Damn! Damn, Damn!

How to deal with life when sh*t hits the fan.

In the legendary film trilogy Back to the Future, Dr. Emmett Brown paces back and forth as a generational storm rolls into town. He is waiting impatiently for the resourceful Marty McFly, preparing for their single, high-stakes attempt to send Marty from 1955 back to 1985 in his time-traveling DeLorean. Damn! He shouts. Damn, Damn!

The pressure was extreme, it was truly a once in a lifetime opportunity, and the doctor had zero control over the outcome. He was depending on his partner Marty to come through, and it wasn’t looking good.

If you are a people leader, a business owner or an entrepreneur, you’ve felt this before.

Our lives are filled with tiny situations that bring about big emotions. Most of us don’t know what big emotions are, but we know we don’t want them.

In this article, I’ll break down what’s happening when we feel big emotions, and give you some practical tools so that when you experience these big emotions, you have a way of navigating them effectively instead of blowing up your closest relationships or business partnerships.

Let’s start off with a window into my world as an executive 10 years ago.

If I look back at the most high-intensity times in my professional career, I was trying to control as much of my life as I could: my environment, my nutrition, my schedule, who had access to me, and how I felt. Interestingly enough, I don’t remember feeling much. There was so much at stake: so much stress, so much complication, so much anxiety, that the idea of feeling “big” feelings was probably something I intuitively felt I couldn’t handle.

I was struggling with a small business which was at a point in its growth that Alex Hormozi eloquently calls “the swamp.” That size of business between 1-3 million EBITDA where everything is hard. We had diligently built out different delivery teams for our IT services, and then we lost some significant clients due to shifts in the customer’s business strategy. Our performance was outstanding, our contracts weren’t.

We found ourselves with a huge spend on human capital relative to our overall revenue. Given that we were a full service managed IT services company, it wasn’t easy to just “fire some people” — we needed everybody in order to deliver and in order to scale. The business quickly went into the red, and eventually I had to decide to shut it down or sell it.

I never once remember saying to myself, “I’m stressed,” or “I feel angry,” or “I feel desperate,” and yet I’m 100% sure that these difficult emotions were screaming at me, 99% of the time.

All I knew how to do was “take the edge off.”

Sex, intense sports, pornography, alcohol, loud music and other white-knuckle activities. Looking back on it, if I could’ve given my physical body a voice, it would have been screaming, “Help!!! — I feel threatened, I am afraid I’m going to die.”

I am afraid I’m going to die.

Let’s think about this: how could a few tough business decisions, and some difficult conversations, make my nervous system scream, “I’m going to die!!!”? It doesn’t sound reasonable. But that’s what was happening.

The crazy thing is, I could’ve avoided that if I had just had the courage to acknowledge I was having big feelings. But I didn’t want to do that because I had no idea how to deal with them.

It felt like a rogue being was inside of me, an alien I had no control over. Another thing I didn’t have control of. So I unconsciously did everything I could to push these feelings away. You could say it’s like locking your kids in the trunk of your car. They’re gonna keep screaming until someone opens up, or you’ve got a big problem on your hands.

So if we’re gonna operationalize this concept of working with our big emotions, we need to start gathering data.

Avoiding hard emotions is like locking your kids in the trunk of your car. They’re gonna keep screaming until someone opens up, or you’ve got a big problem on your hands.

Step 1: Label your big emotions.

This is really contrary to our nature. We don’t want to feel pain or discomfort, but that’s what we’re going to do.

Next time you feel something inside of you say “DAMN!”, I want you to try and verbalize what exactly you feel. You might say, I feel nervous or I feel humiliated or I feel vulnerable or I feel confused.

Science shows us that by simply putting a feeling into words, we activate a part of our brain which turns down the neurological volume of our stress and fear. This is called affect labeling.

When we feel big emotions, our body’s security system is essentially saying that you are in danger. This could be for a lot of reasons, but what’s important is that your nervous system is trying to keep you alive, and so when it’s doing this, it’s doing its job.

So we can help it do its job by helping it see that we are not going to die, that we’re not in immediate danger. This is called safety.

Step 2: Use safety cues.

When our limbic system hijacks our brain, we can use safety cues to activate a part of our brain that essentially puts on the brake and interrupts the physiological cascade of emotions. You can use lots of different types of cues to help you feel safe in the present moment:

• Environmental cues

• Physiological cues

• Relational cues

So let’s think about a few examples here.

An environmental cue that tells your body that it is not going to die could be that it’s quiet in your house, or that you’re sitting on a sturdy chair, or that your door is locked.

A physiological cue could be your favorite pillow, cool grass under your feet, or experiencing slow deep breaths going in and out of your nose and mouth.

Some relational cues that would help your body feel like it’s not going to die could be feeling a trusted person’s touch, going for a walk, giving yourself a hug, or hearing someone’s soft vocal tone.

There are lots of safety cues, and different safety cues work for different people. What’s important is that you find some things that help your body believe that it’s not in clear and present danger. This process of finding a safety cue that works for you is called orientation.

Step 3: Connect with safety.

The third step in our process is to personally connect yourself with those safety cues you’ve selected. By default, your brain believes what you tell it more than what other people tell it. So now it’s time to tell yourself that you’re not in critical danger. Once you’ve articulated how you’re feeling (“I’m noticing…”) and you have oriented yourself towards some potential safety cues, then we lock them into our situation.

You can do this by articulating your experience of the safety cues:

“I see that my front door is locked. No one is going to come in and harm me or what’s important to me.”

“The chair I’m sitting on is solid. It is holding me up. I don’t have to do all the holding up.”

“I can feel myself giving me a hug. It feels comforting that I can hug myself.”

Step 4: Get the energy out.

Our feelings bring with them real electrical energy in our bodies. That’s why if someone just tells you it’s gonna be OK, it often doesn’t change anything. Big emotions flood the body with cortisol and adrenaline. If you just stay still, you’ll find that this energy stagnates and you stay tense.

Do something to get that energy out of your body. This could be three deep breaths followed by “vocal exhales.” Or if you’re sitting on a chair, you could tense every muscle in your body at once, as hard as possible, for five or 10 seconds, and then release. Or you could go for a run, or you could lift heavy weights. Give your body a way of getting the adrenaline and cortisol out. This is called somatic discharge.

Step 5: Reclaim your power.

For the purposes of this conversation, the last thing we wanna do is understand that we’re powerful. We have options, even if we don’t like them. Most of the things that threaten us will not happen — in fact, science says that less than 10% will. Here’s the reality: your emotions are data. If our nervous system feels in mega threat, it’s like getting AI to do all of the analysis — you probably cannot trust everything you read. Likewise, when you’re triggered, you’re not going to be able to trust your brains’ evaluation of things with the same measure of confidence as you would if you were not activated as much.

So once you’ve connected your body to a feeling of safety, and you’ve gotten some of the energy out, gently approach an element of the situation again and try to appraise it with your own resourcefulness. This is called cognitive reframing.

Instead of saying, “everything is ruined”, you might say to yourself, “Stuart, this is a really uncomfortable moment. But it is temporary, and I have the skills to manage it.”

There is a ton of science around all of these steps, but what’s important to know is that your body’s doing its job when you feel big emotions. By ignoring those big emotions, you put yourself in a deficit. You’d probably agree that you’re not at your best when you feel that sort of storm cloud over you.

We have options, even if we don’t like them.

By being courageous enough to look into the storm, and curious about the emotions you discover, you’re actually working with your body rather than against it. If “The Doc” had known the science of affect labeling, safety cues, somatic discharge, and cognitive reframing, his hair might not have been so white. And yours doesn’t have to be either.