Unlock the Secret to Better Emotional & Physical Health

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Have you ever felt disconnected from your body or unsure about how you're feeling physically or emotionally?

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Do you struggle with managing stress or emotions in your daily life?

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Are you interested in improving your overall physical and mental health?

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If the answer is yes to any of the three questions, then stay tuned.

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We are going to discuss a sensory system that is not as well known as I would like, but is critical.

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It is critical for your emotional and physical well being.

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This is Flavors of Emotions, expanding your emotional palette for a tastier life.

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My name is Kim Cordy.

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I'm a sensory perception and emotion management strategist, and I'm an author.

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I explore how to make sense of our feelings through the lens of a chef understanding flavors in a recipe.

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I'm here to help you refine your emotional palette to differentiate the emotions that shape your world.

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You might be one of those who says, Oh, I don't have any feelings.

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Everything I do is based on logic.

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You might think differently or even feel differently by the end of this episode.

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Just like tasting flavors can be developed, so too can this sensory system.

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It can make a huge difference in almost every aspect of your life.

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And what is it?

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It is interoception, or how we feel inside of our bodies.

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Awareness of these sensations are the cues as to our emotional state.

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Emotions come in two flavors.

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There's the homeostatic ones.

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Homeostasis is the body's desire to keep us in balance.

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Our, our whole physical systems.

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So if we're low on water, we get thirsty.

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If we have no energy, we're hungry.

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If we are tired, we need, that means we need sleep.

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That's it.

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This is homeostasis in action, and these are the feelings that are produced by the brain in order to bring us in balance.

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Then there are the feelings that we're more familiar with.

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These are affective emotions.

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We know them as love, hate, sadness, joy, anger, contentment.

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But how do we use these feelings?

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I love the explanation that was given by Stephen Feynman in his book, Understanding Emotion at Work.

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He explains the feelings produced by affective emotions as being crucial for prioritizing, sorting, and filtering possibilities.

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Otherwise, we become paralyzed or stuck in a perpetual loop.

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They guide us as to what matter and what is relevant, not just what makes sense.

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They are our own personal feedback on what is significant, irrelevant, dangerous, or desirous in what we see, touch, smell, or think about.

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You think your decisions are completely based on logic.

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In the end, It's how you feel about it is what makes the decision.

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When your awareness of these sensations is low, you might not be connecting to the feelings of hunger until they're loud.

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And the same with your emotions, until they get really loud, you're not paying attention to them.

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And then they come out in big bursts.

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We know what spurs the brain to do.

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Um, turn on the emotions for hunger and, and thirst, but what spurs the brain for our other emotions?

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I call them recipes just to give it one label, but it's basically a combination of ingredients from the outside and inside world, perceptive ingredients, that have been formed to make a recipe.

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That recipe could be for any of the emotions that we experience, and they're all stored in these recipes in our brain, along with what was going on at the time.

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And it uses that then to say in the future, Hey, We've got a similar situation here, so we're going to launch this emotion.

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Kind of makes sense, right?

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If you had a bad experience with your math teacher as a little kid, and they made math difficult, not very fun, and you were frustrated, well, guess what?

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You're not going to like math very likely, unless you have another experience where you were frustrated.

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I have someone making math fun.

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It can change your recipe.

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It can make your math experience go from a drudgery to a joy, some people love math, but you get what I'm saying.

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Um, the brain is, constantly taking this information in and deciding what it needs to do with it.

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And if it needs to do something, then we're going to feel it just like when your stomach is doing its thing all day long, but we don't notice it until the brain makes us aware.

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The same is true with our affective emotions.

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When we are connected to these emotions as they come up, instead of waiting for them to get big, then we have a better chance of identifying them and processing them and maybe even pivoting from them.

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Like you, you recognize you don't like math.

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Oh wait, I, I do like math.

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It's just, I didn't like my math teacher.

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See, knowing that kind of detail is what can help you to move forward.

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So it's not just recognizing the emotion, but it's recognizing it in more detail and noticing what's going on to see if it really matches the emotion.

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This is why I wrote my book, because I spent a little too much time pushing feelings down for way too long and not being able to recognize them.

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And the tools in my book have made such a huge difference for me, not just emotionally, but physically.

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In fact, I was with my chiropractor and he said to me, I don't know anyone who knows their body as well as you do.

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I can tell him exactly what I need and I'll know if something's slightly out because I'm connected to my feelings and remember my feelings are physical and emotional.

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It makes a huge difference.

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Knowing what you want and what you don't want is, is probably fundamental, the most fundamental thing that you should know, because it's driving you.

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Where your decisions are taking you, your actions., how you feel.

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And when you understand and know yourself this well, your decisions are better and they're in alignment with you.

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And this is what this is all about.

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You getting to know you and being the refined you, because you are unique and special.

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It's so important to know what you want and what you don't want to know how you feel about something.

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When you know these things, you're going to make better decisions.

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You're going to be healthier.

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The list goes on and on Most of all, the more connected that you are to yourself, the greater connections that you can make with others.

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And I don't know about you, but a good relationship, there's nothing like it.

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A bad relationship, nothing like it.

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Get what I mean?

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If you're interested in exploring this topic and expanding your interoceptive awareness, I highly recommend that you check out my book, Yucky Yummy Savory Sweet Understanding the Flavors of Emotions, or just research the topic.

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My niece is neurodivergent.

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She has autism, which makes it harder for her to connect to her feelings, but she has learned how to over the years.

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There are occupational therapists who teach this to people to learn how to connect.

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To their emotions, even though they're neurodivergent and they improve.

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We can learn how to increase our interoceptive awareness to make our connection to our feelings that much more developed.

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Thanks for listening to the flavors of emotions.

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I hope you enjoyed the episode.

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If you liked what you heard and you want to hear more, please click on the subscribe button and don't forget to like it too, please.

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To connect with me or purchase my book, check out the links in the show notes.

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Until next time, have a good one.