Anxiety, Emotions, and Healing: How to Stop Bottling It Up

(air whooshing) (mouse clicking) (bright music) Headspace Studios. (bright music) (gentle piano music) Hi, friends, it's Rosie here. Welcome to "Radio Headspace." A few months ago, I found myself crying in the dairy aisle at Trader Joe's. I wish I was kidding. I was standing there staring at the oat milk when a wave of emotion just hit me, not about the oat milk. It was something deeper. It was one of those days where everything had piled on, work stress, family stuff, hormones doing their thing, and I hadn't given myself a second to feel any of it. As I stood there holding a carton of unsweetened oat milk and blinking back tears while pretending to compare yogurt brands, it hit me. I am not okay, and I haven't been for a while. (light music) That's when I realized I was emotionally constipated, like full-blown spiritually bloated, feelings on lockdown, and I didn't even know it. See, growing up, I learned very early on that showing emotion wasn't safe or welcomed. If I cried, it was, "You're too sensitive." If I got mad, it was, "Don't be so dramatic." If I was scared, it was, "You're fine, get over it." In my Hispanic household, we didn't talk about feelings. We worked, we endured, we kept it moving. Our emotional vocabulary was mostly side eyes, sarcastic jokes, and passive aggressive cleaning. And so, like a lot of people, I learned to file away my emotions like overdue mail, hidden, stacked, unopened. But here's the thing. Emotions, they don't just disappear. They just get louder. They don't just vanish because you ignore them. They wait. Then they come back with compounded interest, louder, messier, and often at the worst possible moment, demanding to be felt all at once. It wasn't until I began my mindfulness journey that I learned something simple, but profound. Emotions are energy in motion. They're not flaws, they're not weaknesses. They're data. Anger says, "A boundary has been crossed." Grief says, "You loved deeply." Fear says, "Pay attention." Joy says, "More of this, please." (birds chirping) I didn't know how to read any of those signals back then. I just felt tight, numb, easily triggered, like I was doing everything right, eating well, meditating, working hard, but still waking up with anxiety stuck in my throat and grief hiding in my shoulders. And then, like all good revelations, it hit me in a very ordinary moment. I was sitting in a parking lot, yes, again, clearly my spiritual awakening spot. After a difficult therapy session, we had touched on a memory I hadn't looked at in years, and I felt this overwhelming tightness on my chest. Instead of numbing it with a podcast or calling someone to talk about anything but what I was feeling, I did something wild. I sat, I closed my eyes, I put my hand on my chest, and I said out loud, "This is sadness." Then I asked, "What do you need right...