What’s your internal temperature?
Did you know that over time we set our own internal temperature? Now, I’m not referring to the temperature we take with a thermometer. I’m talking about our emotional temperature.
Let me explain with a story.
I was speaking with my coach the other day and I told her how I grew up in a household with very little noise (these days I’m sure my dad would have been diagnosed with some type of sensory disorder).
As you can imagine it wasn’t much fun. No uncontrollable laughter, no singing in the shower, no screaming at spiders, no jumping out the cupboards and scaring each other.
As a result, my sister, as an adult, has a constant stream of background noise in her house while I like the peace and quiet. Well, I thought I did until my coach asked me if my “noise” was actually internal – after all I’d just explained to her my mind never switched off.
Ohhh, that got me thinking. You see I’m someone who’s brain goes constantly. Its relentless with to-do lists, ideas, plans, deadlines, schedules, what-if scenarios. It’s the constant chatter that I wake up to and what I go to bed with. It means I often feel overwhelmed and under pressure.
So, when I was complaining to my coach that I always feel like I should be doing more and working harder” she suggested to me that perhaps my relentless chatter actually felt good even though I thought it was bad, What???. As you can imagine that stopped me in my tracks!
It feels good to feel bad. Contemplating and journaling on that was my homework.
Fast-forward a few days later and I woke up in the middle of the night and did what I often do and put on a podcast. It was an interview with Dr Joe Dispenza who was explaining that our mind is always working to return us to homeostasis – a state of equilibrium. Now we all know that our reaction to stress leads to a burst of energy, right? So, if we’re cut off in traffic, we have a momentary burst of energy where we might toot the horn, swear and wave our fist in the air but a few minutes later we’ve calmed down and are back in that state of equilibrium.
Now on a related but different topic our mind doesn’t know the difference between what’s real and what’s imagined. So stressful thoughts, problems and that endless chatter in our heads can give us that same burst of energy. That is, we don’t need an actual stressful event to get the same response.
As a result ,we can become addicted or dependant on this energetic state to “feel good/valued/worthy (insert your words here). When we do this, we create the stress in our lives to get the burst of energy feeling we start to believe we need to create equilibrium. This desire overrides any natural tendency for balance. This in effect becomes our new normal. Our new emotional temperature setting.
YIKES!!
The stress response becomes the emotional state that is familiar to us and as humans we prefer what is familiar over what is not. Or, as my coach explained; we fear something bad will happen when it’s not familiar, so we stay stuck in that emotional pattern we have created. Dr Dispenza describes it as living in the past, in the same old thought patterns creating the same stress response. For me, that emotional pattern is reinforced through the noise in my head and manifests as the familiar feelings of overwhelm.
Oh my! Do you have one of these too? A malfunctioning internal emotional thermometer? One that’s keeping you where you don’t want to be?
In a job you hate?
In a career that sucks the life out of you?
With a boss/company/agency that doesn’t align to your values?
For me, my next job is to set about changing the dialogue in my head and the meanings I have associated with feeling overwhelmed. To consciously change my internal temperature so that feeling good can feel familiar and it can become my new go-to homeostatic state.
What about you? What needs to change to reset your internal temperature?
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