before for a test in school, I often waited until the last minute to complete a project and would tend to put a lot of things off saying “I’ll do it tomorrow” and sometimes it never got done. I cleaned my house based on if someone was coming over for a visit and it was always driven by external events. Most days I came home after work exhausted and rarely had the energy to do anything in the evenings. I thrived on using stress to be productive and quite frankly, it has taken a toll on me physically. In the past, I understood my mood effected whether I wanted to go out and socialize or do a project around the house and was always led by how “I felt” to determine what I did in a day. I would tend to use external interactions with others to determine my emotional state instead of internally reflecting on where I was at and make appropriate adjustments. I never knew I had all the control with regards to my emotional energy regardless of what was happening around me. I wasn’t aware that I could focus on my emotional state to increase my energy to my benefit until I took some courses earlier this year and can attest to what I am going to share here – it really does work. Do I always tap into this? Nope, but I am evolving and getting closer to being more consistent, it’s definitely a daily practice to condition myself to be mindful of where I’m at and adjust accordingly. I think the hardest part for me is I get busy throughout the day and don’t take the time to remember, to check in with myself and measure how I am feeling and if it’s not where I want to be, then I apply the few simple steps to change it.
How do emotions effect brain function?
Researcher Barbara Frederickson describes the upward and downward spiral effect of emotion. “An upward spiral correlates with expansion and feelings such as joy and happiness. A downward spiral correlates with contraction and feelings such as resentment and fear. In itself, emotional energy is neutral. It is the feeling sensation and physiological reaction that makes a specific emotion positive or negative. Feeling is what you label as anger, sadness, joy or fear. It is then your interpretations or thoughts about emotional energy that give it meaning. Emotion serves as the carrier waves for the entire spectrum of feelings. Understanding that emotions are energy implies that they are fluid, moving resources meant to be felt and released vs. suppressed and ignored. The latter is the true culprit of low emotional intelligence and stress burnout. Several key discoveries have significantly changed our understanding of the relationship between the emotional brain and the analytical brain. Based on neural circuitry, our emotional brain responds faster to incoming information or stimuli than our analytical brain does. The emotional brain has more neural circuits connecting to the analytical brain than the analytical brain has connecting to the emotional brain. The emotional brain is connected to every area of the brain, whereas the analytical brain is not. On the basis of survival, the experience of stress and feelings of worry, fear, or anger take priority over feelings of happiness and peace of mind. The emotional brain is considered to have executive power in the brain. It influences all decision making, thought processes, memories, and present experiences. Your ability to understand, deal with, and effectively use your emotional energy is vital to your happiness levels”. One way psychologists distinguish emotions is along two dimensions: positive/negative and high intensity/low intensity. In other words, is the emotion positive (like elated or serene) or negative (like angry or sad)? And is it high intensity (like elated or angry) or low intensity (like serene or sad)? There is lots out there on emotional intelligence and the vibration of each emotions but I’m not going to go into detail about that in this article, I want to really highlight more of the physiology and how to use emotions to enhance how we take action with our decisions.
How do you get more energy?
Energy levels are a habit. If you are not feeling good about yourself, for example, you gained a few extra pounds and your mood is low from that, and it matches your energy. If you are on cloud nine from something exciting that’s happened to you your energy level is off the charts. I’ve learned, to start with the body to influence the energy level of your emotions to be where you want the energy to be. I’m sure most of us as kids ran around like a super hero and felt like we could do anything. Those of us who have children can attest that just like us, our children did/do the same. There’s something about feeling like a super hero that can boost how we feel – powerful, joyful or happy, whatever it was for you.
Tony Robbins talks lots about getting yourself into a “Peak State” which he believes is the emotional state of your highest level of potential, being tapped into. This is why if you’ve ever seen any clips of his seminars and courses on YouTube or Facebook videos, he is clapping and raising his arms increasing the emotional energy in the room for a ideal learning environment. He is immersing the audience into getting in the habit of shifting into this high energy state. Robbins also mentions we need to be measuring our energy levels, get off auto pilot in order to condition ourselves to stay and maintain a high energy state. He has been teaching the power of movement for decades.
A study came out of Harvard on postures a few years ago around this. Power postures like the super hero batman, superman or wonder woman where you put your hands on your hips like you are a super hero, stick your chest out for a few minutes and you will notice the change in your energy right away. Or interlock your hands behind your head and feel a slight shift in your energy. This study out of Harvard by Amy Cuddy noticed that postures can increase testosterone by 20%, decrease the stress hormone cortisol levels by 25% and increase risk tolerance by 33%. Risk tolerance is how we move out of our fears and do things outside our comfort zone that typically allow us to take advantage of opportunities we wouldn’t normally (state of readiness). It allows for more flow of creativity and confidence to follow through with what you need to do. So, all of this is a good thing!
Cuddy proved in this research that by doing a high power-pose (expansive pose) versus a low-power pose (leaning inward, legs crossed) for two minutes gave people the feeling of power and was being used prior to interviews or a sports game you were about to play. Back in 2012 Cuddy did a TED talk on this and it had over 46 million views and became the second highest watched TED talk of all time. Many people caught this craze, such as public speakers, athletes and job candidates. Then her fellow Social Psychologists got ahold of the data and debunked it all as they said they couldn’t duplicate the same results. According to an article in Forbes by Kim Elsesser, she says that Cuddy refuted her peers and was able to show why they didn’t get the same results. Cuddy’s analysis examined over 55 studies and clearly demonstrates a link between expansive postures and feelings of power. Even the replication study that set off the original controversy found that those in high power poses felt more powerful than their low pose counterparts.
Some people turned away from using this science, but Tony Robbins who was using it before the Amy Cuddy craze still does to this day. I have taken quite a few of Tony’s courses and events and can tell you it works. I have had a tremendous change in my life since I figured out the impact I can make when controlling my energy on a day-to-day basis. Take this blog as an example, I never would have had the courage to start this had I not been practicing being in a Peak State everyday, for months leading up to publishing that first article back in May.
3 Tips for Improving Your Energy:
1. Identify yourself as an energizer bunny – it’s all in the way you determine and choose to be. For example if you think you are someone who is very mellow and slow moving and don’t have lots of energy then you won’t but if you identify as someone who is tapping in to a higher state of energy and lift your emotions, actions and movement of your body to reflect this, then you will achieve a higher state of energy. Set your standard of energy from 1-10 to always be a 10 regardless of how you feel and if you do this you will attract that into your life.
2. Curate the feeling of being fully alive. Feel excited about life think about loved ones or your happy place. Think about something you love to do and create momentum in your body, feel the energy rise up as you put that smile on your face make your smile bigger and feel everything about that thing you want to do that excites you. It’s that feeling that you can tap into at any time, regardless of what’s going on in your life. That feeling of joy allows for momentum and creativity into your day.
3. Be mindful of your posture. For example, sit up straight and don’t slouch. Put a smile on your face at the same time. Raise your arms in the air and pump them up and down. You will feel the difference of when you stand up or sit up in your chair and raise your arms above your head in a cheering motion then you will if you slouch and think about something that upsets you or depresses you.
You are able to do all of this anytime, anywhere and keep yourself in that state all day if you choose to. This will substantially change your life. Because when you are in this peak state mood, you feel like you can do anything. You will not be living in fear but in wisdom. We all know when we go for a walk we always feel better with our disposition or mood than we do if we lay around on the couch numbing out to TV. It’s a known fact and when you practice this, you will notice an increase in productivity, creativity, an overall positive attitude not to mention the impact this will have on others as well. Lastly, I wanted to mention an easy way to incorporate the body movement to increase your energy with physical body and health improvements.
I have a rebounder that I got a while ago as I was wanting to get some health benefits from all this moving around. I know you are thinking I’m am such an 80’s chick as it was a huge fad back then thanks to people like Tony Robbins and Jane Fonda, but I promise you, it’s not why I bought one there’s a lot of science to back it up. The Robbins Research International sums it up by mentioning that 2 minutes on a rebounder increases your emotional energy, but also the vertical use of acceleration, deceleration, and gravity (jumping up and down) provides the ideal conditions for cleansing cells. it builds physical cellular strength by challenging the structure of each cell. It leads to improved posture, increased vascularity, better muscle tone, enhanced timing, sharper vision, greater coordination, better balance, more rhythm, along side the elevated energy levels. By working against the constant gravitational pressure while bouncing, you resist the earth’s pull. Gravity becomes a force for the good of your entire body. Rebounding will let you improve the working of your heart muscle by improving the tone and quality of the muscle itself and by increasing the coordination of the fibers as they wring blood out of the heart during each beat. It provides the stimulus for a free-flowing lymphatic drainage system, which helps rid your body of toxins, cancer cells, wastes, trapped protein, bacteria, viruses, and other waste the cells cast off. When you are rebounding, you are flooding the cells with oxygen. This enables them to convert glucose into ATP and also into glycogen. Thus, rebounding can actually increase your ability to convert glucose into glycogen. Further, it may be possible to train your body (through consistent lymphasizing) to store this glycogen and have it released when you need it for a sudden burst of energy.
Here’s how it all works. The G-force (gravity) at the top of the bounce is eliminated and the body becomes weightless for a fraction of a second. At the bottom of the bounce, the G-force suddenly doubles over what is ordinary gravity on earth, and internal organs are put under pressure. Their cellular stimulation is increased accordingly so that waste materials within cells get squeezed out. The lymphatics carry the waste away to be disposed of through the urinary tract and other excretory mechanisms. The $65.00 I paid for mine a year ago from Amazon, was the best money I have spent on fitness gadgets and gym memberships over the years and as a side note, it builds calf muscle too! You can watch online videos on how to use the rebounder as a full body workout but for me it was more to do with supporting my lymphatic system than exercising as my body has a lot of inflammation from an autoimmune disease I have so it’s super important for me. Everyone these days should be ensuring they are getting toxins, cancer cells and all the other crap mentioned above out of our bodies for longevity.
Knowing what I do about physiology and the importance of moving the body for high energy and a happy peak state, if I’m struggling to get to a 10, I put on dance music, jump on the rebounder for a few minutes and boom, I’m back baby!! So if you find yourself in one of these low energy states but need to be in a high energy state for a child, parent, interview, tackling the to-do list – simply move your body, put on some music and start dancing around or do a superhero power pose and then get on with it – I dare you!