In this episode, Elisha Goldstein talks about how to go from overwhelm to empowerment by harnessing tiny shifts for emotional resilience. He explains how small, consistent changes, or “tiny shifts”, can break negative emotional loops and improve stress, relationships, and longevity. He shares personal stories, practical tools like the “four R’s” (Recognize, Release, Refocus, Reinforce), and emphasizes emotional awareness over willpower. The conversation offers accessible strategies for managing overwhelm and building resilience, encouraging listeners to make manageable changes that support emotional health in everyday life.
Exciting News!!! Coming in March, 2026, my new book, How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!
Key Takeaways:
- The concept of “tiny shifts” in emotional health and well-being.
- The impact of modern life on emotional loops and chronic stress responses.
- The importance of emotional awareness in breaking negative patterns.
- The biological and psychological effects of “bracing” in response to perceived threats.
- Strategies for interrupting emotional loops and fostering recovery.
- The “four R’s” framework: Recognize, Release, Refocus, and Reinforce.
- The role of self-compassion and supportive questioning in emotional management.
- The significance of reinforcing positive emotional experiences for lasting change.
- Practical applications and limitations of the discussed methods.
- The relationship between emotional health, stress management, and longevity.
Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D. is the co-founder of the Center for Mindful Living in West Los Angeles and is the creator of the 6-month Coaching and Mentorship Program: A Course in Mindful Living. He’s a psychologist and international speaker and mindfulness educator. He’s written many books and in this episode, he and Eric discuss his book, Uncovering Happiness: Overcoming Depression with Mindfulness and Self Compassion. There are so many practical approaches and new perspectives in this episode. We think you’ll get a lot of useful information out of the conversation.
Connect with Dr. Elisha Goldstein Website | Instagram
If you enjoyed this conversation with Elisha Goldstein, check out these other episodes:
Elisha Goldstein, Ph.D-Mindfulness and Depression
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Episode Transcript:
Elisha Goldstein 00:00:00 My mind has been so deeply entrenched with anxiety and self-loathing for so long, or like catastrophizing, like what I need. You know, I need big things to fix me. Know. It’s in the moment, in the real time, and it’s the smallest things when we weave them together consistently that actually really do make the biggest changes.
Chris Forbes 00:00:25 Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:10 Elisha Goldstein described a conversation he had not very long ago at a dinner party in Los Angeles. A friend of his, a woman, said, I’m not handling it all very well. None of my friends are either the WhatsApp groups, the text, the emails, juggling the kids and family plans, the brutal news all the better advice. It never stops. I can’t keep up. I hear a lot of the same things. Elisha’s answer to this is emotional health. And we achieve emotional health by learning to break what he calls emotional loops and construct better ones. He and I have come to the same conclusion. It’s not big insights that save us, but small, repeated ways of relating to ourselves and the world differently. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Alicia. Welcome to the show, Eric.
Elisha Goldstein 00:02:03 It’s great to be back with you.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:05 Yes, I am happy to have you back on. And we’re going to be discussing your book, which is called Tiny Shifts How Emotional Health Transforms Stress, relationships and Longevity.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:17 And we will get into all that in a moment. But I want to start the way we always start, which is with the parable. And in the parable is a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild. And they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do to me.
Elisha Goldstein 00:03:00 It’s it’s very direct, that parable. There’s a saying that wherever your focus goes, you invite an energy to flow. And some people in the neuroscience world would say, and that’s the way the brain grows.
Elisha Goldstein 00:03:11 And if you allow for your mind to drift in certain what I call emotional loops or certain patterns or habits, you’re going to have a certain energy that follows. It’s also going to influence what you do in your life. If you’re aware of that, that that’s a pattern. You might have learned it from your your your parents or your culture, or it just might be a mood that you fall into biochemically. and but if you’re aware of it, then you can pause, create some space. And, you know, there’s a way to do that physically too. And then you can do, you know, what I call tiny shift to be able to feed the other wolf and to be able to support an opening to seeing maybe possibility, choices, opportunities, a different way of supporting yourself that might give you the energy to move in a direction that’s going to serve you and serve your family and serve your friends and serve your community and serve the people around you. And it doesn’t take willpower. That’s not what I’m talking about here.
Elisha Goldstein 00:04:19 It all starts with emotional awareness, and that begins how we can kind of shift who we feed there.
Eric Zimmer 00:04:26 Yeah, I love the emotional loops and we’re going to get into that in a minute. But I want to start just by reading something that’s pretty early in the book. It might even be where the book starts. I sometimes forget by the time I get to the end of the book. But you said in November 2023 at a dinner party in Los Angeles, a close friend said to me, I don’t know about men, but I can tell you this I’m not handling it all very well. None of my friends are either the WhatsApp group, the text, the emails, juggling the kids and family plans, the brutal news. All the better advice. It never stops. I can’t keep up.
Elisha Goldstein 00:05:01 I mean, just even hearing that, I feel overwhelmed, like. And so, you know. And I remember that moment at the dinner party with with my friend. And this is about the time that I was kicking around the concept of this book, too.
Elisha Goldstein 00:05:12 And I was kind of asking her her experience. And, I mean, I experience it myself. I mean, the the amount of the different forms of communication that we have, the amount of inputs that that are happening. I’m not even talking about the algorithm and how it’s feeding negativity bias after negativity bias, you know, and but just the just the amount of juggling, like it’s overwhelming, it’s taxing to our nervous system and overwhelm. That feeling of overwhelm, which is very real, isn’t just an emotion. We can it’s an amount of emotion, but it’s a loop. It comes with certain thoughts. It comes with certain physiological, biological sensations that are involved with it, and it typically leads to leads to certain reactions. And where do we go? Most of us to look for more information. How do I solve this feeling? That’s here. And we don’t need more information. We need an interruption. And you know, that’s one of the the keys here. Because when we’re constantly fed this idea of optimizing everything, optimizing our health, optimizing our our knowledge and information, optimizing even our rest, optimizing our sleep, optimizing our the way we eat.
Elisha Goldstein 00:06:22 and and I mean, how many different ways can we do all this stuff? And when we have too many ways, none of it sticks.
Eric Zimmer 00:06:29 Yeah, it is overwhelming. And I think you and I have thought a lot about this stuff. We both work with people where we both see what’s happening, and I think we’ve landed in fairly similar places around this idea of, you know, tiny shifts or small steps or a way of doing that. And one of the things that I really hit on a few years ago was just how little the average person has bandwidth to make any big changes. Right. We all know we’re overwhelmed, and the one answer to overwhelm would be just do way less. Turn off the WhatsApp. Turn off the phone. Don’t don’t have email. You know, make sure you have two hours a week to meditate. Like do less. But for most people, my experience is that that’s not going to happen. Those aren’t the choices that people are generally going to make. And so then within that context of everything that we’re describing, how do you make any sort of ongoing change that doesn’t feel overwhelming? And I think the the conclusion that I came to and it seems like you came to is you’ve got to do it almost in the context, in the flow of day to day life.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:46 Like you can interrupt, but not for too long.
Elisha Goldstein 00:07:49 Yeah. One of the moments that’s really hit me. Was trying to write about this in tiny ships too, but the we have this area of our kitchen that I think probably a lot of people have, which we call the corner of crap. And it’s just like where.
Eric Zimmer 00:08:03 I read that made me laugh when you said that, I was like, yep, I got one of those.
Elisha Goldstein 00:08:07 Yeah, we all got one of those. Like, where does this go? Okay, it goes here. That’s one of my Achilles heels in general. Growing up I wasn’t I was never shown had a, you know, how organization worked or anything like that. And I got lots of stories around that. But but I was sitting there and I was this speaks directly to that woman’s story that you mentioned a moment ago, too. I was sitting there and I was I was flipping through my phone because what if I could, if I could, if I could just get this, this Amazon return out of the way, you know, if I can just figure out how to transfer my airline, my, my credit card, my whatever to my airline miles and, you know, and so I was sitting there and I was like juggling these two different tasks at the same time.
Elisha Goldstein 00:08:43 Meanwhile, my son had come to as my youngest son and, and he had come to me and he was kind of like pulling out my shirt. He just wanted to kind of show me something or is there some some basketball trick or, you know, something like that. And I was just like, one minute I got, you know, I’m almost there. I’m almost there. With this Amazon return, I’m almost there with this. And then, you know, by the time I kind of woke up to that, you know, he was gone. And I mean, that was a precious moment that I likely missed. Probably. What’s more important than the meaningful moments of life? I think at the end of life, that’s what people look back and they say, you know, hey, it’s about who you love and how you loved, and the rest of it really never mattered. What was more interesting to me was like how I was so caught in a form of bracing, like biological bracing that was happening to get this thing done, this perception of urgency that I had that, you know, if you tie the amount of urgent things that our mind perceives as urgent together, we’re going to miss out on all kinds of moments of life.
Elisha Goldstein 00:09:42 And likely what was happening to I was I was also sort of we could take this with a grain of salt when I say this, but if I allow myself to stay in that form of bracing in that form of elevated stress, then I’m causing harm to my body physically too, and that’s going to impact my sleep patterns, that’s going to impact all kinds of things. And so, you know, that’s when it really hit me. I’m like, wow, it would be really nice to create, even for myself, a psychologist, mindfulness teacher for some decades, and to support my own emotional awareness so I can wake up to this and be more intentional about where I’m placing my attention on what really matters in the moment.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:19 Yeah, I think there’s so many things in what you said there. The first that I want to hit on is that fallacy that we just need to get one more thing done because it never ends. And like quite literally, for me, it it never ends. I mean, I used to have these days where I was like, I’m going to get through my inbox, I’m going to get through my task list.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:41 I’m going to get no, I’m not like, I no sooner cross one off Then three more. Go on it. And there’s a certain amount of learning to relax into that. That I have found has been really important is when I just go, okay, that’s the way it is. Like, that’s that’s the nature of life and that’s the way we want it to be. Maybe someday I’ll not have enough things on my task list, or people won’t send me enough email and I’ll be like, I miss all that. But in this stage of my life, how do I relate to the fact that the demands, both good and bad, they’re ongoing, there’s no arrival.
Elisha Goldstein 00:11:22 And if we don’t have that awareness, what happens is, and I’m sure everyone who’s listening or watching has a has this experience, but you pile on that false sense of urgency trying to get this done and that done and that done, and answer this text and make sure to respond to this personal person’s birthday and, you know, and and, you know, return this.
Elisha Goldstein 00:11:41 And, and I better get this thing done in my house today. We literally walk around the day bracing, and we’re wondering why we feel so exhausted.
Eric Zimmer 00:11:50 What do you mean by bracing?
Elisha Goldstein 00:11:51 Bracing? Like, literally. Well, I’ll give you a I’ll give you an example. But what this actually is. So what’s happening in the body during the day. We have these we noted them earlier. These kind of like emotional loops. These are like this kind of reactions that we’re in typically unconsciously, that include a certain collection of emotions and certain thought patterns and sensations, biological sensations happening, our body and things that we’re doing. and, and what’s happening is these, this sense of like, urgency or needing to get things done, or the moment we open our phone and see the various threats that are possible for us, or we see something happening with the economy, or we see war somewhere or, you know, get in a fight with somebody. Our brain interprets it as like something is something is threatening.
Elisha Goldstein 00:12:43 There’s some potential on the scale of 1 to 10. Pick your in the continuum some form of danger, and that could come external again through those threats that we’re seeing around the world, or economy or whatever, or internal with our own thoughts and emotions that are there sensations and and our body reacts biologically. So when you say what’s bracing? Our body reacts biologically because our amygdala gets kicked in, we fall into a fight flight, freeze response on a certain level, and that instantly changes what’s happening in the body itself. And so for those who aren’t aren’t familiar with this, what happens is stress hormones start to get kicked up. We get cortisol and adrenaline operating at a certain level, which is wonderful in short bursts, but not in longer bursts. Our heart rate starts to go up, our blood pressure starts to go up. It’s just elevated a bit, right? Elevate depending on the person, but it’s elevated a bit. And then what happens is our muscles literally start to tense and brace. So our shoulders might be creeping up to our ears.
Elisha Goldstein 00:13:45 We might be actually feeling like more tension around our arms, or around our buttocks, or around our quads, particularly maybe in our face, the area between our eyes or our cheeks. And then, of course, digestion. We know we’re not hungry or we’re too hungry. Our immune response goes down. And then, like long term healing, our body gets prioritized. And imagine now for a second that because of all the inputs that you and I have been talking about, that you know, with our whether it’s with our phone or our now, our really trained implicit sense of perceived urgency that we have, or needing to check to smooth out some underlying anxiety that’s there, that’s been embedded in us since probably 2007 or before, when I’m just kind of noting the time that the iPhone came out. And the problem is that we’re not really stuck in any kind of danger. We’re just caught in this loop. And and so we can literally if our body is having this kind of biological reaction, the moment we become aware of this loop we say like, oh, overwhelm this here, I’m thinking about this.
Elisha Goldstein 00:14:46 Or there was something you said a moment ago, which I was like, oh, that would be a perfect thing just to remember, not for me to remember, but in daily life to remember. I’ll come back to it. but the moment we name it and we label it, we notice it. We realized we’re in. This thing is something that in all the many worlds, wisdom, traditions, and in the field of science, we’ve known for a while now that creates this moment of space. And that’s when I said, we don’t need to look for more information, or we don’t need to solve the problem with more content. We need an interrupt. And the interrupt is to interrupt the biological reaction that’s happening in that moment. That’s kind of harming us. And the first interrupt is really just recognizing the experience we’re having. Like literally as simple as noticing the shoulders tense up where they are on your on your body if they’re up a little bit. And then, you know, we can try this right now.
Elisha Goldstein 00:15:51 You know, anyone who’s listening or watching, you can just kind of see if you can notice where your shoulders are and see if you can just drop them like 5%, just a little bit or something I really love to do is I like to take a breath and on the exhalation because, you know, take a breath, your shoulders naturally rise because you’re breathing in. When you breathe out, your shoulders naturally, naturally fall. And so you’re you’re noticing them fall and you’re even maybe saying the word release a little bit and you’re creating a little space, you’re creating that interrupt, you’re creating a little bit more spaciousness. And I guess that’s what I mean by bracing and how we can begin to interrupt it.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:26 So let me ask you a question. What you’ve just described is let’s assume we we get caught in emotional loops and we’ve been getting caught in them for a while. Let’s assume that the outer conditions are making it more likely that this happens. Let’s assume that our stress hormones have been higher than they should be for a while.
Eric Zimmer 00:16:46 How does a tiny shift address what seems to be a pretty big problem?
Elisha Goldstein 00:16:53 So the tiny shift supports recovery, so we’re never going to catch the reaction. We may have like years of conditioned reactivity that our brain now implicitly, you know, creates in our in our lives to relate to the family members around us, in our workplace, how we relate to people in traffic. Before we even got on this call, we were talking about the the idea with the comparing mind and, you know, writing and how we can get caught in, you know, that kind of place. But that also creates a lot of stress. And I was saying how that’s very draining. That can lead us to not being motivated to complete the tasks that we’re doing. So when we get caught up in that sympathetic arousal over time, especially if it’s conditioned. We’re typically not going to catch it in the exact moment, but at some point we are and we want to support now as recovery, because emotional health is less about like feeling happy and positive all the time.
Elisha Goldstein 00:17:58 It’s more about like, how quickly can we recover from the trained reactivity that we get hooked into here and there throughout the day? Because the more you can recover, consider this for a second. The more you can recover, the more your body is going to get better at repairing the cellular inflammation that’s happening there, the less damage it’s going to have on these protective caps and the end of your chromosomes that are called telomeres that are associated with lifespan. The more your blood pressure and heart rate’s going to go down. And if you’re susceptible to heart disease, let’s say, or you’re going to be kind of potentially protecting your life by doing that. So it’s really about the recovery. And like how do we support ourselves in recovering from this type of reactivity and then putting ourselves back on a track that’s going to be healthier for us?
Eric Zimmer 00:19:18 So let’s talk about emotional loops because this is really important. You say these are the automatic mind body patterns that pull us into worry at 3 a.m., snapping at the people we care about, or suddenly dropping us into a funk that we can’t explain.
Eric Zimmer 00:19:34 Then you go on to say they have four interconnected parts, so walk us through the different parts of an emotional loop.
Elisha Goldstein 00:19:41 Okay. I’ll walk you through it. Through a story. Okay. And this actually happened to me like, while I was writing this book and ended up being a huge gift because I put the story directly in tiny shifts, and you may have had this experience. I’m sure a lot of people here can relate to this. Where I was asked to be on a health panel by some celebrity who was putting on like a health event, whatever. And her team reached out to me and and they were going to, you know, there’s pay me. Here’s the date we got to set up this tech call. So I set up a tech call with them. I’m kind of excited about it. I’m like, this is going to be really cool. All right. I’m writing this new book and you know, that’s a good exposure to. And I get on this tech call and something feels a little weird about it, but I, I, I overlook it because I’m kind of excited about this thing.
Elisha Goldstein 00:20:27 And just to cut to the chase here in the tech call, it turns out what happened was they had me kind of go into my in my Facebook because I had they wanted me to set up something because the event was going to be on a Facebook Live type of whatever, and at the end of it they said they couldn’t do something. But I felt kind of weird about it. So I contacted the celebrity directly and they’re like, this is a total scam. They’ve done this to a bunch of people. I’m like, oh my God, what kind of information have they gotten from me? What have they done? Before I knew it, they had taken over my Facebook page and they had been posting weird stuff and like, I’m like, did they get financial details? And so I start kind of freaking up. My nervous systems kind of a little bit on fire at that moment might steal my identity. You know, catastrophizing in a lot of different ways. And the anxiety wasn’t the worst part about it.
Elisha Goldstein 00:21:13 I had my assistant kind of helping me, and and I realized that, wow, I’m really kind of on fire right now. My body was bracing in a lot of different ways, and my heart rate was elevated. And I asked myself, like, okay, so you know what’s going to be most supportive to me right now? And I decided to take a walk with my dogs. But what was most interesting on that walk was how loud the shame was. So with an emotional loop, we’re talking about thoughts, emotions, sensations and actions. So those are the four elements. I had these voices in my head that were telling me what an idiot I was. How could you possibly fall for something like this? You saw some signals that weren’t there. Why didn’t you pay attention to them? You’re a psychologist, your mindfulness teacher. You write about talk about emotions all the time. What’s wrong with you? Like you know all of that. And so the shame was intense. And so I was walking there and I noticed it, and I was able to recognize it.
Elisha Goldstein 00:22:12 I was able to recognize the feeling that was there and saying, well, this is shame alive in a big way right now. I could feel it in my body, you know, I can hear the voices. They were so loud and I decided to kind of like soften around it. It’s a little bit of this method that we talk about, and here are this forearm method where the first step is recognizing the the emotion. We need that emotional awareness. Remember, we need the. We don’t need so much more content. We need more emotional awareness. And so I was able to recognize that that created an initial interrupt, and I was able to soften around it while I was walking. And that created a little bit more space. Then I asked myself the question, what would really God? There’s so much there’s so much pain in here right now. Like what would be supportive to me right now? I was able to redirect. You talked about that initial question about feeding the two wolves. I talked about wherever your emotions go, energy, wherever your attention goes, energy flows.
Elisha Goldstein 00:23:06 And that allowed me to open up this window of saying, can I can I be kinder to myself? My mind is so mean to me right now. Can I be kinder to my eyes? Can I just open this window? Classic self-compassion question, but I got the ability to do that by interrupting the emotional loop that was happening. Would that recognize and that release? And that question squeaked out a little small voice inside of me that said, yes, yes you can. And what would that look like? Okay, so I did something. I continued walking, put my hand to my heart for a second just to kind of just make contact with me. I just need a grounding. Like. And then as I did that, I noticed the shame turned into sadness. And because there was grief at being, you know, violated, you know, in some ways. And then that eventually, as I allowed myself to kind of stay with that, that turned into anger also from that feeling. So I allowed that.
Elisha Goldstein 00:24:04 I allowed that to be to be there as well. And within an hour after that hour, change whatever it had kind of washed through me. Now, the danger is if you don’t allow yourself to walk through a process like that, we need things that are that are simple, where life life is too overwhelming, too complex. And so we need like a method that’s really simple. And so I worked really hard to make this method super simple. And so with that ability to kind of move through this in this way, I wasn’t hijacked. The rest of the the evening and the night and the day. Turns out that we were able to go through Facebook and get it, you know, repaired within a few days and not too much damage was done, fortunately and but more importantly, was the way I was able to move through the biological cognitive reaction that was happening through me and be able to create a bit more peace inside, even in the midst of the storm.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:00 Yeah, that’s a really good example of applying this.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:05 And I want to hit the four Rs in a second, but I’m going to stay with emotional loops just for a second to give some examples, because I love the fact that you’re talking. They have thoughts, they have emotions, they have sensations, they have actions. And one of the things that I think a lot about is the good thing, when you when we can kind of recognize that those are the components, is even by deconstructing those components from each other. Here’s what I’m thinking. Here’s what I’m feeling. Here’s what’s going on in my body. Here’s what what I feel compelled to do. Right. There’s usually a some sort of action that it’s it’s it’s pushing us towards. Even the deconstruction of those into their component parts helps me take the whole thing down a notch or two. And I also think what’s really interesting about about framing it that way is that we can then intervene in different ways. Sure. Right. We can intervene with our thoughts. We can try and take a different cognitive approach.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:04 We can intervene emotionally. We can try and intervene with the body. Right. And we can also intervene with the behavior that we do or don’t do. So I just love this concept of tying it up in an emotional loop. And I also love that you name some of these loops. You name just a couple here. The self-doubt loop. The should loop, the what if loop. So talk to me a little bit about the should loop. Walk me through that one, how that one works and and how these things kind of feed on themselves to if we don’t interrupt them.
Elisha Goldstein 00:26:41 So I think I’ll first say that, as you’ve been noting, there’s a real value in naming the different loops. So we said there’s an umbrella overwhelm loop. We we talked about before you named a few different types of loops, but I also want to give people permission. The value in this is in the recognizing the naming. Right. And so if there’s like a I can’t stand this particular friend loop, you know, you can kind of play with that.
Elisha Goldstein 00:27:09 Like if there’s a way to kind of bring a little humor to it. Like though this is, this is my 11:30 p.m. urge to snack loop, you know?
Eric Zimmer 00:27:17 Yeah, right. I have a loop I’ll share. This is a funny one. It doesn’t sound funny at first. It’s called the I wish I was dead loop, but I’d be completely serious That thought pops into my head. That’s the cognitive aspect. And of course, then immediately there’s there’s emotion that goes with it and all the sensations. And by naming that loop, what I’ve realized for myself is that a just when I recognize it, I sort of laugh a little bit now because I’m like, that is such an extreme overreaction. Like on one level, you could look at and go, well, that’s sad that that is set deep enough in me that it still fires off. You know, that I felt that that way. But naming it does cause me mostly now to laugh, because it’s usually usually happens when I don’t know the answer to something.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:08 And it often happens with the stupidest things like should I use conditioner today or not? And the next thing you know, my brain goes, I wish I was dead. I’m like, well, settle down. But so your point about humor is really important. I found like naming them in that way is often really helpful, just that immediately diffuses it.
Elisha Goldstein 00:28:28 That’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for the interrupt. We have to take to heart for a second that even though we’ve been trained and programmed to think that we need to do these big things, to fix these things in my. Oh, my mind has been so deeply entrenched with anxiety and self-loathing for so long, or like catastrophizing, like what I need, you know, I need big things to fix me. Know it’s in the moment, in the real time. And it’s the smallest things when we weave them together consistently that actually really do make the biggest changes. The reason you’re able to recognize the I wish I were dead loop, and then you immediately kind of turn to like, eye rolling and laughing or something like that, is because you have so much practiced experience with that and redressing it that that there’s now an inner knowing inside of you that’s top down, that processes, you know, from this experience and so that you can kind of cut to it pretty quickly.
Elisha Goldstein 00:29:28 Now I’ll, I’ll, I’ll say this as a caveat to the different ways we can interrupt the loop. and it’s not it’s not that we can always just kind of shift our mind and reframe and, or we can just go to our body or something like that. It really depends on what’s happening. So, for example, if you’re really activated and you’re really feeling anxious, let’s say on a scale of 1 to 10, seven, eight, nine, something like that, reframing or just kind of trying on a different way of looking at things doesn’t typically work very well, right? And the reason is, is because our emotional center of our brain is far deeper and more primitive and faster than the more evolved area of our brain or the prefrontal region where we’re trying to cognitive and reason and be rational about stuff. So we don’t believe ourselves in that moment. Right? Right is the reality. And so we need a different type of entryway in there. The recognition typically comes something more somatic. That’s more implicit.
Elisha Goldstein 00:30:27 So it starts with the body typically versus the thoughts. If we’re like bothered by something or we’re really kind of being down on ourselves or we are just telling ourselves, just like life’s not going to, I’m never going to be successful or, you know, who knows. And and on a scale of 1 to 10, it’s like, I don’t know, 4 or 5, six, three, something like that. We can recognize that and we can say, hold on a second. We can take a breath and say, what’s another way I can look at this? Yes. And if you have a lot of experience like you do in in that particular one, your mind can just cut right to the truth because you know what the reality is. And so we just need that shortcut based on our inner knowing.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:31 There are times that the emotion part of the loop is so high, like the cognitive part of the loop, the thoughts are going crazy, but you’re not going to rein them in to your point.
Eric Zimmer 00:31:41 So that might be a time that what we need to focus on is the sensation aspect of the loop, the body aspect of the loop. Or, you know, sometimes I find with these things too, is it’s just recognizing, like the fire is really burning right now. And even being able to just give myself some grace to go. This one’s going to take longer to untangle. Right?
Elisha Goldstein 00:32:05 To have that awareness.
Eric Zimmer 00:32:07 Yeah. And mine is sort of funny because it’s so dramatic, but it’s oftentimes the ones that aren’t so dramatic that are harder. That one is so absurd, given the general state of my mind. Now, a thought like that is like it stands out. You’re like, where did that come from? A time in my life, though, that might not have barely even registered as different. And it’s those ones that we almost don’t notice, but they’re happening that I think can be so insidious.
Elisha Goldstein 00:32:42 Yeah. Consistently in the background. Yeah. you know, we could be asking ourselves, you know, like I was with the Facebook scam story.
Elisha Goldstein 00:32:52 You know, I could have been asking myself, how can I be so stupid? A lot. Yeah. And, you know, the thing about shame is it’s one of the fastest loops we fall into.
Eric Zimmer 00:33:02 Why is that? Do you think.
Elisha Goldstein 00:33:04 We’re wired to belong? That’s for our own security and evolution. And it’s the greatest threat to not belong. And shame is basically saying I don’t belong. We have to be quick to see where the dangers are in order to survive. And so that’s been wired into us since the dawn of. Yeah, before the dawn of humanity. However, we, you know, believe the evolution of humanity is. So I think shames like a little a cousin to that, but more on a social level. And so if that was familiar to me and I was able to say like, oh, how can I be so stupid? Okay, there’s that one again. You know, and I was able to take a breath and I would say, what if I asked a different question? So what’s the difference? I’d say anyone listening right now or watching what’s the difference? If you’re asking yourself like unconsciously or semi consciously, how can I be so stupid? How can I be so stupid? What? What kind of answers are we going to get from that? Well, you can be so stupid because you’re hopeless and, you know, you’re you’re really not as adept as you thought you were.
Elisha Goldstein 00:34:07 And you know, it’s going to come with all the reasons like that, you know, that are going to back up that thing. But what if I was able to take a ship and make a tiny shift? In that moment? I was able to recognize that that thought pattern, because I’ve had it before, this kind of like, how can I be so stupid? Loop. I was able to take a breath, just could create a little space, and I was able to shift to say something like, what is it that I’m really needing right now? What’s going to be most supportive to me right now while this feeling is here? What kind of answers am I going to get? Well, just like I did. Well, can maybe you can be a little kinder to yourself. Maybe you need to take a walk outside. Maybe you want to talk with someone about this. Maybe. And which are going to be healthier and more adaptive, which are going to get me on my feet quicker and which are going to be better for the relationships I have and for my health.
Elisha Goldstein 00:34:52 And so it’s all about like how how quickly can we recover from these moments that we slip into these little insidious loops and the the naming them like we’re talking about in a variety of ways we can do it is just really the first step to be able to interrupt.
Eric Zimmer 00:35:08 Yeah, let’s go through the four R’s. So we have these emotional loops. And your general point is that interrupting those as close to as when they’re happening, and being able to do it in a very easy way, that doesn’t take a ton of time, that we don’t have to go sit on a, you know, we don’t need to go sit down in journal for 30 minutes. Like we can use in the moment. And so we come up with the four R’s. So walk me through those. We’ve already talked about the first one but okay.
Elisha Goldstein 00:35:40 So again baseline idea here is we don’t need to do more about anything. We just need to be able to do something that that allows us to shift in the moment with the life we’re already living, the things we’re already doing.
Elisha Goldstein 00:35:51 That’s the key. And we want to make it simple and repeatable because small, consistent actions like you and I are both talking about with your book and my book, small, consistent actions lead to big changes. And so, so for ours recognize release, refocus, reinforce. That’s what it is. Recognize release, refocus, reinforce. That’s what it is. So we recognize we talked about that. The important part of the release is understanding that emotions are biological. And so when we get caught in an emotional loop, we’re having a biological reaction like we ran through before the impact of the sympathetic nervous system being aroused going into the fight flight freeze response, how that impacts our muscles, our blood pressure, our heart rate, cortisol, adrenaline, interrupting sleep, messing with how we eat. You know, all the different longevity factors that most people focus on eating, sleeping, exercise and messes with all those things. Because in order to do those things exercise, sleep and nutrition, we typically need some form of body battery to be able to drum up the energy to engage those types of things.
Elisha Goldstein 00:36:57 And when we get emotionally depleted through these emotional loops, we’re draining our body battery. And so it makes it harder to actually follow through on the habits where we’re trying to follow through on. So we we release to be able to move into recovery, we to move to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and to be able to move the body into recovery. Also, we release because what you do notice is from a psychological point of view, I always say like recognizes, stepping into that space between stimulus and response releasing is widening that space. So now we have a little we have more wherewithal to recognize the choices and the perspectives, bringing more blood flow to the prefrontal region, which is about emotion regulation and impulse control. And so now we have the ability to refocus. So what people typically do is they skip the second hour. They just go to like I’m recognizing this. What do I need to do differently. But the reason that doesn’t work as well is because we typically need a little bit more space in order for that refocus to land.
Elisha Goldstein 00:38:00 And so to to become more fertilized, let’s say as an example. So we refocus. And one of my favorite ways of refocusing is some of the things we’ve been talking about here is by accessing what I call our natural intelligence. What’s natural intelligence? I’m kind of playing off of the big hoopla around artificial intelligence right now and accessing our natural intelligence, says when we ask our brain questions, it searches for answers. And so let’s ask it a different question and see if it comes up with a different answer. So instead of, you know, why am I so stupid? Well, what’s going to be supportive to me instead of the world’s going to hell in a handbasket? What are some examples of things that are going well right now? Or moments of kindness? Like we were talking about earlier before we started our episode together here, or this is all there is and nothing’s going to work out for me, and no one can help me and I can’t help myself. Okay, hold on a second.
Elisha Goldstein 00:38:54 Is there another way that I can see this? Are there other things that I haven’t uncovered? You know. So. So those are just some different ways of asking questions. Another way of refocusing is what we had sort of mentioned here before is by reframing a situation. And that’s sometimes really helpful to be able to expand perspective from there. And for example, there was a hiccup with the layout of my book, and it turned out that it it kind of delayed the time. I’m going to actually like, get my physical books to be able to give to people, which I was like at first I was like, oh, I’m going to disappoint people. And then I realized I was sick last week. And another way that I could see the, well, this gives me a little bit more space and time to recover now so I can present, you know, in the best way that I can present different ways of kind of reframing, which allows for a little bit more relaxation. Another way is by accessing your inner knowing, just like you did Eric, with when your mind was able to go back and say, what did it say? What? What is it? What did it access in that example?
Eric Zimmer 00:39:51 Oh, it just recognizes that like, okay, settle down.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:54 That is a dramatic overreaction. Because again, it’s something it’s almost always something really small about not knowing the answer.
Elisha Goldstein 00:40:03 Yeah. So you you have that inner knowing based on your practice so we can. Another way of refocusing is by accessing our inner knowing based on our own experience. I call our own wisdom. I know for me that idea of can I be kind to myself, or that idea of noticing when I’m activated and taking a moment to lower my shoulders or put my hand on my heart for a second? Is is something that helps me deactivate. I know this about myself because I’ve done it a thousand times, so I can kind of shortcut my refocus to that, because I know that that’s something that I need. I don’t really need to ask myself a question. I don’t need to reframe anything. I just know what I need because I have a lot of experience with it. So we all have things like that. Another way of refocusing sometimes is to do something that I call taking a joy break.
Elisha Goldstein 00:40:53 Sometimes we just need to do something different. And so one of my favorite examples of this is when a client of mine or one of my programs, she’s like, you know what? When I feel overwhelmed, the first thing I do is I just even know, I recognize that I’m able to kind of take a beat with it. And then I go straight to my garden and put my hands in the dirt. And for her, that’s just accessing something that gives her joy, which. Joy, joy, humor a play. These things can flip our emotional experience. So the fourth R so we got recognized release refocus a variety of ways of refocusing. There’s other ways of releasing too because we can release certain beliefs and mindsets as well. is this last piece that most people miss. And this is what makes change really hard for a lot of people. The last R is called reinforce. And why are we what what do we need to reinforce? Well, if we believe that neurons that fire together wire together.
Elisha Goldstein 00:41:50 and we believe that our perception of any given moment is based on memory. So I know this as a phone right here I’m holding up my phone for these are just listening. And I know that because someone showed me that at one point and they said, that’s a phone. The phone, a pen, same thing. Right? So that helps me see that and not have to question it, and I know exactly what I need to do with it. We have experiences all the time where we help ourselves. We activate our parasympathetic nervous system, we relax our shoulders. We have a good conversation with someone. We think of a new insight or idea that really helped us out. Generosity. Sure, that felt good, you know, that kind of thing. But we don’t do something that in the field of neuroscience is called emotional tagging. Emotional tagging supports memory. We want to support the memories that work for us. And so one thing to consider doing is when you notice a new insight or you notice your shoulders dropping, or you notice a moment of relief or calm or some way, you did a tiny shift that supported you in the moment, then you want to take a moment and just kind of close your eyes, or keep them open and literally see yourself.
Elisha Goldstein 00:43:00 Take a mental snapshot of the moment, a snapshot of how you’re feeling, a snapshot of what you did, a snapshot of yourself in this present moment. Our brain loves to work off pictures and images. I was talking with someone earlier today and she was like, I wanted to remember my daughter’s wedding. And so I took a moment and I just kind of paused and breathed, and I looked at the stones on the wall. I looked at the people all around. I paid attention for a moment. I took a mental snapshot in my mind of this experience. This was years ago, and she goes to this day. I could tell you the exact colors of those stones, each one of them. I could tell you who was there and what their facial expression was, because she intentionally paused and took a mental snapshot. This is the exact same thing. When something works for us from a tiny shift that we make, we want to reinforce it by taking a mental snapshot in our mind and reminding ourselves that this moment matters, and that’s how we reinforce it.
Elisha Goldstein 00:44:03 So recognize, release, refocus, reinforce. Those are the four R’s that help us interrupt, recover and get back on track.
Eric Zimmer 00:44:12 I have a few questions within each of those. So I think with the reinforce, I think that’s a really important point to be able to tag something. I find myself more and more relying on an ability to look back at a challenging situation and say, oh, that’s how I handled it. Oh, that’s what I did there. Oh, that’s right. And that’s sort of the reinforcement process is I not only tried to encode it in the moment, but I can then call on it and go, oh, I know it. I know it helps me in this situation. I know what what will work here. And so I think your whole book is filled with these. There’s all these tiny shifts you can do. Right? I even feel like cataloging them sometimes is somewhat helpful for me to know. Like, here’s my little library of things that I can turn to and do that help? Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:45:08 An example I often give is it’s with music. I know that when I get depressed that music is helpful. The problem is that when I’m depressed, no music sounds good to me. Like, I’ll just flip through my library, but nope nope nope nope nope. Right. So I just created a playlist of like, just go click on this when you feel that way. And I think we can create a similar playlist of the tiny shifts that help.
Elisha Goldstein 00:45:35 That’s that’s a great idea. I mean, reinforcing writing it down as a form of reinforcing talking about your experience as a form of reinforcing. We’re looking to reinforce a memory. If you want to make a list of the tiny shifts that have been really helpful. That’s another way of recommitting it to memory. You know, they’ve been saying in school for so long that like, taking notes is so important for memory. writing things down physically is what they mean by that. These are great examples. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:04 So let’s talk about putting all of this kind of into practice, in what situations? You work with clients a lot.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:11 So you’ve been obviously teaching these ideas. Who does this not work for? Or what happens when people don’t get benefit out of this? Like what goes wrong with this approach? If anything.
Elisha Goldstein 00:46:24 you know, if someone is severely emotionally disabled you want to work with with somebody anyway, or not even severely emotionally disabled. Sorry if it’s going to be hard to work with anything if that’s happening, but if you’re really emotionally impacted, I’m just going to support the notion of how important it is to speak with somebody. And by the way, that could be a tiny shift all in its own, meaning like the idea of what’s the one decision I need to make that’s going to support me. I’m going to reach out to someone and talk to them a professional. So I don’t actually see this really not working for somebody because it’s so personalized and contextualized. It’s not a model where it’s giving us specific directive. That’s the same for everyone. It’s more of an architecture that someone’s personal experience can fit into. So, you know, we can all get better at recognizing how we’re feeling.
Elisha Goldstein 00:47:19 And typically like, you know, you and me, we didn’t grow up learning about emotions or how our body’s reacting to things or, you know, being present to really any, anything but our thoughts. I mean, you know, for the most part, and even then, not in that way, but I think anyone can really do that, and anyone can get better at it, and anyone can get better at noticing the the connection with their, their mind and body, noticing how emotions are biology and being able to just do something to slightly redress a little bit more ease in the reactivity. Now where this could go wrong, I’ll say, is if somebody confuses the second R with relaxation, because that’s not what that’s meant to be. And so what that means is they recognize it and they try and relax their bodies, but they won’t relax. And they say this, this isn’t working for me. This is not for me. What it’s really meant to do is it’s a leaning in toward easing.
Elisha Goldstein 00:48:14 It’s more of a verb of of releasing tension. Not that you arrive at a state of relaxation. That’s not what that’s about. So it could go wrong if there’s a misinterpretation of the step. And I think refocusing at that point could support anybody. I’ll add a caveat to that. Depending on how impacted you are emotionally in the moment. Could be really helpful to do it with another person, whether it’s a trained professional or a good friend that you feel really comfortable and safe with, that’s where that could be done in partnership can be really helpful and even reinforcing, I think could be supportive and partnership. The more people we have around us that, you know, can support our good moments, that gives us a boost. But being able to do what you sing, even right down physically, like the moments that were the tiny shifts that were supportive to you and put them down to support your memory. Because also, when we’re really impacting, we’re really depressed, we’re highly anxious, our memory, like gone kind of yeah, that’s the part of our brain that’s like, I’m going offline now.
Elisha Goldstein 00:49:22 Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:49:23 You know, I’ve got a method that I teach called Still Points, which are similar to tiny shifts. They’re more something not that we do in response to something, but something that we more try and insert into lots of different points in our day. And I think the things that I see make an approach like this not work for people or a couple. One is we just don’t remember, right? It’s just hard for us to remember. Like, here’s a loop. I’m in it to recognize it, to do it. I mean, I think that’s one of the big ones. The other one that I think is really important also is that a lot of times the tiny shift or the still point that I’m describing, it’s mildly helpful, but oftentimes very mild, and we want more help than that. We want. Like, I’m just going to do this thing and I’m suddenly going to feel better. And my experience is that the thing about these sort of small interventions or small approaches or small moments, is that any one of them on their own isn’t really that big of a thing.
Eric Zimmer 00:50:36 It’s when they accumulate that all of a sudden things really start to shift. That’s been my experience. So if I give somebody a practice of doing still points, a still point of like, we set your alarm to go off four times a day, and each time you just spend a minute noticing five things, you can see five things you can feel, five things you can hear any one of those. Okay, great. That was a lovely little ten second exercise. But if you do those day after day after day, all of a sudden your ability to be more present does start to shift. And I think that’s the challenge that a lot of people face with this sort of small approach to anything is that we want results way faster, and when we don’t get them, we then go, oh, this thing doesn’t work.
Elisha Goldstein 00:51:23 I’m going to push back slightly on that, please. What I’ve actually found is that first, just acknowledging what you said and and also saying yes to that too, when the expectation is that when, when there’s a sense of I need to fix it all with this moment, you know, right now our expectation is whenever we don’t meet an expectation, a hidden expectation, we get deflated.
Elisha Goldstein 00:51:46 And it can be we can be demotivating. But the simple interruption sometimes, that’s why we want to really keep it simple. We want to keep it. We want to kind of back up and say, all you need to know for now is just be aware. See if you can be curious in naming how you’re feeling. And that’s it. You need to do nothing more. And then just allowing that to be without giving a whole method or a formula all at once. All you need to do now is notice where you’re where in the day your your shoulders are bunching up towards your ears and softening. And a simple thing like that, the feedback I’ve gotten has been game changing. Like just just being able to notice where tension is in your body and begin to soften. It changes the person’s level of presence. And it’s something so simple and so small on its own that it can create a big or kind of a big shift. Now, like I think the danger is. And what what you’re noting is there needs to be some level of consistency.
Elisha Goldstein 00:52:50 And if there’s not consistency, well then you forget about it and you slide back. That moment wasn’t wasn’t Enough to that that one moment wasn’t enough. In the field of the decades of your life that you’ve had of conditioning. Right? Yeah, right. So what’s going to support you and being able to be consistent. And so that’s why you’ve probably noticed when I in tiny shifts, one of the things that I was so intentional of doing was I wanted to say, I want this to be so low of a lift for people, because the whole premise that chapter one is called the Culture of Overwhelm. The whole premise is like, guys, we’re all like living in this state of overwhelm right now. I’m not going to ask you to lift anything heavy here, because that’s not going to work. That I sprinkled these tiny insights and tiny shifts in action in the book where just by reading the book, you’re experiencing these shifts with repetition. Just by reading the book alone, you’ll experience these shifts with the consistency and repetition that will create an experience as you go through the entire book without you needing to lift anything really that heavy.
Elisha Goldstein 00:54:01 That was the intentional design within the book. Not telling people to go out and like, go do all these practices and do these meditations or go do this 20 minute exercise like nothing like that. Because, look, the reality is, when you’re holding a book, I don’t know. I don’t know what to follow through on. That really is if you’re asking someone to do heavy lifts, you know, in the book. Well, because I’ve done that before in other books. So that’s that’s my hope. So to to just acknowledge what you’re saying and weave in a strategy that can support the consistency that can move through that initial like, well, I don’t know if I felt enough or I don’t know if I can continue doing this on my own type of thing. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:54:44 Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming back on. I really enjoyed the book. It makes a lot of sense to me. Obviously we see a lot of things similar. And thank you. Always a pleasure.
Elisha Goldstein 00:54:56 Yeah. That’s great. I’ll just let everyone know as we go. Like, if you remember nothing else from this time with me and Eric, it’s that if we can kind of keep it simple. One tiny shift in how you relate to your emotions and noticing what you’re feeling and how you’re relating them can change the trajectory of your day. And if there’s a repetition and consistency of that can change the trajectory of your life. Proof is in the eating of the pudding. Try it on. See what you notice.
Eric Zimmer 00:55:19 Beautiful way to end. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.
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