Cecelia Baum Mandryk (00:01.506)
Hey and welcome to Calmer Conversations, episode 23. I’m Cecilia, your host. Today we’re gonna talk about dread and how perhaps to feel less of it in your life. You can substitute pretty much any emotion in here for dread. So even if you don’t tend to feel a lot of dread in your life, this will be applicable to you. If you’re somebody who experiences the Sunday scaries,
or you dread upcoming social events or things like that, then this will be really helpful for you because I’ll be talking specifically about dread. But again, you can kind of apply this to almost any emotion. So that’s where we’re gonna go today. If you’re somebody who experiences dread, then make sure you stick around and listen to this. And let’s dive in. Okay, so this…
Feeling dread is like feeling any emotion and there are a lot of emotions that for some of us Feel more uncomfortable than other emotions. So for instance dread for some people can feel really tough and it can be something that shows up a lot For other people it might be shame for other people. might even be something like joy or happiness so most of us have some emotions that feel kind of uncomfortable and a huge part of the work that I do with folks is to
help you become, sorry I’m laughing a little bit because I understand how hard of a sell this might be, but help you feel more comfortable with hard emotions. And I think if you’re in the middle of feeling hard emotions or if you haven’t experienced the other side, you might not understand how powerful this is, but I just had a group coaching call with a group of people that have been working with me since…
at kind of mid January, so we’re getting close to having worked together for a year in a group. And most of the people were relatively new to me when they joined that group. Maybe they’d done a few workshops or had some one-on-one, but for the most part, most people were relatively new to my work. And two people in the call noted how there are things happening in their life right now that were bringing up a lot of emotions.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (02:17.802)
and a lot of kind of conflicting emotions and a lot of really strong emotions. And one of the things that struck them was that they were not only able to recognize these emotions and name them for themselves, which is really powerful, right? To say, I’m feeling this right now. But they were also able to be with them. And it didn’t feel like a big deal that these emotions were coming up. And so I want you to think about that in your life and in the context of perhaps dread is that
or any whatever strong emotion that you’re thinking about during this episode is that what if I could feel this emotion? What if it was still present in my life? It still might come up and it might not, right? So with certain emotions, once we start working with them, they actually do come up less often. But what if I could have this emotion in my life? What if I could experience, for instance, overwhelm or anxiety or shame or guilt or embarrassment? And instead of it,
becoming this big deal and me having to avoid it or buffer from it or I don’t know, go buy a bunch of stuff or drink something or clean something, I could just be with it. And I could just notice that it was there and I didn’t have to do anything about it. That’s the kind of upside of this work. Okay, so feeling okay with uncomfortable emotions, I think is a superpower.
And I think that if you take the time to figure out how to do this, you will notice that it’s a superpower in your life too, because almost all of my clients say something similar after we’ve been working together. Like, I’m so impressed that I can just be with a feeling. And the reason why most of us can’t do that to begin with is because we learned how to process emotions from other human beings who also had their own things with emotions and who also felt emotions were hard to process in some way or certain things were scary or we should avoid them. So anyway, that’s a little bit of a tangent, but let’s come back to Dread.
or any heart emotion, right? So I’m gonna stop saying or any heart emotion, but just know that when I say dread, you can kind of put whatever you’d like in there. Okay, so this is the process that I use for folks is to recognize, and we talked about this and like the three keys, right? But I’m just gonna kind of break it down in a smaller chunk for you here. And this is meant to be one of those shorter episodes. It’s pretty digestible.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (04:39.776)
So start to recognize, and this might be, this is helpful to do usually out of the emotion at first, so not when you’re feeling it, but kind of ask yourself, when do I feel the most dread? And I know that one thing a lot of people come to me with is some version of the Sunday scaries, right? So they start dreading the work week ahead of the work week, or they dread social events or things like that. So notice when you feel a lot of dread.
And again, you can pause this episode as you’re listening and kind of use this as almost like workbook, like an audio workbook that you can go through. Ask, when do I feel dread? And if you can’t identify when you feel the most dread, you might say, okay, for the next week or the next two weeks, I’m gonna start to notice when I feel dread. And then the next step with that.
And I’m gonna start to notice and get really, really clear what dread actually feels like in my body. So every time I feel dread, I’m committed, instead of trying to fix it or make it go away or create some other emotion for myself, so for instance, creating little dopamine hits by scrolling or feeling better by cleaning something or distracting yourself with some other task, pause when you feel the dread.
This is a perfect time to go into like the kind of allowing process, which is taking a breath, reminding yourself it’s safe, it’s okay to feel dread, that there’s nothing wrong with you, that you’re feeling dread. It’s a totally human emotion. So it’s, a lot of people feel dread. And then ask yourself, how exactly does dread feel in my body right now? And the neat thing about this process,
is if you remind yourself you’re safe, you’re working with your primitive brain, the more and kind of more cognitive side of your brain that wants to escape feeling this way. When you take a slow breath, you’re actually engaging your vagus nerve, which sends a signal to your nervous system and to your primitive brain that you’re safe. And then when you start to describe what’s happening, so when you start to get descriptive, instead of judging what’s happening, I shouldn’t feel dread right now.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (06:59.028)
or I wish I didn’t feel dread right now, or dread feels awful in my body. Instead you’re saying dread feels like a heavy weight tied around my waist. Dread feels like a pit in my stomach. Dread feels like I’m really, I’m shrinking down. Whatever it feels like for you, describe it. And the thing that starts to happen, the mechanism that starts to happen when you start to describe it to yourself is instead of resisting the emotion, which most of us do very naturally, we don’t need any help resisting it.
which puts our nervous system into the sympathetic place. This is the kind of fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flock response, which is what you probably see. When we start to describe it, we start to naturally allow it. And remember, allowing is different than condoning. So condoning is saying I want more of this. Allowing is just recognizing this is happening. This is coming up for me right now.
So you recognize dread and you allow it. And when you allow it, you bring your nervous system back into the parasympathetic state. And when your nervous system is in the parasympathetic or more regulated state or closer to that state, what it does is it lets your body actually process the emotion. And that’s really what we want it to start doing. We want to let our bodies do what they do best, which is process things, let them go instead of store them.
And from this place, which could take somewhere between 60 minutes, not 60 minutes, 60 seconds and few minutes for your body to actually be there. So this isn’t a huge thing, but we’re slowing down and feeling dread. Then you can start to ask, I wonder why I’m feeling dread.
If there was a story associated with this feeling, could I name it to myself? And often we can’t at first, but we can if we keep asking the question, right? And so for instance, if it’s around the work week, you might be telling yourself or around like some test that’s coming up or something like that, you might be telling yourself, this isn’t going to go well. It’s going to feel really hard. I’m not looking forward to this week. I hate my job. I don’t like my colleagues.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (09:07.308)
Like there might be, there’s some story that’s happening. I’m not good at what I do. This is the week that they’re gonna find out that they hired the wrong person and they’re gonna fire me, right? Some story that’s in there that’s causing the dread. And you need to figure out what your story is or come to coaching, get someone to coach you. You join the club or you can come to something else that you can get coaching. And you can figure out.
what the story is that’s associated with the feeling of dread. Why are you dreading this? And then once you understand the story, and this is kind of like the more advanced version, right? So once you understand the story, then you can start to ask what other stories are available? What else is true for me? If I’m not gaslighting myself or using toxic positivity or forcing myself to feel good about this,
If I was just moving from dread to like maybe not looking forward to it or from not looking forward to it to neutral, what kind of story would I be telling myself? What might be available to me? If I was actually somebody who is looking forward to this, what kind of story might I be telling myself in my head? And this just starts getting your reticular activating system and your brain looking at something different in your life, like looking for different kinds of facts, telling different stories. And when you do that,
it’s actually a lot easier to not feel dread, to feel something else. You can also ask how you want to feel at the beginning. That can be really powerful. So even just naming that I want to go to neutral, I want to feel neutral about this event, doesn’t sound like super sexy, right? But oftentimes we have to get to something like feeling less intense emotions. We have to kind of stair step our way or like walk a path from dread, which can be quite intense for some people.
to something that’s a little bit lighter instead of just switching immediately to feeling like super positive about the social interaction that you’ve been dreading for years. So that’s how you work with an emotion like dread, right? So you start to say, recognize when it’s coming up in your life, recognize what are the patternings and stories around it, allowing it, recognizing how it actually feels in your physical body.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (11:27.998)
And this is, this sounds familiar because it’s a process that I use over and over again and it’s super powerful. So if you feel a lot of dread in your life, you might say, I’m committed to understanding where the dread, maybe how it feels in my physical body. I’m committed to knowing maybe when I feel it throughout the day or week. I might commit to starting to understand the story or I want to get support from this coach or this person to help to understand my story. Because again, sometimes it’s really hard to see our own brain.
We’re just so entangled in the story. feels so true to us that it’s really hard to get some space around it to understand the difference between the truth that our brain is telling us and the story that our brain is telling us, right? We just see it as true. And so actually slowing down is really powerful. So I’m looking at my notes right now because
It’s not actually super insightful, but a client that I talked to yesterday just said that one of their major wins for the week, this is a one-on-one person, between the weeks that we met was that they’re really starting to see the story their brain tells them as a story instead of as a fact. And even that slowing down and noticing that is really powerful. Okay, so I want to follow this up by saying this, I have a mini course on this. It’s $29.
it is so much more valuable than $29. Like think about the last thing you spent $29 on. This is a kind of, without overselling it, and this is kind of what people have given me feedback on, it’s a pretty life-changing approach to things like emotions. It’s called the five-minute shift, and the idea is it’s teaching you how to identify, create safety, process emotions, and move forward from them. So there’s a kind of class that’s available.
There’s an explanation of why it works and there’s me processing in real time plus notes and kind of a cheat sheet that you can use and things like that. So if this episode was helpful and you’re thinking, this is a process I’d like to try, grab the $29 five minute shift. Like, please go in there, give yourself that gift. You really only need, you need less than an hour to go through all the material probably. Maybe a little bit more if you wanna watch both of the classes, but really truly.
Cecelia Baum Mandryk (13:51.298)
If you want to start making these shifts systematically in your life so you can feel better, if you’re really committed to feeling less dread in your life, this is well worth your money and your time to go do it. It’s a mini course, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not valuable and there’s not lots of gems in there. And again, people who have been long-term clients have gotten it and said like, wow, this is so helpful. Thank you so much for putting it in one place and making it so condensed and potent. I use it all the time. So go get the $29 five minute shift.
Give yourself a gift this holiday season if you’re listening to this in real time or just a random present if you’d like to. And it’s a skill that you’re gonna learn to use over and over again so you can process emotions more easily, so you can move forward from them more easily, so that you can feel calmer in your brain, so you can feel better in your life. Okay, that’s all about dread and how to work with it or any other strong emotion. Thank you so much for being here today. I will see you the next time I see you.
