what do we know about the way to let emotion out and through and what do we know about healthy adaptive compartmentalization as skills and here I'm hoping that perhaps people can glean some tools like take an hour a day and let it wail take two hours a day and handle your stuff yeah I think it is helpful to remember that emotions are actually the output they're the product it isn't so much that we have to figure out how to deal with emotions although I will come back and say that differently in a moment we have to figure out how to handle what physical and mental state resulted in those emotions so what I mean by that is if you are in a moment where everything in your body is in protest you are amped up and you can't sit still then working with your body right maybe you are the person who needs to go for a run every day where that hasn't really been who you were before right uh on the other hand maybe you're the person who needs to develop a yoga practice to figure out how to breathe through that amped up feeling and soothe yourself physically soothe yourself so that you can bring your heart rate down right so those are two entirely different behaviors but I can tell you at the end of either of them your body's going to be in a different state and I bet your emotions are in a different state too right so there's one way to think about it which is coming at how do we handle the emotions but there's another way to come at it which is how do I handle all of the demands and resources I have when demands and resources get out of balance that stress so how do I increase the resources in my life how do I reduce the demands in my life because I am suddenly in a really difficult situation so that's one way to think about it we did an intervention study in my lab with widows and widowers where one arm uh received mindfulness training another arm received progressive muscle relaxation which is sort of like learning a really fancy body scan you contract and relax different muscle groups in your body and you become aware of what that feels like to really understand what relaxation feels like and then there was a weightless control group and we did it because the progressive muscle relaxation was the control group we thought mindfulness training would be very helpful turns out mindfulness training was helpful but progressive muscle relaxation was even more helpful for people's grief so what does this practice look like it's a it's you're tensing your fists them relaxing then forearms them so working through uh head to toe contracting for about how long i'm just trying to get the rough contour yeah it's a brief contraction it's you know you can go online there's really easy instructions it's often done with a sort of guided uh audio um to help you figure out but the important part is also feeling what what's the difference between my clenched fist and my relaxed fist oh gosh i didn't even realize i was had so much muscle tension right so what's fascinating is people told us in any situation i'm in the grocery store i'm in a work meeting i'm trying to fall fall asleep i can use this tool now to help my body to get into a different state and that helps my grief now mindfulness training was effective but not as effective as i said and i think some of this is that we have you know grieving is a form of learning i'm not kidding about that your brain is busy while you you are grieving and it might not be the right time to take up a new practice that requires a lot of concentration if you do mindfulness it can be very helpful anyway the upshot of all that is on the one hand it's not that we have to deal with emotions because they are an output we have to deal with our demands and our resources and uh developing a whole toolkit of ways to think about adapting in our life now on the other hand even specifically for waves of grief having a toolkit of what to do with those emotions i think you described it beautifully andrew that we do have the capacity for suppression and if you are about to walk into a pitch meeting suppression is probably the way to go in that moment where suddenly your deceased child has popped into your head and thinking i am not going to think about this right now i am completely going to pretend this has not happened and i'm going to do this pitch right but if it's your only strategy then you don't have the learning process going on right that at another moment you might be looking through a photo album and just be overcome with tears but over time realize i can't say stay in that puddle either when i'm doing this i need to you know if it was me i need to text my sister and tell her you know i'm looking at photos of mom and this is what i'm thinking about and she'll text me some funny story about mom or or even just say oh man i feel ya and if my sister isn't available then i'll text my best friend right because in that moment it is important to have that puddle it's also important important to know how to get out of the puddle again and so this is really a process of learning how do i cope with these waves of grief it's like being a basketball player one possession after another after another how am i going to get through this possession each possession looks different how am i going to get through this possession with this constellation what's the right skill to use right now