How Small Emotional Pivots Break Stress Cycles

Speaker 1 · 0:00Hi everyone. Thank you for listening to our Mindfulness Exercises podcast. My name is Sean Fargo. Today I'm really happy to speak with Dr. Elisha Goldstein. I've been aware of Elisha for 15 years-ish, maybe. His name is on some of the more popular mindfulness books out there that I'll share with you soon, but he has impacted millions of lives around the world with mindfulness and emotional intelligence. So it's an honor to have you on the show today. Elisha is a clinical psychologist, mindfulness teacher, speaker, author, longtime contributor to the field of mindfulness-based emotional healing. He's the founder of the Emotional Longevity Experience and the host of the Emotional Longevity Podcast, where he explores how emotional health shapes our stress, relationships, happiness, and long-term well-being. For many years, Elisha has helped bring mindfulness and psychotherapy together in a very practical and compassionate way. In speaking with him, I think you'll hear a lot of heart. He's helped people work with anxiety, depression, stress, reactivity, self-judgment, and the habitual patterns that keep us stuck. He's also co-founder of the Center for Mindful Living in Los Angeles. And his work has supported therapists and educators, parents, business professionals, and many others bring mindfulness into their daily lives. He's the author and co-author of several very important books in the mindfulness field, including a mindfulness-based stress reduction workbook, which I've recommended to maybe thousands of people in the Spirit Rock bookstore as well as through mindfulnessercises.com. He's the author of MBSR Everyday, The Now Effect, and Uncovering Happiness. And today we're going to be exploring his new book called Tiny Shifts How Emotional Health Transforms Stress, Relationships, and Longevity. In this new work, Elisha offers a grounded science-backed approach to emotional steadiness, showing how small internal shifts practiced in real life can help us calm the nervous system, interrupt stress cycles, respond more wisely in our relationships, and strengthen resilience over time. I really appreciate Elisha's work in that he doesn't ask us to become someone or something else. He invites us to relate to this moment with more awareness and compassion, courage and care. Elisha, thank you so much for being here. It's a true honor to welcome you to our podcast.

Speaker 2 · 3:08Thank you, Sean. That was really wonderful. And the Feelings Mutual. I've been aware of your work for quite a while too and the innovative way of putting out these mindfulness exercises early on. And also I just want to commend you on the ability to pronounce my name so correctly. And because that just doesn't happen all too often.

Speaker 1 · 3:27Well, it did take a little bit of practice, but once it's down, it's down. Well,

Speaker 1 · 3:32I'm delighted to have your book here with me called Tiny Shifts. And I am wondering why tiny shifts? The world is so volatile right now, and we need these big shifts. But why did you call it tiny shifts? And what can people expect from the book?

Speaker 2 · 3:53It comes back to in 2004. I was in graduate school and I came across this guy's works, Rero Bendo and the Mother's Soul. So this isn't exactly where tiny shifts come from, but it's a full circle story. As I was reading his work, I came across this concept of sacred moments. Moments in life, they're fleeting, they come and go. Our kids are young, they get old, we have experiences in our lives and they pass, both comfortable and uncomfortable and neutral ones. But the moments are precious because of their fleeting nature. And so I wanted to see if I could help people cultivate more sacred moments, more precious and special moments in their lives, more meaningful moments. As a graduate student in the doctoral program, you had to put together a study. So I supported people in putting together a five-minute practice of having something meaningful in their life and getting a sense of presence and then relating to this meaningful object. It could have been a religious object, it could have been a memory, it could have been something in nature. And I showed that in just small moments, we can statistically significantly change our stress, how we feel, feel more sense of meaning and purpose in the moments of our lives, generally feel a deeper level of psychological well-being and happiness. So fast forward 20 some odd years later, after doing a lot of work in the field of mindfulness and psychology, as you said, areas of emotional intelligence. I just felt as I talked to my family and my friends, my clients, different people I worked with, that everyone was feeling something similar. And there was this feeling of just general overwhelm that was there. It probably happened back in 2007 when the iPhone came out. I think that probably has added quite a bit to it. Um, there's just a lot we're juggling, and we have more inputs than we've ever had in our lives, and people are switching with this continuous fractured attention constantly. And congratulations, the trillions of dollars spent have gone to the base of our brains, and most of us are programmed to some degree or another. When you say base of our brain, are you referring to the amygdala? Yeah. There's the subcortical regions of our brain that are more involved with impulse and motivation and what we're paying attention to in any given moment, the emotional centers that are there, the amygdala, the whole limbic system that is telling us if we're fearful, we're going to interpret something one way. If we're feeling joyful, we're interpreting that same event a different way. So there are big changes maybe that need to be made. There's like a friend of mine who's moving his way through cancer treatment right now, and they gave him my book, and he said, Do you have anything called big shifts? I mean big shift right. But it's that all we have is these moments. And so if we're feeling stressed, we have a certain emotional loop, which I talk about in the book. We feel anxious, we feel stressed, we feel like frustrated, we feel outraged, we feel like, you know, not this again loop type of thing. These are practiced, patterned experiences that we learned early on in life and that have been reinforced culturally, like a self-worth loop type of example. And we may not have consciously created them, but with these moments of awareness, we can begin to interrupt them. We can somatically begin to shift our body back into a place of balance and shift the blood flow in our brain so we have a little bit more emotion regulation and impulse control and perspective, and then be able to shift where we're paying attention in ways that are healthier. I'll just say this before I close this part is everyone who's listening right now, they know what to do in moments. They've read the books, they've gone through the mindfulness exercises, they've gone to therapy off and on, potentially, they've done meditation off and on, potentially, they've listened to podcasts, they know they have the information. The issue isn't that we need more information, it's that we need access to it. So this ability to interrupt these loops in the moment, that's a tiny shift. The ability to correct our nervous system reaction in the moment or be able to kind of move back in the direction of calm and balance, that's a tiny shift. And the ability to refocus on things that are going to be more supportive for us, more different questions which lead to different answers, or things we know, pieces of wisdom that help us in the past, these are tiny shifts. And all these things take seconds to do. And with repetition, then the muscle of it gets stronger.

Speaker 1 · 8:01Yeah, and even we just say to ourselves, well, I'll just do a little tiny shift now. That can create a new momentum for continuing lengthening the duration or adding more shifts back to back. That first shift is often the hardest shift.

Speaker 2 · 8:17We try to make it really simple. You're somebody who is feeling overwhelmed in the days of your life. You're someone who your cup runs over and you're snapping at the people that you care about. If you're somebody who emotionally shuts down in the face of feeling vulnerable, if you're somebody who tailgates somebody, if you have experiences like that, the very first shift we try to make it very simple. And by the way, this is something that's in all the world's wisdom traditions. This is in the field of neuroscience,

Speaker 2 · 8:45the field of psychology. This is something you've heard of before, but we want to put it into practice and we want to make it this simple. In some ways, I wanted to write a book called Life Can Be This Simple, but we want to make it simple. We want to say, can I just recognize the experience when it's here? Can I just recognize either a thought that's happening, an emotional experience I'm having, or maybe it's a physical sensation? Oftentimes people have their shoulders to their ears. That's a signal that I'm caught in this emotional reaction, or maybe I'm sitting there scrolling for too long or overeating or overdrinking, or I snap at somebody. These are all signals. Can I just recognize the signal either when it happened or as it's about to happen? That's the first tiny shift. The first emotional pivot starts from there. And sometimes I tell people, just take a week, see if you can recognize, like reflect on like what are your moments where you're out of balance, basically? What's happening? What's the emotional loop? What are the thought, emotion, sensation, action that's connected to it? And just see if you can take a week. If you don't want to take a week, that's too long, a few days. I know Sean's got 136-day program you can take. So, but if you just take a few days and just say, I'm gonna be on the lookout for the signal of this particular what I call an emotional loop happening. And that's all you need to do. You don't need to do anything else for those three days, just that.

Speaker 1 · 10:04Yeah, you talk about the four R's and recognize what you've been talking about is the first R.

Speaker 1 · 10:11And you talk about the real power of naming. And I'm wondering, you know, I hear different teachers talk about how to name your experience. And it seems like each teacher has a little bit of a different take or a different style in using certain kinds of words to name our experience and how to recognize our experience. Do you have a recommendation on how people can name or recognize their experience in that moment?

Speaker 2 · 10:42Almost any way that you do it is what the purpose of it is for. So, in other words, in chapter two of Tiny Shifts, I talk about the emotional loop, which I just mentioned. The emotional loop has thoughts, emotions, sensations, and actions. Those are four things that are happening in our experience in any given moment. That's like the whole idea. And you can name, recognize, label, note any one of those. So there's no one size fits all. You don't have to just notice what's happening in your body. You don't have to just notice what you're thinking. You don't have to just notice what you're doing or what you're feeling, which different teachers might promote or support more of one versus the other. But in our everyday lives, all of that's happening. And I might be somebody who notices my activity more than I do how I'm feeling, because maybe, you know, as a man, as an example, maybe I grew up in this world and I was told culturally that my feelings didn't really matter. And so I didn't really pay attention to them. So I don't really have the skill, the emotional intelligence quite yet. It can completely be built for that to be the thing that I'm going to pay attention to. And in fact, when I do try and pay attention to my emotions, I only prove that I just don't have a very good handle on them. And so that only eats away at my self-worth or the idea that I can't do this. Maybe what I do notice is my activity. Maybe I notice my eating. Maybe I notice my snapping. Maybe I notice my scrolling. Maybe I notice them driving a little too fast. Or maybe I'm someone that notices my body more. Maybe I do notice that my shoulders are tense off and on throughout the day, or that I hold a lot of stress on my face because my face kind of contorts, or maybe I notice that my stomach really hurts quite a bit throughout the day. Maybe I'm a person that notices my body more. Maybe I do have a lot of emotional awareness. I'm good at naming, I'm skilled at naming that there's stress here, there's frustration or irritation in chapter four of Tiny Shifts, and I'm a big fan. Your audience probably has a good amount of emotional awareness, but we can all continue to get better and better at it. I'm a huge fan of just relieving all of us and believing we should have at this point a good amount of emotional awareness, no matter how much meditation practice you've done, because typically growing up, most of us didn't learn, and especially boys even more than girls, but we really didn't learn a lot of emotional vocabulary. And in nonviolent communication, Marshall Rosenberg's work, he did a fantastic job. I would say a pioneering job in a lot of ways of helping us understand that there's a whole emotional world out there, and we can study a vocabulary. It really helped me in my life understand what anger was, understanding that frustration, irritation, and annoyance are like derivatives of anger that helped me understand when I was feeling angry. So I could begin to label that feeling more when it's happening. So just give ourselves a little break and give yourself a chance to study different feelings, and we can get better at naming our emotions. But for most of us, that might not be the first place that we go. Or our thoughts. For most of us, thoughts are a little bit more intangible. We might not go there. So any of those ways are ways to do that recognize piece. And because the purpose of recognize is to step us into that space, as we're all aware of, and to bring more blood flow to the prefrontal region of the brain and just allow us to get a tiny sliver of perspective or the opportunity of perspective anyway, to begin to shift from the conditioned and pattern loop that we've fallen into.

Speaker 1 · 14:02Beautiful.

Speaker 1 · 14:04One of maybe the biggest benefit that AI has brought to my life was helping me to synthesize my emotional world and how I want to communicate with the principles of Marshall Rosenberg's nonviolent communication. And helping me to reframe what I was thinking and how I wanted to communicate into a more safe, responsible, and clear way of communicating what's really happening. And I've used AI for helping me to communicate nonviolently so much, and it's really helped reinforce the principles of NVC the more I do it. So I just wanted to share that as a little aside that AI has been really useful.

Speaker 2 · 14:57Call that AI augmented communication.

Speaker 1 · 14:59Yeah. Sometimes I'll print out a script and use that sometimes when I want to communicate something in a difficult conversation.

Speaker 2 · 15:07You know, I remember when I was first learning to lead meditation, and I would print out scripts and I would kind of read out the script initially, and I would do that, and then I would get better and better and just not need it and be then become very dynamic with it or whatever. But I think that if people can have the courage for a moment to admit, like, hey, I really don't know how to communicate very well. When I'm really stressed or when emotions are high, I really lose access to that part of my brain anyway. Some scaffolding would be enormously helpful. If I can just hold this page and read off of it and the person I'm talking to is okay with that understanding of it, we could get a lot further. I think that's kind of brilliant.

Speaker 1 · 15:46Yeah, it's a great analogy around guiding meditations and teaching mindfulness. A lot of our community uses scripts or bullet points and yeah, it's kind of like training wheels and helps us to go from unconscious incompetence to conscious competence.

Speaker 2 · 16:04When you've moved to conscious competence, and you've really arrived.

Speaker 1 · 16:08I want to talk about something that I wonder about from time to time, which is even just the phrase emotional health.

Speaker 1 · 16:16The subtitle of Tiny Shifts is how emotional health transforms stress, relationships, and longevity. And I really want to talk about the longevity piece soon, but I'm curious, what is emotional health to you? I think a lot of people, it seems obvious, like what is physical health? Well, it's lean and strong and free of disease, etc. For emotional health, what does that mean? Because as human beings, yeah, there's stress and grief and depression and all these different emotions that could come through, but does it just mean that we feel that more fluidly, like we witness them and we let them pass, or does it mean that they're less often? What does emotional health mean to you?

Speaker 2 · 17:03It's all tied in. So it's not just awareness of emotions and how we relate to them. It has to do with our relationships as well and communication, like you were talking about. That's also tied into emotional health. And I also think it also is tied into our biology ultimately, because emotions are biology. When anyone's feeling an emotion, I guarantee if you pay attention to your body, you're gonna have a sensation somewhere. That means that your heart rate is going up or your muscles are tensing and it's all connected. So emotions are biology. But emotional health to me is saying like I'm aware of my emotions and I can be appreciative of the comfortable emotions while they're here. And with the uncomfortable emotions while they're here, I can be more graceful with them during the inevitable uncomfortable emotions that come our way. And I have this feeling that no matter what comes my way, I can handle it. I'm gonna be okay. To me, that's a foundation and a bedrock of emotional health. And then to be able to, in our relationship, because before we got on, we had mentioned different people and different names of different mentors and friends and things like that. And Dan Siegel came up and like this idea, or that's who he's got this whole MUI thing, but there's this delusion of separateness, Albert Einstein said. And so we have this kind of connection with each other. So we have this feeling that we're feeling, and it's impacting the people that are around us. So we need to be able to communicate. And so that's part of our emotional health too, is being able to recognize how our emotions are impacting other people, to be able to communicate with people too and have the strength of communication. So you practicing emotional health by having that piece of paper and using it as a way for effective communication or the intention of effective communication anyway. We never know how it's gonna turn out exactly. Yeah, that's all part of emotional help to me. Thank you for elaborating on that. I mean, I just to say, I asked people, what would the days, weeks, and months ahead be like if you had a little bit more of that? If you had this feeling inside you that no matter what comes my way, I can handle it, I'm gonna be okay. Or to be able to recognize when uncomfortable experiences are there and be able to really appreciate them while they're there because all things are fleeting, of course, we know that. And to be able to meet the uncomfortable with more grace. I'm like, what would life be like? What would be different for you? And that feels very healthy.

Speaker 1 · 19:21I love that style of question because it's an invitation to just even consider what it might be like, even just a little bit, and can overcome resistance to taking action because we're already sensing into the positive benefit.

Speaker 2 · 19:37Another benefit of emotional health is a lot of us struggle with self-worth, this feeling of feeling defective or deficient or that something's wrong with me. I mean, that's reinforced culturally in a huge way. Certainly, many of us have it from growing up, and then it's reinforced culturally. I always make this joke when I lived up in Northern California, coming down to Los Angeles and seeing all the billboards that would always tell me what's wrong with me until I have their thing or I'm more like that person. Now we get it everywhere all over the internet. But self-worth grows as we begin to feel more safe with our emotions. So every time you notice self-criticism in your mind and you kind of notice that hook and you are able to recognize that I'm in this self-critical loop, and you're able to pause and you take a breath and you release a little bit. You kind of lower your shoulders slightly or whatever, softening your body. And then from that place, you have a little bit more emotional capacity to choose a kinder response, or to even ask yourself, can I even be kinder to myself right now? It's moving in a healthier direction because if you think about it, what happens? Your heart rate starts to go down, you're contracting all around your body, the squeezing and tensing all around your body begins to loosen up. You start to move into a place that is easier on your body, conserves more energy that your body had been expending so much because it had been like frozen in that fight-flight response. And so we save a whole lot when we begin to support our emotional health and support our self-worth. And it just sends us a clear message whenever we do anything for ourselves that we're worth caring

Speaker 2 · 21:05for.

Speaker 1 · 21:05Oh, thank you for your kind words when we started after my introduction. You said some kind words to me and I kind of evaded it. Just wanted to say thank you for your kind words and take that in and not ignore that. It's practice to feel comfort with more emotions and more intense emotions. And I think you're right, that does increase my feeling of self-worth when I'm able to be with more of myself and more of these emotions that are here.

Speaker 2 · 21:38There's a lot of resonance, just to interrupt for a second, only because before you move on, I wanted to piggyback on that. I have this story in tiny shifts about this exact thing. I led a retreat. It was the end of the retreat. Everyone's in a circle saying something that they are taking away from the retreat. And this woman who works with me, her name Susan, she said to me, and I just want to really thank you. Elisha for all your leadership and everything you've given to us this weekend and pouring your heart into this anyway, these kind things. She said that, and I said, Oh, hey, thanks. Okay. So hold on a second. I did exactly that. And there were these kind of compliments or these kind words that were coming my way. And I sort of kind of just deflected a little bit because it was uncomfortable for me to let in that love. It was uncomfortable for me. And so I moved on to another thing. And it became this sort of joke. As you read tiny shifts, you see this thread of like, why was that uncomfortable for me? And where did that come from exactly? Like you said, I think a lot of us, it's probably so prevalent. I mean, how hard is it for so many people to take a compliment? This is like a common thing. Some people say, I have no problem with taking compliments. But like a lot of people have an issue with it. We feel uncomfortable with it. And there's a reason for that. And to get in touch with that feeling is emotional awareness. Whether we want to let it in and let it be, or whether we want to choose Rumi's words and welcome and entertain them all, or whatever way we want to do that can help us feel more confident and bring the good of that love into us. It's nourishing when we allow it to be there.

Speaker 1 · 23:11This being human is a guest house. Every morning, a new arrival, a joy, a depression, a meanness. Welcome and entertain them all. That poem from Rumi called The Guest House is at the beginning of your book, and I think is very emblematic of these shifts that you're inviting people to take. And ultimately I think these are shifts of love. Self-compassion has been central to a lot of your work. And some may say that compassion and self-compassion are the same as mindfulness, or at least overlapping a great deal. You can distinguish them and talk about them as being separate and make a valid case for that. And I think as people like Jack Cornfield and Ram Das will often say that mindfulness is this loving awareness.

Speaker 2 · 24:08I love that meditation, by the way, by Ram Das, where you just sit there and you just repeat back, I am loving awareness. I am loving. I encourage anyone, well, you can search that on Google or something like that, or whatever your wherever you're searching goes. But playing with that a little bit, there is something about that. And I think that's also a tiny shift. If you are being really self-critical and you pause for a moment, you notice that old story, you notice that patterning, and you're like, okay, well, hold on a second. I noticed that. Take a breath and you release. That's really the second step of this process. That recognition of the emotional loop is typically not enough. We are too wound up from the emotional reaction we're experiencing. They may be chronic, low-grade stress of overwhelm or whatever. Could have been a high grade moment with somebody. And we need to release a little bit. That opens up a space. So if you said then in that space, now you are a little bit more grounded, not fully, but a little bit more ease around you. And then you said, hold on a second. Tried this on, you repeated it three times. I'm loving awareness. I am loving awareness. I'm loving awareness. I would say play with it. I don't know what would happen, but see what you notice as you do that. I remember practicing that meditation more in its full essence for a while because I really appreciated it when I first heard about it. But you can make it a tiny shift.

Speaker 1 · 25:26I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness. I am loving awareness.

Speaker 1 · 25:38You were seguing from recognize into what you call release. And then the third is refocus, fourth is reinforce. There's something about these four R's that kind of remind me a little bit of the cross between what the Buddha called sati sampa janya, the sati being mindfulness, sampajana being clear knowing and often tied to like a clear knowing of how to proceed. The Buddha talked a lot about mindfulness, but usually paired with sampa janya, you know, mindfulness alone is usually not enough. And so you talk about what is enough? What else can we do here? So there's recognize, release, refocus, reinforce. Rick Hansen has well, a lot of teachers have like a similar sequence or a different take, but for people who are focusing on mindfulness, people who go to my website or read books about mindfulness, that there are skillful ways of responding to the world once we recognize what's happening, once we're aware of what's here. So can you talk about some of these skillful means of release? What does that mean? Because I think a lot of people might sense it, even just subconsciously, as maybe a suppression or a getting rid of, as opposed to say like a letting go skillfully. And then how do you refocus? What do you refocus on? And then how do you reinforce that?

Speaker 2 · 27:12It's funny. He said, This book is deceptively simple. And he goes, but I don't want to write that in my endorsement because people might not understand what that means. There's a simplicity to recognize, release, refocus, reinforce. It's deceptively simple because there's a level of depth to it in our experience that can radically change the moment for you. So we talked about recognize. The recognize is if you create a foundation of understanding what emotional loops are, patterns that we are conditioned with over time, and you're able to just map out for yourself, like what does that mean for me? I do this or I think this way or I feel this way, or my body does this thing. You'll become more familiar with it pretty quickly for yourself, personally. You want to personalize this. This isn't to be generalized, it's it's generalizable, but you can personalize it. And that's the important piece. So once we're able to do that, and again, very simple. I'm just noting that I'm scrolling again, whatever. Could be everyday stuff, or it could be more intense things. I shouted at my kid again. What I said before, which was emotions are biology. Release is recognizing that when I'm caught in a certain loop, whether it's feeling overwhelmed or frustrated, that's why getting an emotional vocabulary is helpful. There's a variety of ways to do that, by the way. We you and I talked about Marshall Rosenberg's feelings inventory, which I give away for free as part of this tiny shifts bundle that's on my website, or you can just find it online. Or there's this woman who has the feelings wheel. I mean, there's different ways of coming to feelings, but the release piece is saying that as I have this emotion when I'm feeling overwhelmed, as an example, like this guy who walked into my office. And as he walked into my office, you could see his shoulders were up to his ears and his face. We could see like the pain, the scrunching in his face, his body was hunching over like this. And he had told me on the phone that he had a lot going on, taking care of a parent with Alzheimer's disease, he had issues in his marriage, and his business wasn't going too well. And so the release piece is basically saying your body's having a reaction. We can sum it up as some form of fight-flight-freeze response. That means your muscles are having an experience, your heart rate is going up, your breathing is maybe a bit more shallow or a bit more rapid. There's a physiological correlate with what's happening with you right now. We want to balance that out a little bit. So all we're needing to do in that moment is something simple of saying, like, let's release the physiology. That's what release is. Let's release the constriction that's happening with the physiology. That's the main part of it. So it's literally putting your shoulders down. It's literally taking a little bit longer exhale. It's literally massaging your jaw for a second. It's literally shaking out your arms. That's what the release is. If it's around emotions and something is chronic that's there, you can't release the emotion, but can we soften around it? That's a form of releasing. Another form of releasing that's a little bit different is I have these negative thoughts, I have these self-critical thoughts. They're constantly intrusive and haunting. I'm gonna write them down on a piece of paper or I'm gonna communicate them with somebody. That's another form of releasing. Again, this all doesn't need to take very long. Recognize, release, 10 seconds, 15 seconds. It actually could feel like quite a long time because you're not used to doing it. That doesn't just step us into that space between stimulus and response, which people have when they experience a moment of mindfulness. Now what we're doing is we're widening that space and then just bring blood flow to the prefrontal region. Now we're kind of bringing more there. We're getting more capacity that's there than it's in the past. So before we refocus on a different story or a new narrative or something action that's going to be better for us or healthier for us, we need more capacity. And that's what release gives us. It gives us greater emotional capacity, or we might say it fertilizes the soil so that when we plant in the refocus, it's more likely to grow roots and take hold. That's the purpose of the release.