Get It Off Your Chest

What a simple saying that everyone’s heard of, yet, in my opinion, it’s one of the best ways to tackle emotions. Let’s take a hypothetical situation where, you, for one reason or another, feel some sort of way, perhaps anxious, sad, most likely something undesirable. In this hypothetical scenario, nothing needs, or can be done, to change how you feel, it is not a matter of solving some problem, something happened that is making you feel a certain way, and it just is what it is. You just want to accept that it happened, and move on. The only way to do that is to diffuse the underlying emotion. This is where “getting it off your chest” comes in, whenever you verbally acknowledge an emotion, it loses all of its underlying power. As Chris Voss wrote in Never Split the Difference, “Labeling an emotion - applying rational words to [it] - disrupts its raw intensity.” So, simply talk to another person about how you’re feeling, they don’t need to do anything, apart from listen, and you just need to say it out loud. I swear, it helps massively, that person can just be your mom, plus, if you don’t do this, then those emotions just pile up, and, at the end of the day, will still come out in who knows what nasty way.