Emotionally Fit with Dr. Emily Anhalt

Dr. Emily is back solo in this Emotional Push-Up to share some of the best advice she’s ever received: in order to handle life’s uncertainties you have to trust that your future self can handle future problems. Listen now to hear just how powerful this advice can be and how you can use it to alleviate some present anxiety.

So much of what we do in life is in service of avoiding discomfort. We avoid tough conversations. We avoid challenging the status quo when we know we could do better. We turn to drugs and alcohol to avoid facing other uncomfortable realities. But unfortunately the things we do to avoid discomfort often end up leading to more discomfort than the original thing we were trying to avoid in the first place. In this Emotional Push-Up, Dr. Emily talks to Chris Messina, credited with creating the hashtag, about why the most effective path to emotional growth is to become more comfortable being uncomfortable.

For Dr. Emily, a difficult realization of adulthood was that every decision we make means having to grieve the loss of every decision we can no longer make as a result. In this Emotional Push-Up, Shoshana Berger, global editorial director at the design firm IDEO, joins Dr. Emily to talk about how growth and grief are intertwined and how learning to grieve is an important skill for ongoing emotional health.