Name Them To Tame Them | Episode 1 | Reviving Vet Med

Good mental health isn’t about being happy all the time. In fact, a mentally healthy life includes the full range of human emotions – even the uncomfortable ones like sadness, fear, anxiety, and anger. These emotions are a part of being human and pushing them down doesn’t make them go away.

On the contrary, one of the best ways to quiet our emotions is to give them a voice. Join me as I talk you through practical tools to boost emotional literacy, thereby fostering mental health and wellbeing.

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Transcript

Hey everyone and welcome to today's session of reviving VET Med!

 For today, we are going to be talking about affect labeling or naming our emotions. This is just one aspect of emotional literacy, which is really how we recognize our feelings and understand them and express them in a productive way. In today's session, we will go through the physiologic response to thoughts, feelings, and emotions.  

We'll talk about the process of naming our emotions and how that helps to tame them. And we will also discuss 3 common myths regarding mental health and feeling. So this session is recorded after the mental Health Week, which was acknowledged in June. And I really hope you get a lot out of today's content. 

Before we get started, I do want to let you know that this session was recorded previously live on Facebook and Zoom. So if you notice that some of the sound is off or that I am interacting with some of the viewers live, just know that that's why. But I really hope you enjoy this and without further delay, let's go ahead and get into it. 

This is the reviving Vet Med podcast, and I'm your host, Doctor Marie Holloway Chuck and my mission is to improve the mental health and well-being of veterinary professionals around the world. 

So interesting to see where everybody is tuning in from. It's usually, you know, various parts of North America, sometimes even over in Europe with the time change, Australia and New Zealand become a little bit tough. But please feel welcome to introduce yourself where in this wonderful world are you tuning in from, you can do that in the chat or in the comments section. OK, so while you are introducing yourselves, I'm just going to launch into some statistics, which is really the impetus for me to choose this topic for this month's Wellness Wednesday session. 

So when it comes to mental illness, one in five adults experience a mental illness every year, these statistics are the same in Canada and the United States. I'm assuming they're relatively similar as well to what we would see in other parts of the world. 

I was actually quite surprised to see as well that by age 40, half of adults will have or have had a mental illness diagnosis, depression and anxiety being the most common mental illnesses diagnosed. And along those lines, one in 10 adults will experience major depression at some point in their lives. 

So again, if this is something that you experienced, I have been living with depression and anxiety for most of my adult life. You're not alone. There's many of us who are experiencing this and a lot of people wonder why, you know why some people experience mental illness while others do not. It's a really complex relationship. 
There's not one thing. It's a multi factorial soup of genetic, biological personality and environmental factors. 

So I know very often as veterinary professionals, we will sometimes blame, you know, the profession for some of our psychological distress and other mental health concerns. But you know, environmental factors are really, really just a small piece, so just be mindful of that. 

So what about mental health? It's really, you know, it's kind of a continuum of a spectrum, you know and and you can be on various parts of that spectrum at different times. You can have mental illness and have very good mental health or you cannot have a mental illness and have poor mental health, so you know the two don't necessarily go hand in hand, and people tend to use mental health, mental illness interchangeably. 
But mental illness and mental health problems are a little bit different than mental health as a whole.

 So mental health is really our psychological and emotional well-being 40% of Canadians say their mental health has deteriorated in the last year, and actually I was just listening to a podcast or I should say, watching a webinar this morning where they said 60% of Canadians say their mental health has deteriorated in the last year, so depending on what study you read that has potentially gone up. 

The good thing about mental health, we all have mental health and we can all promote and nurture our mental health using different tools. So I'm going to share some of those tools with you today. There's many, many other tools in the toolbox, but these are the ones that I'm going to share. 

Before I get into the tools that I had intended on sharing today, it occurred to me as I was preparing this presentation that I tend to use emotions and feelings interchangeably throughout the presentation. For the purpose of this presentation, I'm just going to do that because I think when most of us think about emotions and feelings, we just sort of think of them. 

As the same thing, but there is a very subtle difference, so for those of you who are listening to me and you're like, gosh, she's using them interchangeably and they're not the same. Yes, you are right. Emotions are associated with bodily reactions that are activated physiologically through neurotransmitters and hormones released by the brain. 

So we actually experience E for experience emotions in the body. Feelings are our conscious or mental experience of our emotional reactions. So the feelings are what we often use to label our emotions that are coming up for us. I know, right? Clear as mud. Still a little bit confusing for some, myself included. There is a difference. Again, emotions felt physically in the body, feelings identified by our conscious mind as an experience. Again, I'm going to use these terms interchangeably, but they are subtly different.

So I want to talk to you today about emotional literacy and the reason I brought up this topic or chose this topic for our Wellness Wednesday is because those of you in Canada probably recognized that earlier this month. 

The Canadian Mental Health Association had mental Health Week and the topic of Mental Health Week was to #GetReal. About our emotions, they had a whole campaign focused on feelings. The feelings name the feelings, good or bad feelings, it doesn't matter. The more that we can identify and feel our feelings, the. Better our emotional well-being and our mental health will be so this whole concept of emotional literacy is the ability to understand your emotions, to listen to others and empathize with their emotions and to express emotions productively. 

So, again, literacy, when I think of literacy, I think of, you know, the ability to comprehend and this is really comprehension of our emotions. So in other words, it's recognizing how you feel, understanding your feelings, labeling them, and expressing them productively and all this is doing is allowing management or unquote ‘’regulation of emotions’’, which improves lots of different things in our lives, including our mental health, our relationships, and our emotional experiences.

 So some people will use the term affect labeling, that's kind of like the psychological definition of what we're doing when we are putting our feelings into words. What this does is it makes meaning of emotions that might otherwise seem confusing or unclear.

 So I'm going to get into an example later on, but very often, you know, we feel we have these bodily reactions, like our hearts pounding and our stomach is churning and our tears are welling up or we might even be crying or you know we feel our jaw clenching and we know that there's something there, but we don't know what it is. And so, you know, there's a few things that we can do when that happens and I'm going to get into that in just a moment.

But I want to illustrate an example, and I'm going to put it in the context of veterinary medicine because most of my audience, of course watching right now, are in the veterinary industry. So, you know, here we are in a pandemic and going into the pandemic veterinary clinics were already short staffed, many of them and kind of at peak capacity in terms of caseload. Then you throw pandemic puppies, COVID restrictions, you know, potential for people getting sick, people getting vaccinated and then not feeling well and various other things. And now we are in a super duper crunch of really high case load and really taxed staffing. 

So you are RVT, veterinary nurse, veterinary tech and you have just worked, you are going into work for your 6th shift in a row. You feel super beat, the days have been long. You know, normally you work an 8 hour shift. It's been pretty much a nine or ten hour shift everyday you feel maxed. 

The only thing getting you out of bed and getting to work today is the fact that you are going to have two days off after your shift is done. You are not scheduled to come back into the clinic for two days and you are excited, you're going to plant your garden, you're going to walk your dog for more than 5 minutes, you're going to spend some time with your partner and it's going to be a great couple of days off. So you're feeling exhausted, but you're feeling chuffed. 

You know, knowing that this time is coming and you head into work and literally you are not even, you know, out of your jacket and getting into your, you know, work clothes when your manager comes running up to you and says, ‘’Oh my gosh, thank goodness you're here. Need to talk to you, Josie called in today. She's got symptoms. She's going to be out for 10 days, isolating, waiting on a COVID test. I'm gonna need you to pick up her shifts. You know, in the next couple of days.’’

So what is your response to this? Your reaction? Well, probably you have some sort of emotion coming up for you. Even just hearing me talk about this story, you know, it doesn't feel good. You know, your heart starts pounding, you feel tears welling up, your stomach turns, you're clenching your jaw. You might even be clenching your fists. And you literally want to run in the other direction. This is your fight or flight response, amping up your sympathetic nervous system in response to stress and tied to that bodily response. 

There are emotions that go with it. It so again, this fight or flight response when we have these activating emotions, so anger, fear, frustration. You know, very often these illicit this fight or flight response we get ready to either fight back or run away so our pupils dilate we often become flushed. 

This is why a lot of people when they become flustered they become, you know, very pink in their face. Heartbeat goes up, we might be trembling because we've got a lot of adrenaline circulating through our body. We are getting ready to move so the blood is pumping to the periphery to fuel the muscles. The heart is pumping, our bronchioles are dilating, our eyes are dilating so that we can see our enemy and either run towards it, run away from it. 

And what is happening then on a brain level response, I'm going to use Doctor Dan Siegel's hand model of the brain. He is such an amazing force to be reckoned with when it comes to neuroscience in terms of this stress response and mindfulness and emotional regulation. 

So, If we look at our hand, the base of our arm, the base of our hand into our arm is the brain stem. So that's really what controls all of our basic bodily functions, our breathing, our heart rate, etc. Then we've got our limbic system, the hippocampus and the amygdala, the amygdala especially, that's like our guard dog, that's our emotional trigger center. 

So when something like this happens where the manager comes up to us and now we feel taking advantage of, you know, have to do this thing already overwhelmed and exhausted. Looking forward to this and now we've had the rug pulled out from under us, we are going to some sort of that is going to be a trigger to some sort of emotional response. 

Again, these are our primitive parts of the brain. If we didn't have a brainstem that breathed and beat our heart for us, we would stop living. If we didn't have a limbic system that detected threats so that we could run away, we would be killed. We would not have survived. We would not have evolved. 

Because we have those systems and because we could evolve, we then developed our cerebral cortex, which is our thinking part of the brain, and our prefrontal cortex is our most highly developed part of our brain. This is the part of our brain where we can analyze our emotions. 

This is what gives us our emotional literacy, allows us to regulate our emotions, allows us to look at situations past or future, and judge them. No other mammals can do that, only humans can do that because we have the most highly developed prefrontal cortex.

 So in this situation where you are, having this triggered reaction, this emotional response you are flipping you. Lid your prefrontal cortex is offline. Your thinking brain is not there, you are in a physiologic state of response where you literally feel like you want to run out of the clinic door and never come back, or you want to, you know, smack your manager. 

Not literally just figuratively and say ‘’are you kidding me? I'm just. I've just worked 6 shifts in a row’’ so that's where we're at with the hand model of the brain. So why do I bring that up? Because the whole premise of today's presentation, this Name It To Tame it, which incidentally was also designed or or first coined by Doctor Dan Siegel, is the idea that if we can name the emotion that's there, that will help bring our cerebral cortex and prefrontal cortex back on line. 

This is why for those of you who are parents again, it's for me as a new parent. I've been doing a lot of reading about kids and emotional regulation and parenting, etcetera. This is why, you know, I and I used to think, gosh, this is so weird, I'm hearing parents be like, you know, ‘’use your words. Name your feelings. You know? Yes, you're very angry’’. 

We do that purposefully so that they can recognize it because they don't know they're having this bodily reaction. You know, when you don't let them have ice cream for dinner and you know we want to acknowledge that. Well the same thing is for people, OK, so if we can acknowledge that we are bringing our thinking brain back online. That's allowing us to regulate those emotions and tame those emotions. 

So name it to tame them. Naming, so talking it through, maybe you're not sure you're going to talk it out or writing it down. Journaling, writing it, whatever about our emotions helps to regulate them. This is because it lowers that amygdala, that limbic system activity, and it activates the prefrontal cortex. What does that do? It reduces our sympathetic nervous system response. 

We no longer have that fight-flight freeze response and that in the end brings our anxiety down. Now I know for those of you who are watching veterinarians especially, but arguably most members of the veterinary team.

 But I again, I really feel not to, you know, discriminate against the veterinarians who are watching veterinarians, in my experience, struggle with feelings. We struggle even sometimes when I'm giving lectures and I bring up the F. Or the feelings word. People get uncomfortable and I see them kind of start to shift in their seats. 

So what is that? What is that about? Well, I very often see veterinary team members getting stuck in their thoughts. OK, so remember our feelings arise from our thoughts, and our thoughts are generated from the perceptions of our experiences. 

That's based on our life, our childhood. You know, previous experience, etcetera. So we have a thought, for example, in this situation when. The manager came up to you and said, ‘’you know, Josie's out. She's potentially got COVID. I need you to work. I know you just worked 6 shifts, but we don't have anybody else to call upon’’. You have the thought that's like ‘’I can't do it. I can't work another shift like  the only thing getting me through today was knowing that I had tomorrow off’’. And so we start to then get sucked into these thoughts and the thoughts keep us out of the feelings. 

So we buy into the thoughts or we push them away. If we buy into them, we're saying things to ourselves like ‘’ohh it's the same thing in my last job, It's just like again and again or ‘’clients are so ungrateful’’ or maybe ‘’my manager is so ungrateful’’ or ‘’I knew veterinary medicine was a bad idea’’ So that's buying into the thoughts and then we just get sucked into this situation and we feel like there's no way out and we stay entrenched in that fight or flight response or we push away our thoughts. 

So we we we sort of like you know, this is what a lot of people in the industry do as well where we push through like you, you you think I would have learned by now. Or if clients would just be nicer. So we're deflecting blame onto clients for not taking responsibility for what we have control over. I better just get over it and muscle through and get done. 

So again, we just get pulled into these situations and we have difficulty recognizing and accepting our feelings. So we end up powering through without slowing down to acknowledge what is happening and a lot of people might be thinking you might be thinking to yourself right now, well, what's the big deal? If I power through, if I power through then I can get through and I can do those extra shifts that I need and nobody will know that I was having this reaction. 

Well, let me tell you that if you keep powering through. You are going to have those emotions bubble up at a very inopportune time. You're going to have a client that's going to come into the clinic, normally a very nice client, somebody who you respect. They're going to just, you know, say 1 little thing that's going to trigger you. And because you have that undealt with feeling of anger towards your manager or frustration towards your situation. 

That is going to unleash on the manager or when you get home, you're gonna get passed off with your partner for something and in situations where we're like, you know, like, where did that come from? Well, that's where it came from because that was probably an unprocessed emotion or feeling from previous. 

So how do we do this? How do we name it? To tame our thoughts and emotions, well, one of the most important things we can do is to 1st off separate ourselves from it. So often we're in this, you know, like I said, we get sucked into these thoughts like ‘’I knew this was going to happen. I knew I shouldn't have come in today. I knew I was going to get roped into working’’. 

You know, and we're so ingrained in that experience. So take a step back, OK. I'm having the thought that I am feeling overwhelmed and that I'm not going to be able to physically do this shift tomorrow or label the feeling and it's not that I'm angry or I'm frustrated. 

You can say that but the problem with that is that then you identify with that emotion and we are not our thoughts. They are not our feelings. We are having them. They are an experience, but we are not them. I know it's a bit existential, but so we would say ‘’I'm feeling angry. I'm feeling. I'm feeling deflated, pisssed off’’ Whatever it is, name it. You're feeling you might be feeling multiple things at once, but I'm having the thought that blah blah blah or I'm feeling and preferably both if you can. And if you. Again, are a veterinarian who struggles with feelings or anybody for that matter, who. Struggles with feelings. 

There are so many lists of feelings out there that can help and what I have done in the past is I've tried to. Great. You know, expressing feelings with team members that I work with, this works really well in academia. If you've got a student rotation and you know you want to introduce kind of the softer side of veterinary medicine versus just focusing on the cases or maybe you have a close team that you work with and you want to just check in with your team every day. We want to check in on feelings. Good. Well, fine. 

These are not feelings. OK, so we want to look into it. And if you're feeling happy. Well, happy is such a general feeling. So maybe it's, you know, I'm. I'm feeling optimistic. I'm feeling excited. I'm feeling grateful. I'm feeling appreciated. Or maybe you're angry. You're mad. It's, you know, I'm feeling. Impatient, I'm feeling outraged. Spiteful. You know, try to really capture exactly what the feeling is the more specific you can be, the more you will feel that feeling start to lift because your feeling has now your experience has been recognized and acknowledged and now can have the chance to dissipate. 

That 's all these. You know, experience want to do is they just want to be noticed and felt. That's our human experience, right. We all just want to be seen, heard and acknowledged well, our feelings and emotions. It's the same thing, so you can Google feelings lists or feelings wheel. And there's lots of examples of this online. So the next thing that we want to do is to accept whatever is coming up. And the first thing that you do, if you find yourself, find yourself spiraling into these thoughts and you're having a hard time getting yourself back online. 

Try tuning into your breath. A little bit and and a lot of people say, you know, take deep breaths. For me it's kind of vague and you have to be a little bit careful if you are having a little bit of an anxious response, you already might be hyperventilating. Taking deep breaths is just gonna exacerbate that. So I'm a big proponent of focusing on deeper exhales. Really lengthening your exhale, the longer your exhale can be. Let's say you breathe in for two seconds, you breathe out for four seconds, that activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your breast, and digest. It helps to calm yourself down, so deep exhales.

 Notice what is happening with you internally and physically. What are you feeling in your body? What is coming up for you in terms of your thoughts? Notice it? What are the feelings? Just noticing it and accepting it. OK, I am feeling angry in response to what the manager has just said to me. It's not going to feel good. You're still going to feel. Angry and and. Most of us don't like feeling angry. We don't want to. We don't want to feel sad. We don't want to feel frustrated. 

These are not necessarily good feelings, and they're not going to feel good. But it will bring a sense of relief if you allow yourself to notice it. What you can do then is to show yourself compassion, right? This is hard. This sucks. Like life sucks right now for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. So give yourself that compassion, but also look at the reality of what is happening. OK.

 Very often our feelings are a signal that something important is happening. If you are having a really big response. To the situation. Then you can take action based on that awareness if you voice. To your manager. You know what?  Like ''I am feeling exhausted. And I'm feeling frustrated that I have to work a 7th shift in a row. I don't think I can do it'' and that now allows for action to happen, whether it's the manager calls in somebody else for relief, whether the clinic has to shut down temporarily because there just isn't enough staff. If you push through power, push the feelings away, don't acknowledge them. Muscle through them. 

Those situations might never get resolved and nothing might change, OK? So yes, negative motions, quote UN quote, are uncomfortable, right? We would love to feel joyful, grateful, happy, enthusiastic, excited, whatever, all the time. And that might not necessarily be the way, but pushing them down and trying not to think about them doesn't work and most of you, I'm sure, have heard about the white bear study by Daniel Wagner, It was done at, I believe it was Harvard where he devised the study where he told participants, you know, whatever you do, just don't think of white bears and all of the participants who were told that they were much more likely to think of white bears, right. 

If you tell yourself, you know, just ‘’don't be angry, don't get angry. Don't get angry, don't get angry’’. This is something that I've done in my life. You know, anger is bad. It's it, you know, I don't want to get angry. Don't get angry. That anger is going to come out. You're going to think of it, and it's going to come out at an inopportune time. 
So the beauty of expressing our negative emotions, whether it be anxiety, anger, sadness, fear, frustration, loneliness, is that that allows for increased support from others.

 If you express to somebody that you're feeling lonely, if that's not comfortable, we don't want to necessarily talk about that, but that gives them an opportunity to support. You and to connect. With you versus. If you just retreat and push it away, then nobody knows and the loneliness. Persists and also builds trust and relationships because you're being vulnerable. 

The more you can be vulnerable and share, the more people will trust us and know that they can count on us, to be honest, and they'll feel able to share as well. That deepens intimacy. That builds relationships, right? That's what we want. So I want to.


I know we're getting to the end here. My goodness, I've been rambling longer than I thought. I want to quickly before we go just spell 3 common myths regarding mental health and feelings, so I'm going to leave you with these three things. 

The first myth is that good mental health means being happy all the time. Absolutely untrue. And mentally healthy person experiences all of the emotions, including the uncomfortable ones, and you see somebody who's happy all the time. 

I would be very concerned. Because that would tell me either they're very lucky they've had an amazing, very happy life, which, let's be honest, I think we've all been impacted by this pandemic. I don't even think that's possible anymore. Chances are they're not allowing them to experience some of those other emotions, and we all need to experience those emotions, even the uncomfortable. 

Myth #2 pushing uncomfortable feelings down. Make them go. Away. I've already said this and I want to enunciate it. Bottling up emotions can make them grow. Or come out in other ways. Which we do not want.

 Myth #3 Focusing on intense emotions makes them worse, and I hope that I've just shown you how one of the best ways to calm or quiet intense emotions is to simply notice them. Allow them to be there. Label them for what they are, and I promise you they will pass more quickly. The quicker that you can do that. And if your emotions are overwhelming, if they're persistent, or if they're interfering with your daily functioning, please, please reach out to speak to a mental health provider professional. OK. 

So we are at the end. We've in fact gone a couple of minutes over. I would love to hear and see in the comments section in the chat box what was your biggest take away from this session today. 

Please share that with all of us that helps me to know, you know, what were the game changing things that you learned? I also welcome your questions in the comments section or in the chat box as well. If you are interested in learning more about mental health, my blog for the month of May was five things we now know about the mental health of veterinarians, so we've had a lot of research around the mental health of veterinarians in the last just three years. 

Even so, I urge you to check out that blog, which summarizes that information. And again, my website is Marie Holloway chuck.com. Thank you so much for. Watching if you. Do anything else today other than checking out the blog, visiting my website? Please follow me somewhere on social media. It's so great to have a tribe of people that I can share this information with. I am on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram most heavily. 

Or if you have a question that you don't want to post for everyone, you can reach out to me at veterinarywellness@ outlook.com, I'm not seeing anything come up in the chat, so I will hang out here for just a couple more minutes, but otherwise I wish you all a very wonderful well on this Wednesday. Thank you so much for joining me and we'll see you next month.

Bye bye.

All right. Well, there you have it, everybody. I hope that you enjoyed the content from today's session. It's certainly a really important topic that I think all people can benefit from, not just those of us in the vet profession, but also those of us and our family and our friends and and our other circles. So I would love to hear your thoughts. Please feel welcome to reach out to me at any time. 

My email address is veterinarywellness@outlook.com, otherwise I will post a link to my blog. Five things we now know about the mental health of veterinarians in the show notes and. You can have a read through with that if you're interested. Have a wonderful rest of your week and happy Wellness Wednesday, and we'll talk to you next time.