Honoring Your Emotions, with Dr. Jenna Glover

(mouse clicking) (soft music) Headspace Studios. (gentle music) Hi there. I'm Dr. Jenna Glover, your guest host for the week. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Wednesday of Pride Week. As you know, I'm a psychologist specializing in dialectical behavior therapy and I'm here to share how flexible thinking can help us navigate a non-binary world. Today, I'm breaking down emotion regulation, which is the process of managing your emotions so that you can more easily adapt with the world around you. For example, it can be easy for negative thoughts to spiral when you don't feel accepted like at work, school, or even with your family, but if you can regulate your emotions, you're more likely to cope in a productive way and find peace even in tough times. Oftentimes, people ask me, "How can I control my emotions?" And really that's not something that we want to do. Instead, we want to regulate our emotions, to change our relationship with them, to understand them, and utilize the information they're giving us to make effective decisions. Dialectical thinking is really important in emotion regulation, because often we see our emotions in the extremes. We think of sad as being a bad emotion or anger as a bad emotion when the reality is emotions are just emotions. We can experience something and it can be difficult and it can be helpful. When we start losing the judgment related to emotions that there's good or bad emotions, but instead that emotions just exist, we step into a dialectical mindset that helps us allow our emotions to come and for us to give them space. In a lot of ways, emotions are like children who want attention. When we ignore them, they tend to get louder. Your emotions might come out during a conversation with a friend or you say something and later think, "I can't believe I said that." It's because we're not honoring our emotions and paying attention to them when they happen in the moment. Dialectics helps us to recognize, "Anger, there you are, neither good nor bad, you're just present." One of the things we know is that LGBTQ+ community has to deal with a lot of stress related to being in a minoritized population. We are experiencing difficult situations at a more frequent rate relative to other people in the population. Somebody might misgender you. Somebody might use the wrong pronouns. You might go to a hospital like I did once and have a baby, and they give you a form to fill out for the mom and the dad for the birth certificate. All of those create a range of emotions that can come out of nowhere at any given time. We also know that those in the LGBTQ+ community experience substance use disorders at a much higher rate than the general population, anywhere from three times to five times more, and this is something I experienced in my own life. (gentle music) (birds chirping) Shortly after coming...