In this episode, host and life coach Sarah Kernows provides a powerful perspective shift for anyone struggling to navigate the emotional turbulence of a breakup. She challenges the common habit of using "feelings as strategies"—where we act impulsively on emotions like loneliness or anger to get immediate relief—and argues that these feelings are actually just data points from our nervous system. Sarah explains that while emotions are valid messengers, they are not instructions, and reacting to them as emergencies often leads to long-term regret and "emotional constipation." To reclaim power, she introduces the "24-hour rule," a mandatory pause that allows individuals to validate their feelings without letting those feelings dictate their behavior. By shifting from emotional reactivity to value-based decision-making, listeners can learn to process their pain without self-sabotage. Ultimately, Sarah encourages her audience to view discomfort as a temporary wave and to start acting as the "healed version" of themselves today.
Your feelings are signals, not strategies. After a breakup, your emotions are louder than your logic, but loud just because it's loud doesn't mean it's wise.
Learn how to handle your emotions and exactly what to do to move forward after a breakup.
Get my exact process for healing and thriving in my free masterclass www.sarahcurnoles.com/masterclass
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Have you gone through a breakup and you're tired of feeling low, lonely, or lost? I've got a pep talk through you. I'm Sarah Curnoles, your breakup bestie. I'm a certified life coach with years of coaching experience, helping people just like you turn your breakup into the best thing that ever happened to them. Each week, tune in to get a pep talk to heal your heart, let go of the past, reclaim your power and get back into your main character energy. Your breakup may have shattered your world as you know it, but together let's build a new better world. Let's go.
(00:45)
Have you gone through a breakup and you're tired of feeling low, lonely or lost? I've got a pep talk for you. I'm Sarah Krnules, your breakup bestie. I'm a certified life coach with years of coaching experience, helping people just like you turn your breakup into the best thing that ever happened to them. Each week, tune in to get a pep talk to heal your heart, let go of the past, reclaim your power, and get back into your main character energy. Your breakup may have shattered your world as you know it, but together, let's build a new better world. Let's go.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Welcome, my friends, to another episode of Breakup Pep Talks. I am Sarah Curnoles and it is allergy season. You might hear it in my voice today. I'm a little scratchy, but we're here. We're getting through it. And today I really want you to think of me as that bestie who says the things to you that nobody else is going to say, who has that perspective of being outside of your life. I'm not in it. I'm outside of it. And as someone who deep down loves you fiercely. All right? So I'm going to step into that role of your bestie today. And I'm giving you the truth. Your feelings are signals, not strategies. All right? We are talking about feelings today, what to do with them, how to manage them, how to really use them, where most of us get stuck and what they're supposed to be.
(02:25)
So I think a lot of us, when we're having big feelings, something that tends to happen. And I come from a background working in theater. I usually was the one who was trying to keep the calm, trying to herd the cats, try to keep everything focused and moving forward, which meant I dealt with a lot of big feelings. So a lot of times what happens is somebody thinks they are communicating to you, but they are vomiting their feelings all over you. I get it. They're big feelings. They feel uncontrollable. And what do I do with them? I got to get them out. And we end up taking out feelings on other people. So if you've ever had somebody in your life who was angry and they're lashing out at you, right? Or they can't stop crying and it's almost like they are asking you to take care of their tears.
(03:18)
If you've ever been a part of that, that is somebody using feeling as a strategy. They are saying, "Look at my feelings. I need you to solve them and take care of them." This is not what feelings are for. All right? And I've been guilty of this, but it's also why I think so many of us are scared of our feelings. It's why we think they feel unsafe because deep down you know nobody else can take care of your feelings like you can. We've also, probably many of us have been on the receiving end of anger that is being lashed out at you. That doesn't feel safe. It feels uncontrollable. It feels like I don't know what's going to happen. Right? It's scary. That's not what feelings are for. So today we're talking about just because you feel it doesn't mean you're going to act it.
(04:18)
All right? And I want you to see that missing him at 11:00 PM is a feeling. Texting him is a behavior. Lonely is a feeling. It's a signal.
(04:34)
Chasing after him to fix that feeling is behavior. All right? We're going to break this down a lot today. So I want you to think about it this way. After a breakup, your emotions are louder than your logic, but loud just because it's loud doesn't mean it's wise. So let's talk about what feelings actually are. Feelings, your emotions are just energy and emotion in your body. It is just data from your nervous system. It's merely information, right? You are going to feel sadness because you're experiencing loss. So that sadness is expressing itself as a reaction to feeling loss. Anger comes up when we have been disrespected, when a boundary's been crossed, right? Maybe you're feeling anxiety. It's because you have a perceived threat. Loneliness, that in my experience, is a grief. It's a flavor of grief. It's a grief of a loss of love. It's a desire for connection.
(05:47)
Feelings are just messengers. They're not instructions.
(05:55)
And I want you to start paying attention to how many feelings you have in a day and how quickly they can move, how quickly they can change. If you treated each and every one of those emotions like an emergency, you're always going to be living in reaction mode. And if this has been you, if you've been the person who is incredibly reactive to your feelings, this isn't about judgment. This is about bringing awareness to it. And I think what happens when we get after a breakup is that we take our feelings as instructions. "Oh, I feel lonely, therefore I better download a dating app right away and start dating immediately." Or, "I was rejected." "Well, I better prove my worth. I better get out there and win the breakup and show like, hot damn, I am hot shit. "You don't know anything. Look what you're missing.
(06:54)
Or if you're feeling anxious about your future, maybe you seek reassurance from your ex of like, " I just need closure. I just need to know what I should have done differently. "Or if you're feeling nostalgic, maybe you try to just keep those memories active and you keep bringing them up over and over and over and over again. And I get it because these feelings feel urgent.
(07:23)
I have to make them go away. They are so uncomfortable. I need them to go away now. What we often do is maybe you emote them, maybe, or more often I hear people, they distract themselves, they busy themselves, they try to push them away and they try to move forward. But just because there is an urgency for you to feel better, to feel relief, it does not mean that it's getting you any clearer or any closer to being moved on. That's the ultimate goal, right? We want to move on. That's what happens if you feel that feeling all the way through, you're a step closer to being moved on from your ex. That's actually the relief that you're looking for. Not just when am I going to go back to normal? When am I going to feel better again? When are these feelings going to stop?
(08:17)
I have news for you. You're a human being. You're going to have feelings the rest of your life, but we want to change our relationship with our feelings. That is where relief will actually come from. I'm going to take this a step further, actually. So there is a hidden cost to being emotionally reactive. I saw this all the time in the theater because especially I worked with a lot of younger artists who were very early in their careers, so they hadn't figured out an emotional mastery yet. It was like a brand new tool that they were trying to figure out how to use in the world. It was like baby giraffes and wobbly legs, except it was novice actors with big, big, big feelings and no training really around how do I use these to my advantage.
(09:16)
So there is a cost to being reactive with your emotions and using your emotions as strategy. The cost is you create habits around your feelings that reinforce, "I can't handle this. " Because what you are always doing when you have a feeling is you are responding to it as if it's an emergency and that you can't handle it, so you got to get rid of it. So you end up feeling out of control a lot. You text when you say you wouldn't, or you sleep with somebody new just to try to avoid feeling lonely or sad. You settle for breadcrumbs in the next relationship. You get overly possessive when your new person that you're dating has a very normal relationship with a person of the opposite sex or same sex, but you feel threatened and instead you respond with an explosion of anger rather than talking about it.
(10:23)
You could also learn how to shrink when you don't handle your emotions well and you handle them as strategies. We learn to shrink ourselves in response, right? So what this is, is you're creating short-term belief and long-term regret.
(10:45)
Nobody wants to sign up for this. Nobody actually wants to be the person who's always responding to their feelings as a nine alarm, urgent emergency. This is also how I believe that we get constipated with our feelings, because eventually we just start repressing them over and over and over again, and we never actually move them. So we get very constipated in our feelings. So when anytime we're going to feel them, they feel so big we can't handle it, and then we just become shut down. There is a solution. Hallelujah. There's a solution. We want you to use your feelings correctly. So we're going to use them to create power for you, not constipation, but we're going to create power. All right? So what I want you to start using your feelings for, I want you to start relating to them in a different way. I want you to start seeing every feeling as temporary.
(11:52)
It is temporary and it is not a fact. Feelings are not facts. It is a passing energetic reaction. It is moving. It is energy in motion. All right? That's how I want you to start looking at your feelings of this isn't going to last, this is temporary.
(12:15)
So I want you to start instituting a mandatory pause between when you experience a feeling and between experiencing the feeling and taking action. You have a mandatory, I'm going to say 24 hour pause. Yes, I said it. 24 hours mandatory. You are going to name the feeling. Here's what you're going to do. You're going to name the feeling. I'm experiencing loneliness. And then you are going to validate it with this phrase, "Of course I'm feeling this way." You can even give yourself reasoning. Of course, I'm feeling this way. I'm going through a breakup. Of course I'm feeling lonely. I'm used to having somebody in the bed next to me. Of course, I'm feeling this way. And then you are going to delay action for 24 hours. I don't know if you can hear it. I'm tapping on the table because that's how insistent I am.
(13:05)
No action on that loneliness for 24 hours. You are going to see how quickly that moves away, right? If you don't respond to it immediately, it's going to pass.
(13:17)
It is truly like a wave, right? If you watch an emotion and all emotions last less than two minutes when they are uninterrupted with thought or story, right? Story and thought are the things that keep emotions active. If you just witness the feeling, it's going to last less than two minutes and it's going to follow the same pattern of it's going to have a rising, just like a wave. It's going to build, bub, bub, bo, build, it's going to crest and then it's going to fall down, right? That is the pattern. Sometimes when we are really close to the breakup, you're going to experience a lot of waves with short breaks in between, but as you get farther from the breakup and as you continue to do this work, there is more space between the waves. All right? So I want you to also start paying attention to what is this emotion pointing towards?
(14:20)
Why is this emotion coming up right now? What does this emotion want me to know? Every emotion carries a message. And so instead of, I'm feeling anxious, I need my ex, right? That's what we might be thinking. What else could be true? What is the message that this anxiety has for me? I don't feel safe. I need comfort. I'm missing him. Right? And then you can go ahead, you can repeat the steps from before of validated, of course, of course, of course, of course. What do I need? How can I show up for myself right now? Okay? So here's what I want you to know. I'm going to shift right now. Feelings are going to point inward. Feelings are expression and expression is just getting out what you have inside. So feelings are always turning your attention inward on yourself and expression is getting that out.
(15:28)
The healthiest way to do this is movement. Put on music. Move it. That is a healthy expression of a feeling.
(15:42)
Not, let me go and yell at my neighbor. Right? Move that anger first, maybe dance with it a little bit. Feelings are going to point you inward, right? You can turn inward. Why is this showing up for me? What's the message this has for me? What do I need to know? How do I need to show up for myself? Now, a strategy will point outward. A strategy is about taking action. And I want you to build your strategy, not from emotion, but from your values. Think about this long term. What do I really want for my life? How do I want to feel about myself? How do I want to see myself? So you might be thinking of, I want to have self respect. I want to be proud of myself. I want to have a healthy relationship in the future. I want to travel the world.
(16:44)
I want to have an amazing career.
(16:49)
When you create a strategy based on those things, it becomes very clear. I am not creating it from panic or from fear of being alone. I am creating this on the version of me I'm evolving into. I am deciding whether to text my ex based on, will this help me feel proud of myself? Will this help me have more self respect or will it have less? And you want to make decisions in alignment with where you want to be going, not from the flow of constant emotions and the urgency of this is an emergency. I have to solve this immediately.
(17:36)
And so as a shortcut, you could always ask yourself, if this was six months in the future and I'm totally healed from this, what would healed me do? I want you to hear all of this and know that this is a skill. There is a level of being able to tolerate being uncomfortable that comes from practice about continuing to show up. It might mean making some mistakes, yes. Sometimes it happens of like you text your ex and you're like, "Oh no, I shouldn't have done that. " I know that in hindsight, right? But we're not going to beat ourselves up over it.
(18:19)
Go back and listen to the self-blame episode, right? We are not going to beat ourselves up. We are going to relate to ourselves in a new way and be like, "Whoop, learning opportunity. I'm going to learn how to sit with this discomfort. I am going to go for a walk instead of sending a text. I'm going to call a friend. I have literally done that. I have set up networks of friends just to say, if I feel like texting my ex, can I text you anytime, day or night and all you have to reply with is like, I love you or I see you or I hear you. " You don't even have to reply to the logic of my text. I just need someone else. I need to break a pattern of reaching out to him and I want to reach out to my friends instead.
(19:04)
This is about learning how to choose wisely for yourself. Okay, so we are going to be shifting here. Your feelings are no longer your strategies. Your values are your strategies. Your feeling is merely information and you get to decide what to do with it.
(19:25)
This is living a badass life. The most badass women I know are the ones who have their feelings, but they take smart action, smart action that is planned, that is logical, not emotional or reactive and this doesn't invalidate your feelings. Your feelings are real, but they serve a different purpose. They are expression. They're getting you unstuck. They're giving you information and then you can use your logic to decide what to do with that information. So if you are ready to stop letting heartbreak run your choices and you are ready to start responding from your strength, that is exactly the work that I do. I help you get back into your power and I want you to join me on my free masterclass from Hot Mess to Badass. I am going to talk you through my entire step-by-step system, right? I want you to think about it.
(20:28)
Dorothy had the Yellow Brick Road to get to Oz. This is my yellow brick road for you. I am going to teach you my process of how to go from heartbroken to badass, and we are going to have so much fun doing it. You are going to walk away knowing exactly what to do from where you are and how to get back on track to feeling in control of your life again and excited for the next chapter of your life. I want you to sign up and come join me. It's totally free. I make it a lot of fun. It is very interactive, right? And I can't wait to have you there. So come join me. The link is in the show notes. It's going to be happening on a fairly regular basis, but you do not want to miss this. You want to be live.
(21:15)
The energy is unmatched. All right, my friends. Come join me there. And you can also come find me on Instagram @sarahcurnoles and we can talk more there about how I can help support you. All right, my friends. That's this week's episode. I cannot wait to hear how this goes for you of shifting out of feelings being your strategy and moving towards using them purely for expression. If this helped you, would you mind giving me a five star rating on your podcast app? That rating helps other listeners find this really useful information so that we can spread the message far and wide. All right, my friends, until next time, have a wonderful day and take good care of yourselves.