How to Regulate Your Emotions Using Helper Feels | #103

Helper feels are simple emotional tools that make hard moments easier to move through without denying reality. In this Daily Dose, Dawn Super explains how positive emotions can act as helpers while negative emotions serve as alarms, helping you regulate your inner ecosystem. This episode is for anyone living a challenging life who feels overwhelmed, stuck in emotional extremes, or unsure how to hold onto happiness when life is hard.

Watch the Video Here or Read the Script below

What are helper feels and how do you use them?

This video is for anyone living a challenging life who feels overwhelmed, says things like "life is too hard," who exists only in one state - either positive or negative until the situation changes.

And so why do we want to learn this? Because sometimes being a human is hard. Especially when you compare your life to someone else who seems to have it easier.

Welcome back to my Happy Matters collective. If you've followed me for any length of time, you know that happy matters is my thing.

It turns out a lot of people think happy is like an on/off switch. You can be happy or not, but there's no in between. It's not a dimmer switch. But that's just not true.

If you're new here, thanks for joining us.

For 41 years of my life, I didn't think I had the right to be happy. I was happy in moments, but miserable was my overall default. A bunch of things came together for me, and on my 41st birthday, happy bonked me on the head, and I was determined to hold on to it. But life kept lifing.

One key thing that came into my awareness was: nobody knows what I'm thinking unless I tell them.

This helped me a lot when I was practicing being happy in situations where the other people were miserable, angry, disappointed, or some other icky feel.

It can be easy to get sucked into other people's drama, to hold on to our happy while our friend is complaining about their relationship or your parent said something harsh or your kid is failing French. We sometimes feel we have to show we're displeased with someone because of them or because that's what the situation calls for.

Like do you ever do that? Like if you're not mad when you're talking to them about like say your kid failing French that they won't take it seriously or not understand the gravity. So you have to show it with your emotion. I definitely used to do that before I worked on being an angry person.

And there's a lot of fear and anger in the world. And everything that you consume with your eyes and ears is designed to make you mad or afraid. And that's not an exaggeration. You don't see it until you step away from it. Even harmless TV shows are filled with fatal flaw characters that do horrible things that you don't even blink at because you're so used to seeing people behave poorly.

You don't see a lot of things created out there that are designed just to make you feel good for the sake of feeling good outside of puppy video playlists. The crazy thing is we don't even realize that we can feel happy just because that's what we prefer to feel.

If happiness is a choice, why don't we choose it? It's only because we don't feel like we should or don't realize we can.

If you think of positive emotions as helpers and negative emotions as alarms, it gets a lot easier to regulate your emotions.

Negative emotions are designed to get us to act. They're fleeting. A spike of anger, a rush of adrenaline. It's the body's way of saying, "Pay attention. Do something."

"My kid is failing French." Your body is saying do something.

Okay, so everyone says feel your feelings and don't shove down your feelings. And I agree with this, but I also want to break down the definition. "Your kid is failing" brings up emotions. You're concerned, disappointed, maybe angry. Those feelings are saying you need to talk to him. Find a tutor. Talk to the teacher.

If you carry those feelings around, you're not actually helping anyone, especially not yourself. Feel your feels, but keep your feet out of the fire. So, how do you do that? When you're feeling something that's making you sick to your stomach, you call in helper feels.

Acknowledge it. "Hey, this is hard." "I'm concerned for my kid." "I'm giving them and myself grace." "School is hard." "We are taking action." "I can let myself have hope along with the concern." Hope is like Pepto-Bismol for hard feels.

Bring in gratitude that you're holding it together. understanding for both of you as you navigate it. Teach yourself and your kid how to bring in feelings that help you through the challenges in life. And you know what I guess less challenging.

One of the highlights from my talk at the Topanga library was helper feels and how they reframed everything. some mindset tools for the hard stuff in life. You'll find it below.

Wanna go deeper? Check this one out:

Go through How To Be On Your Own Side with Dawn!

Coming soon!

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