For most of my life, I completely misunderstood emotions. I treated them like disruptions, things I needed to swallow, suppress, or “manage” so I could just keep pushing. I thought that strength meant composure, productivity, and stoicism. I thought that if I could just make it through whatever I was feeling, I could outrun the discomfort and avoid the messiness.
I know now that I had it entirely backwards.
Emotions don’t go away because we want them to. They don’t disappear because we’re too busy to deal with them. They don’t resolve because we shame ourselves for having them. Instead, they linger, shape-shift, and settle into the body in ways we don’t always recognize, until we find ourselves exhausted, reactive, or unable to feel much of anything at all.
If you’ve read my earlier blog about Energy Drains, you may remember the A.B.E. Technique I introduced. But today, I want to go deeper: not just into the “how” of emotional regulation, but the “why.” Why are emotions so physical? Why do they get stuck? Why does the body keep score? And why does healing begin, not when we control our emotions, but when we finally let them move?
Let’s start with something as overlooked as the breaths you take.
How Breath Reveals What Your Body Is Really Asking For
Breathing is happening, instinctually, all the time. Most of us don’t think about it at all. But breath is the fastest way to influence the nervous system, and it can tell us so much about our emotional state.
Every inhale stimulates our sympathetic nervous system, the part responsible for mobilization, readiness, and stress. Every exhale activates the parasympathetic branch, the system that restores us, digests for us, heals us. Most people spend far more time inhaling emotionally than exhaling. They brace, tighten, push, perform, respond, and react. They stay in a constant state of subtle activation without ever releasing the tension their bodies are begging to let go of.
Emotions work the same way. They come in, often forcefully or unexpectedly, and we inhale them… but we rarely give ourselves permission to exhale them. That emotional exhale (the allowing, the processing, the truth-telling, the slowing down) is what most of us were never taught to do.
So what happens to the emotions we keep inhaling but never release?
What Happens When We Carry What We Don’t Process
Many of us grew up believing that emotional strength looked like endurance. “Be strong.” “Push through.” “Don’t cry.” “Don’t make it a big deal.” “Just get over it.” These messages might have taught us discipline, but they didn’t teach us wholeness. And while we learn to adapt, our bodies silently absorb everything we refuse to feel.
Unresolved emotions don’t vanish. They simply relocate. They take root in our tissues, our digestive systems, our muscles, our sleep patterns, our headaches, our energy levels. They create a slow drip of internal toxicity, one we rarely notice until it becomes impossible to ignore. This is how emotional exhaustion begins, not in one big collapse, but in a series of tiny, subtle withdrawals from the body’s inner battery.
Emotional exhaustion doesn’t always look dramatic. Sometimes it looks like irritability you can’t explain, forgetfulness that scares you, or a heaviness in your chest that shows up out of nowhere. Sometimes it looks like waking up tired, skipping meals because your stomach is in knots, feeling indifferent about things you used to care about, or losing the capacity to focus. Sometimes it’s tears you can’t seem to stop. Sometimes it’s tears you can’t seem to access at all.
And sometimes it shows up in your performance. Missing deadlines, struggling to complete normal tasks, moving more slowly than usual, or withdrawing from people because you simply don’t have the energy to be seen.
These patterns don’t mean you’re failing. They mean your system is overwhelmed. And unfortunately, the world we work and live in is only amplifying that overload.
The Crisis We Don’t Acknowledge Until We’re Breaking Down
Workplace stress is something we talk about casually, but the truth is far more serious. According to data from Spill, 2024 brought numbers that are startling: 120,000 deaths in the U.S. each year are tied to work-related stress. Up to $300 billion in business losses stem from burnout, overwhelm, and disengagement. More than 90 percent of workers say stress diminishes the quality of their work, and one million people are absent from work per day because their stress has reached a breaking point. Sixty-three percent say they would quit their jobs entirely if it meant they could reclaim a sense of stability and well-being.
These numbers reflect a deeper truth: we are emotionally depleted as a culture. We are overextended, under-supported, overstimulated, and disconnected from ourselves. And the body cannot thrive, cannot heal, cannot restore, cannot show up, with an empty inner battery.
So the question becomes: how do we rebuild resilience in a world that keeps draining us?
Resilience Isn’t About Being Tough. It’s About Knowing Your Energy.
Real resilience has nothing to do with how much you can carry. It has everything to do with how you spend and renew your energy.
I like to think of it as an inner battery. Every emotion, thought, and decision either charges or drains it. Familiar emotional patterns, whether it’s people-pleasing, perfectionism, chronic self-criticism, avoidance, or hyper-independence, may feel comfortable because they’re familiar, not because they’re healthy. The brain loves what it recognizes. It chooses familiar neural patterns even when they leave you exhausted, depleted, or disconnected.
This familiarity doesn’t mean alignment. It doesn’t mean resilience. It simply means the pattern has been practiced, intentionally or not.
Breaking emotional depletion isn’t about force. It’s about coherence.
Coherence: When Your Heart and Mind Finally Get on the Same Page
Coherence is a physiological and emotional state in which your heart, mind, and body operate in harmony rather than conflict. When you reach coherence, your nervous system slows down, your heart rhythms regulate, your blood pressure steadies, and your mind clears. Your hormones shift into balance. Your capacity to think, feel, and respond expands.
Coherence is not a luxury; it’s the biological foundation for well-being. Research shows that when you enter a coherent state, your heart rate variability increases, a key marker of resilience and longevity. Higher HRV means your body can recover from stress more effectively. Lower HRV means your body stays in survival mode long after the threat has passed.
Cultivating coherence is less about “fixing yourself” and more about remembering what your body already knows how to do: regulate, restore, heal. And one of the simplest, most effective ways to access this state is the A.B.E. Technique, something you may have heard of if you’ve already read my blog about emotional drains and energy depletion. But it deserves revisiting here, because it is more than a technique; it’s a doorway back to yourself.
The A.B.E Technique: A Return to Emotional Presence
The beauty of the A.B.E. Technique is that it doesn’t require silence or perfection or long stretches of time. It meets you exactly where you are, even in the chaos.
It begins with Attention: bringing your awareness to your heart, not the metaphorical heart, but the physical space in your chest. This instantly shifts your focus out of mental overdrive and into embodied presence.
Then it moves into Breath: imagining your breath gently flowing in and out of your heart area, a little slower and deeper than usual. This simple act communicates to your nervous system that it’s safe to soften.
Finally, it brings in Emotion: specifically, a renewing emotion like appreciation, compassion, ease, or warmth. Not forced. Not performed. Just a quiet, honest softening toward something good.
Even ninety seconds of A.B.E. can shift your entire internal state. It helps your mind release the grip of old patterns. It signals to your body that it can return to calm. It restores clarity, flexibility, and emotional steadiness. Most importantly, it returns you to yourself.
Emotions Aren’t Your Enemy. Disconnection Is.
One of the biggest myths we carry is that emotional strength means being unshakable. But true emotional strength is actually the opposite. It’s the willingness to feel, to listen, to pause, and to move through the discomfort instead of moving around it. Emotions aren’t disruptions in your life’s rhythm; they are part of the rhythm itself. They are guides, messengers, mirrors. They are the language of the body, trying to tell you where healing is needed.
When you stop running from your emotions and instead give them space to breathe, you stop living in survival mode and begin living in coherence. You stop bracing and start softening. You stop depleting and start replenishing. You deserve the clarity, balance, and resilience that come from finally partnering with your emotions instead of battling them.
The power of emotions isn’t in how intensely we feel them. The power is in our willingness to feel them at all, and in our courage to let them move through us instead of settling inside us.
And the moment you choose that courage, even for just one breath, your life begins to shift.