I’m having an emotion. At work. Ugh 🫠

Corporate somatics for emotional regulation. 

Quick, before you have your next mental breakdown at work, take this mental health advice. We say mental health like it’s somehow separate from our physical health; let’s not do that.

Imagine that someone you cannot stand at work just sent you one of these messages and check how you’re feeling:

“Got a sec for a quick chat?”

“Let’s explore more options”

“How can we use AI to improve this?”

Just ugh, right? Massive eyeroll. 🙄 Now imagine you get a sudden meeting invite with only the HR and your manager. How would that feel like? The answer is probably “horrible”.

Oh wait, I see you’re already so advanced, you’ve learned to label your emotions. So you may say you’d feel anxious, annoyed, angry, or scared, or a mix of those. Slow claps, congrats. 👏 

You’re about to evolve Pokémon-style now. The next question is: when you feel anxious or angry, where do you feel it? Exactly, if you think really hard, you find that it’s not happening in some mental La La Land, starring Ryan Gosling. You feel it happening inside your body.

Every emotion is a physical, bodily sensation.

A sensation we have to experience fully in order for it to end. So when we say anxiety or anger or fear, what we also mean is we’re experiencing very real, measurable physical sensations like heaviness, contraction, or expansion. None of this feels good, so our mind quickly gives us narratives that we use to disconnect from the experience and to stop feeling that way. 

So we tend not to go there, to the physical level, because it’s even more unpleasant to notice. Let’s go there just this one time. I promise it’s worth it. 

What can you do when you’re feeling a Big EmotionTM at work? 

While some nice guy is typing ‘not all men’ in the comments somewhere, I am typing ‘not all emotions’! You’re probably really good at managing feeling happy, grateful, included or supported. You don’t really need any help with that because those emotions feel warm and fuzzy in your soma. Those sensations are really nice, actually. You can manage those feelings, no problem.

We tend to judge emotions like anger, shame, or sadness as “negative”. So we resist them as if it’s something bad, because it feels bad in the body, so we stop their very natural flow. So that bodily regulation cycle is never completed. 

Sometimes you read a passive-aggressive email, you are suddenly really butthurt; it’s impossible to bear. If we label an emotion, you may say angry. Like, really angry. Maybe even enraged (or you can stick to butthurt). Perhaps the real solution your body is aiming for is to punch that person real hard. Or scream. Or both. Probably both. So if your shoulders tense up, there’s now tightness in your gut, more pressure or heaviness in your chest. Good job, body, we’re ready for a punch now.

Expect we’re not going to punch that person (just yet) in order to keep this job, so instead you’re just sitting there, angrily typing a reply.

Before you hit send!

Hol’ up! The same way you noted you’re angry (like an absolute rockstar btw), your next task is to notice the bodily sensations in the moment without trying to dissociate. Mhm, that’s the hardest part.

You need around 90 seconds of sitting and noticing an intense bodily sensation for it to start leaving your system.

If you can tune into it and describe it to yourself, and stay with it for that long, you’ll feel significantly better afterwards, all that energy and hormones not getting bottled up in your system. The most insufferable yoga-loving friend you know would also tell you “don’t forget to breathe”, but that’s next level. 

Sure, easier said than done. We’ve been conditioned to label anger, fear, envy and anxiety as some sort of “negative” emotions. So might even scold ourselves for getting so agitated over something so stupid. Which makes it even worse, because it adds shame to the cocktail that was already questionable. So the hardest thing here, apart from sitting with a bodily sensation, is to process it with compassion. 

What if the feeling won’t go away?

Spoiler alert: if you’re often angry, or often anxious about the same thing at work, it’s probably because you escape feeling that emotion in your body at all costs (as a survival adaptation you’ve developed long ago, not because you are “that kind of person”).

So if you label an emotion, and then notice what it feels like in your body, and it gets too intense too quickly, you can recharge in a place of safety. That’s right, you’re still not allowed to reply to that email. 

A safe space if your body is a area that feels good or neutral. If you do an internal body scan and you cannot find a place like that in your body (yet), think of a calm place you really liked visiting and imagine yourself there. Maybe your childhood home, or the beach trip from long ago. If you are struggling with this too, imagine a place where you’d like to be, where it would feel safe. Then check back in with your body. 

Bonus points: If you can get your body moving, do that – walk somewhere if you can. Maybe even do the holy pilgrimage to the mental health temple – the office restroom- and shake your libs in the cubicle.  If you can’t leave your post, you can do your yoga friend’s favorite breathwork routine. Or a low-key version of it so you don’t look sus.

When the PHYSICAL intensity decreases, you may finally proceed to write a reply. Look at you go!

A real human wrote that.

Oh yes, an actual meatbag. Did it make you feel something? We do not replace our people with AI. We help them stay authentic, creative and connected, while AI does the most boring stuff.