 Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away and this is a time of year where a lot of people get a lot of anxiety as well as depression when being around family members during the holidays. In this video I'm going to give you a very simple step-by-step process so you can make it through Thanksgiving while maintaining your mental and emotional health. So stay tuned. There are two things that people want to be able to do to improve their emotional life. You want to be able to choose what you become emotional about and when you become emotional. That's number one and the second is you want to be able to choose how you act when you are emotional. What's up everybody this is Chris from the Rewired Soul where we talk about the problem but focus on the solution and that clip that you just saw that was Dr. Paul Ekman. Now this is from a video called calling off the emotional attack dogs. I'm going to link this video in the description. I highly recommend that you watch this. This is going to be a great toolkit for you to use if you struggle with dealing with emotions but for the sake of this video I'm going to take his ideas and kind of speed up the process and make it more relevant to what you might be dealing with on Thanksgiving. So the first step in this process is finding what we call your emotional database. This can also be summed up as triggers so whether it's anxiety depression or even lesser forms of stress or even anger. Anger is a good one too but what we want to find is your database. So the first part of this process is get a notebook. A notebook some scrap paper some printer paper if you'd like to write like I do do it on the computer whatever it is okay and write down what your triggers are what makes you emotional what triggers this emotion. For example I'm basically doing this video off of one of the comments I got on my Instagram and if you're not following me on Instagram you need to I post a lot of good stuff but this young woman was talking to me on Instagram when I made a post about hey tell me what you're worried about when it comes to Thanksgiving and this first example is if you're going back home you know taking a on your college break for Thanksgiving to visit friends family and a lot of people get depressed or anxious when their family is asking them about their future right so what career are you going to get into who are you going to get married to are you dating anybody and all these things and they might trigger different emotions because maybe you feel that you're not where they think you should be and all these other things right so these questions that you get bombarded with maybe it's something completely different maybe it's anxiety around bringing over a new boyfriend or girlfriend over to Thanksgiving to introduce them to your family maybe it's depression just being around your brother or sister or cousins who are what you think is more successful than you are take a piece of paper or in a notebook and write down what all these triggers are what situations do you foresee happening that are going to trigger some type of emotion that is difficult for you to deal with that is step one step two now you have a list okay this is your emotional database now what you're going to do is take a pen pencil whatever Paul Ekman talks about getting a red pen circle any common themes okay so whether it's people asking you about what you're doing with your future whether they're asking if you're dating anybody uh maybe it's uh comments about where you're currently at in life whatever these common themes are circle them what i want you to do when you circle these common themes and this might actually help if you don't see common themes is turn to someone you trust who has a strictly objective point of view what does that mean if it is involving triggers with your family it might not be good to turn to your brother or sister who also deals with these issues the reason behind that is both of you probably have the same core experiences and it's not really going to help you come to the solution so you need a very objective point of view on this so i'm talking about a friend who may not have met your family a co-worker or colleague somebody who you know and trust and you don't mind them reading some of the stuff going on with your family find somebody purely objective now this is something i don't usually do but i'm here to help you so what i want you to do if you do not have one of these people in your life go ahead and shoot me an email at the rewired soul at gmail.com and just in the subject line type in emotional database all right and i will correspond with you through email and help you find the commonalities within your list the reason why we do this is to give you some more clarity on the situation a little bit and to give you an outside point of view on what you may not be seeing now a little curveball i'm gonna throw at you take this list once you see the patterns in here and write down some fears associated with each one for example fear of being judged fear of not being where i'm supposed to be at in life fear of dying alone if they're asking you about who you're dating and you're not dating anybody fear of failure that's a big one for any of you college students out there who feel judgment from your family about how you're doing in school or what you're pursuing and all these other things write down fears associated with what you found in your emotional database the last step the most important step that i'm going to give you is to download a mindfulness meditation app right here i'm going to link again my video for my three favorite free mindfulness apps now what i want you to do once you download one of these apps on your phone is when you're getting ready to meditate and your meditation only has to be about five minutes long but when you're getting ready to meditate i want you to imagine one of these situations coming up what that does is it's actually going to trigger the same parts of your brain even though it might not be as intense which is actually a good thing and when it triggers that part of the brain and you sit down to a meditation you're preparing yourself for what these emotions are going to feel like and through these various practices whether it's a body scan or guiding your breathing some of you might do some mindful walking you're going to start acknowledging what is actually happening in your body and how you can begin regulating your emotions start doing this today not tomorrow today okay even if you haven't made your list yet download one of these apps and just bring these situations to mind before you start your meditation i want you to do this every day for at least five minutes if you want to be an a plus student do it twice a day all right i guarantee that this is going to help you survive this Thanksgiving so let's recap real quick one get a notebook or some pieces of paper and write down your personal emotional database what triggers you to get an objective outlook on these things you're going to circle or they're going to help you circle what the commonalities are again you can email me and i'll go over this list with you step three you're going to download a mindfulness meditation app right now and you're going to start practicing five minutes a day bringing one of these situations to mind the only thing i ask you to do in return is come back after Thanksgiving on beautiful black Friday leave comments in the description below let me know how this went for you let me know how your journey is let me know what's going on what's coming up for you when you're writing these things down i want to hear about it and what you'll see is is that you'll find a lot of people in the community too struggle with the same exact things all right so if you like this video be sure to give it a thumbs up and if you're new here click the little round subscribe button right below this box i'm always making videos about mental health and if you haven't yet i have a bunch of videos that you can check out by clicking or tapping on one of those thumbnails right there so thanks everybody and i'll see you next time