How to Stop Carrying It All: A 90-Second Practice for Real Relief

You're doing everything right. But something still feels... heavy.

Not dramatic, just heavy. Like you're moving through life a little bit at arm's length... present enough to function, but not quite in it.

Here's what's actually going on: when we push down the hard feelings (the frustration, the grief, the anxiety) they don't disappear. They get stored in the body, and they quietly weigh us down from the inside.

And here's the part that changes everything: when we block the hard stuff, we accidentally block the good stuff too. The joy doesn't land the way it should. The big moments slide past. Life starts to feel a little gray, even when it looks really full.

In this episode, Jessica shares a simple 3-step practice, backed by research and rooted in somatic work, that can move an emotion through your body in as little as 90 seconds. Not to fix it. Not to analyze it. Just to let it pass through instead of pile up.

This is how you lighten the load. This is how you start to actually feel your life again.

You'll walk away with:

• Why "thinking through" your feelings keeps you stuck
• What's really behind that low-grade heaviness you can't shake
• The 90-second body-based practice to release what you're carrying
• Why you have to feel the hard stuff to unlock the good stuff

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Fix it. You can have a life that looks successful and still feel like you're caring way too much. The pressure, the overthinking, the constant weight of holding it all together. This is Live Lighter. I'm Jessica Berg, and this show is for women who are done living like that. Each week, we'll be breaking down what's actually keeping you stuck in that pressure and how to start letting it go so that your life doesn't just look good, it actually feels good. Hello and welcome to the Live Lighter Podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Berg, and I am genuinely excited about what we are going to be diving into today because this one has the potential to completely shift the way in which you move through your day-to-day life. We are going to be talking about feelings. And I don't mean just the warm, fuzzy life is beautiful, rainbows and butterflies type of feelings. We'll talk about that. We're also going to be talking about the ones that feel edgy, the ones that feel triggering and really uncomfortable. We're going to talk about why it is so important to feel the full spectrum of both types of feelings, the pleasant and the unpleasant ones. And we're going to talk about why we avoid the hard ones at all costs. And then we are going to walk through a really practical exercise that I love to use with my clients in the hopes that it will help you actually start letting these emotions move through you instead of staying stuck inside of you. So buckle up, let's get into it. I want to start by asking you something. How present do you, you the listener, actually feel you are in your life? And I don't mean busy. I don't mean doing. I mean when something beautiful, incredible, really heartfelt is happening. When you're laughing with someone you love, when you accomplish something you've worked really freaking hard for, are you actually in it? And are you letting yourself feel it fully? Or does it kind of just slide past you? You give it a little bit of a pause, a celebration, and then immediately you're on to the next thing. So I'm just gonna put that out there as a question. Sit with it, maybe have it in the back of your mind throughout this episode. Now, I talk to a lot of women who feel this. Life looks really great on paper. They're doing all the things, checking the boxes, they have accomplishments, they celebrate it for a moment, and then they're on to looking at what's the next thing that they need to accomplish. They're on to doing the next thing. And here's what I want you to understand: that feeling of distance, that inability to be fully present in your life, in the moments. It's not a mindset problem. It's not a new strategy that you need to apply, a new practice that you need to put in place. It is actually a body-based solution. So when we have emotions stored up in our system, in our bodies, our nervous system cannot really fully settle. And when our nervous system cannot settle, it is really, really difficult for us to drop into presence. We stay in this low-grade state of being on alert, anxious, guarded, slightly stressed, scanning for what's gonna go wrong next. There's a tiger behind the corner. No, it's just an email that's coming through. That is what we call a deregulated state. And it shows up as this constant low-level worry, the overthinking, the second guessing, the self-doubt. It's almost like your brain just won't turn off. That is deregulation. And it happens when your body is caring more than it's been able to process, than it's been allowed to process. So when I talk about feeling the full spectrum of your emotions, the reason it matters isn't just about emotional health in the abstract sense, that is very important, but it's also because it literally is the pathway to being more present, more alive, more here for your own life. And the more you allow yourself to feel and process, especially the unpleasant emotions, the more regulated your nervous system becomes. And from that regulated place, presence is actually possible. In fact, presence becomes your new baseline. Rest is something that you all of a sudden can enjoy. Real joy, real connection is something that becomes more of your everyday experience versus an anomaly. And this brings me to the thing that I really want you to hold on to today. So if there is anything that you get from this podcast today, I want it to be this: the depth in which we allow ourselves to feel the unpleasant emotions, feel the full depth of them, that is going to be a direct reflection of the magnitude in which we get to feel the pleasant ones. So the blocks you're putting on your anger, your sadness, your grief, those are the exact blocks you are putting on your joy, your peace, your bliss. You don't get to pick which one you get to feel the more depth of. When we shut the door on the hard stuff, we are accidentally shutting the door on the good stuff too. And then we wonder why life feels a little gray, why it feels so heavy. It's because we're not allowing ourselves to feel all of the emotions in our human experience. We are deciding which ones we are actually going to let ourselves have access to. And that's just not the way it works. And I'll give you a real life example. So for anyone who's known me for a good chunk of my life, they'll tell you I am a pretty optimistic person. I lean into the happy, the grateful, the excited, and that's real, right? That's genuinely who I am. I genuinely am a positive person. But as I have done the deep work on myself, I can look back at decades of my life and be honest, hold up a mirror to myself, and I can say I wasn't just being optimistic. I was avoiding the uncomfortable feelings at all costs because they made me feel deeply, deeply uncomfortable. And to take that even a little bit further, now I can look back and see where it all came from, right? So just a little bit of a backstory of Jessica's life. So I grew up in a house with alcoholism. My father is one of the most amazing human beings I have ever known in my life. I love him with every fiber of my being. And we have a very, very close relationship, and I'm so proud of who he is and who he has become. And um, and he has a disease, and he will be one of the first people to tell you, you know, he's he's not that's not something that he's ashamed of. And when you are a child growing up in a home with an alcoholic, it definitely has uh it's going to have an impact on you for better or for worse. And um, I want to preface this by saying, like, I grew up in a very safe space. Like my father was not abusive in any way, shape, or form. He just had um a disease that he developed when I was younger. And so for me, what I picked up on very early is that not every day is promised. And there would be stints where he would be sober and I would be on cloud nine, and then weeks and months and years would go by where he had fallen off the wagon and it would completely rock my world. So I learned at a very, very young age to stay in the positive, and that staying in the positive actually became one of my survival instincts. So, yes, I'm a very optimistic person in and of myself and by default, right, from a survival strategy. And I can see now that by staying on the surface of the unpleasant emotions, especially from just the survival instincts that I learned, I was also staying on the surface of the pleasant ones. So if feeling our emotions is actually the incredible gateway to feeling more alive, why on earth don't we do it more often, right? Sounds pretty straightforward. Oh, okay, I just have to feel all the feelings, okay. So, and then then I'm gonna be more alive, then I'm gonna be more present in my life, then I'm gonna feel more joy, I get to feel all the good stuff more deeply. That sounds pretty straightforward, right? But most of us aren't doing this regularly because, quite frankly, it doesn't feel safe. And because it feels unsafe, the system is going to do what it always does when there is a threat. It's going to get you the hell out of there. It's going to look for the fastest exit. And in today's world, those exits come in the shape of numbing, distraction, overanalysis, and suppressing. We work more, we scroll more, we pour that glass of wine, we turn on something mindless to watch, we overanalyze the emotion in circles until suddenly we are just tired of thinking about it and ruminating on it like a hamster on a wheel. I did all of these. So I am not pointing any fingers, I haven't pointed at myself. But here's what I want you to understand about avoidance. It doesn't actually work. Avoiding a feeling doesn't make it disappear and all of a sudden, poof, it's gone. You never have to revisit it again. It actually just pushes it deeper into the body where it becomes stuck energy. And stuck energy in the body is exactly what creates that low-grade deregulation I was talking about earlier. The constant undercurrent of stress, the heaviness, the not quite rested, the presence you can't quite access. A lot of people think that feeling the emotions is what makes life heavy when it actually is the opposite. It's avoidance of feeling the emotions that makes life heavy because those emotions get stuck. Those emotions weigh us down. But when we feel it, we free it. So let's talk about what to actually do instead. Let's talk about feel it to free it. Now I want to say first that there are absolutely no bad emotions. A lot of us like to say, oh, that's a good emotion, that's a bad one. No, they are all the same. All emotions are equal. They are literally just energy moving through the body. And once we get this good and bad out of our vocabulary around emotions, we can actually start to work with them. We don't resist them as much. They don't feel so scary because we just identify them as energy moving through us. Now, the body, when we get out of its way, it can process an emotion in about 90 seconds. There's research behind this. Harvard did a study on this and concluded that 90 seconds was all it took from start to finish to let the body process an emotion. If we just let it happen, if we just let the body do what it was built to do, the problem is that we don't let that happen. Because we are human beings with a big, beautiful brain and we stop the process before it can complete. We start to overanalyze it, we start to try to fix it, we start to do all the things that I said before, distract it, numb it, suppress it. But if we just got out of our own damn way and for 90 seconds, let ourselves just feel the full breath of that emotion, it would move through us. Okay, so here's how I practice this with my clients. And it's something you can do on your own as well. This is what I've been trained in for the somatic aspect of my training. So step one is naming it. When something starts to feel activated in your body, say it's, you know, whatever, you start to feel the heat rise in your chest. You start to, or you feel your chest tightening or your stomach starts to swirling, or there's just this heaviness that you feel on your shoulders, right? Instead of pushing it away or trying to think your way through it, just pause. Get out of your head and drop into your body and ask yourself, where am I feeling this? Where in my body am I feeling this? Okay, it's in my chest. And this is just an example, right? Okay, uh, it's in my chest. And then just start to describe it. Does it have a texture? Does it have a temperature? Does it have a color? Maybe it's swirly, maybe it's heavy, maybe it's this really tight rope, uh, it feels cold or maybe it feels hot. It's got like this red burning color, maybe this dark color. So once you start naming the sensation that you're feeling in your body, it starts to trigger to your system that it's not this scary thing that you don't know what it is. It's less of a threat. Now it might sound strange, but the moment you start naming what you're feeling, you are sending your nervous system a signal that this is safe. I am not running from this. I'm just looking at it. I'm identifying it and it's not a threat. Okay, so that's step one is naming it and describing what you are feeling. And then if you could even tie an emotion to that sensation, after you've started to name it, just like what's the emotion that you're feeling? And be honest with yourself. Don't get in your head and try to say, Oh, I don't want to feel that one because that one has I feel bad feeling that one. But maybe you're feeling frustrated, maybe you're feeling sad, maybe you're anxious, maybe you're feeling hopeless, maybe you're feeling lonely or angry. Whatever it is, just start to name what is that emotion. So naming it, describing it where it sits in the body and starting to describe what the sensations are, and if you can tie an emotion to it, that is step number one. Step number two is to let it get bigger. Once you've located it, don't try to shrink it, let it expand. With each breath, just give it a little more room. Just 10% bigger, and then 10% more. And you're not going to be making it worse. You're actually giving it permission to move and you are reminding your body, your system, that you are safe to feel this, that you can hold this energy, this emotion. Now, step three is my favorite. This is expressing it. Now, this part, it can sound and look and feel dramatic, but stay with me because this is where the real release happens. Before I go through this exercise with people, I like to give the example of a toddler. Toddlers are genuinely masters of emotional processing. If they are angry, everyone knows about it. They are flailing, they are crying, they might be throwing a complete meltdown in the middle of the checkout aisle at a store. So this final step is to channel your inner toddler. Just let it out. Don't care about what you look like, don't care about what people are going to be thinking, don't care if you're doing it right. Just get out of your head and into the body. And I want you to do this for 90 seconds. So for me, my favorite place, my safe space to do this is my car with the windows rolled up, nobody's watching. Oftentimes I'm in my garage, and I just start to go through step one, okay, I'm just feeling it in my body, I'm naming it. Step two, I'm letting it take up more space, letting my system know it's safe to be feeling this. And step three, I am most often screaming at the top of my lungs or bawling my eyes out, or just yelling as loud as I can, all the things that I'm feeling on my heart, and I'm just getting it out. Whether it's grief, crying, screaming, anger, punching a pillow, whatever the body needs to do, I let it do it for 90 seconds and I just ride that freaking wave. And what I see happen again and again with myself, with my clients, is when we allow ourselves to move through these emotions, at the end of that 90 seconds, we do feel that much later. The emotion has moved through us. It's almost like the way that you, if you think about the way you feel after a really good sob session, what you just released from your body, literally physically with tears and emotionally with the energy. That's what it's like. And sometimes what I've seen with myself and with clients is sometimes that top layer of emotion, once it's moved, often the more activated one, the frustration, the anger, the anxiety, once that's moved through, sometimes underneath there's another layer, a softer one, a more vulnerable one, sadness, loneliness, disappointment. So there gets to be layers oftentimes that we're just moving through. But the the key part is to really just work through what's on the surface, what's rising up within you. And with all of that being said, that's an example of feeling the unpleasant ones. And you can do that same exact thing with the pleasant feelings as well. Really feel and express the joy, the happiness, the excitement, the hope, the pride. Because this is the part that we forget. We practice tolerating the heart emotions, but we also need to practice holding space for the pleasant ones too. Because here's the thing we tend to rush through joy too. We barely let ourselves register it before our brain is already scanning for the next problem. So if you're in a moment that feels good, pause. Notice it, let it land. There is research that the brain needs about 20 to 30 seconds of sustained attention on a positive experience for it to actually register within you. Otherwise, it just passes through as if it didn't even happen. So give it time. Let yourself feel safe in the good stuff too. So as we close out the episode today, I want you to walk away with this. The emotions you avoid don't disappear. By avoiding them, they don't just magically go away. They get stored in your body where they get to stay stuck. And the more we push the hard feelings away, the more we store them inside of our system, the heavier life starts to feel. And by doing that, we are accidentally pushing the pleasant stuff away too. And when we allow ourselves to actually feel what's there, to notice it in the body, to give it space, to name it, to let it move through us, we stop carrying it. And when we stop numbing the hard stuff, we stop numbing the good stuff. Joy gets deeper, connection gets richer, life starts to feel more alive. So this week, if something comes up emotionally, both pleasant and unpleasant, instead of rushing past it, either distracting from it, avoiding it, or rushing to the next thing, I want to invite you to just pause. Notice it, name it, let it move through you. You might be surprised at how much lighter life starts to feel for you. Alright, thank you so much for being here. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who needs to hear it today. And I'd love to hear outlands for you. Leave a comment, send a message, let me know. Until next time, be well. Alright, so that's today's podcast. Thank you for listening. If you would like to learn more about the services that I provide to women, you can check out my website at Jessberg Coaching.com. That's J E S S V E R D C O A C H I N G dot com. Until next time, be well.