Podcasts · Mood Ring

Name Your Feelings

28 Apr 2022 · 18 min · Explicit

In the first episode of Mood Ring, host and mental health writer Anna Borges digs into one of the most fundamental parts of tending to our emotional well-being: naming your feelings. Anna talks with therapist Elisa Beagle about a practical tool to start identifying feelings, and why naming feelings can be the first step to addressing and ultimately soothing them on the journey of self-care.

Full Transcript

Anna Borges: I’m feeling… nervous.

I recognize it pretty well, at this point. My heart is thumping in my throat. My breath is shallow, I’m lightheaded and shaky. My mind is racing with worst-case scenarios and negative self-talk. Just all-around nerves, everywhere.

I’m feeling nervous. About this podcast.

I guess I should introduce myself before I introduce this whole existential crisis I’m having. Hello, I’m Anna Borges. Up until about a year ago, I was a full-time mental health writer. I worked at SELF Magazine and, before that, BuzzFeed and through all that freelanced and somewhere along the way, I even wrote a book called The More or Less Definitive Guide to Self-Care.

I generally wrote about the types of things that we can do to take care of our mental health on our own. I interviewed mental health experts to get their best advice and coping mechanisms. And I collected tips from people who had been there. And I wrote about my own personal experience as someone who struggles with, I mean, a lot. But specifically with their mental health. Which– spoiler-alert–is a lot of what this podcast is going to be too.

Which is exactly why I’m nervous. Because as you might recall, I just said I used to be a mental health writer. Past tense. There wasn’t One Big Thing that happened to make me stop. It just…slowly but surely wore me down.

The closest I got to a dramatic realization that it was time to stop was this one week where I was stretched especially thin and just crumpling under the pressure of a million deadlines. I was wrung out, and out of ideas, and I still had a few more stories to write that week. So, I took a shower and I sat on the floor of my tub under the water and I sobbed. I sobbed, yeah.

And do you know what I did when I was having my little breakdown? Not sit there and feel my feelings. Not any one of the 50 million coping mechanisms I’d written about over the years.

No, I reached for the pencil and waterproof pad I kept suction-cupped to my shower wall, and I wrote: How Not to Catch a UTI While Crying on the Shower Floor.

A potential headline. For a story. Or at least a future memoir.

Because something weird happens when you create content about your mental health for a living. Your mental health becomes your work, and it becomes bound to all the deadlines and quotas and pressures and stresses that come along with it. Coping starts being your job first, and for you second. You stop asking, “How can I get through this?” and start asking, “How can I turn this into content?” Eventually it distorts the way you look at your mental health and yourself, because you’re too used to wrapping things up nicely in a shareable, snackable package. Or at least, I was.

So, I quit. I quit mining my mental health for content.

So hey, welcome to my mental health podcast, am I right?

But no. Truth is, things didn’t magically get better just because I stopped writing about my mental health. And I missed this. I miss exploring new tools and coping mechanisms, and I miss connecting with others over needing these tools and coping mechanisms.

I may not have figured out the secret to shielding my mental health from all the effects of creating content about it. But I did learn that I want to lean into what I missed: the feeling and the trying.

So yeah. I’m feeling nervous. But I’m also feeling excited. And hopeful. And at least a little more prepared this time.

THEME MUSIC

This is Mood Ring, a practical guide to feelings. Every episode, we’ll explore one new way to cope — with our feelings, with our baggage, with our…