How to Move Through Stress, Not Just Manage It
WHOLE SUCCESS WEEKLY #7
Last week I did something I’ve never done in a workshop. I took the group through a somatic exercise I usually reserve for my 1:1 clients - connecting to an emotion in the body, then giving it center stage for 90 seconds.
The reaction was powerful. Many of them were stunned by two things:
How hard it was to locate the emotion in their body in the first place.
How unfamiliar it felt to actually express it.
And here’s the kicker - most of these women saw themselves as “emotional people.” Yet the exercise revealed just how disconnected they were from their raw, unfiltered feelings.
Why this matters
We want to change how we experience our days. So we go straight to external fixes:
• Change the job.
• Improve the habits.
• Reshuffle the calendar.
Those tweaks can help temporarily. But the relief rarely lasts. Because the old culprits - scarcity, stress, anxiety, the inner critic - creep back in and retake control.
Here's why: Until you expand your nervous system’s sense of safety - nothing will change for the long-haul.
And a huge part of creating that safety is one simple, terrifying thing - feeling.
I talk more about this in my LinkedIn video this week:
Why we struggle to feel
We have learned to suppress the very thing that makes us human: our ability to feel.
We’ve been conditioned to see feelings as inconvenient.
To hold it together at work.
To push through at home.
To believe that logic & productivity are more valuable than presence & emotion.
But feelings aren’t the problem.
It’s the suppression of them that keeps so many of us stuck in cycles of exhaustion, guilt, and disconnection.
Here’s the piece that rarely gets named: most high-achieving women are expert feelers of the “acceptable” emotions - joy, pride, gratitude, even grief when it’s tidy.
Underneath the identity of “deep feeler,” many of us are still skimming the surface. We curate what gets airtime and mute the rest with productivity, analysis, or numbing.
The body learns from that curation. It starts to believe that only the bright, efficient parts of us are welcome, and that anything messy must be hidden or managed.
I lived there for years. I could speak about my passion and care deeply for everyone else, while quietly outrunning my own anger, fear, and shame.
I called it discipline. My nervous system called it danger.
Every time I skipped an emotion, I trained my body that the hard ones weren’t safe to feel.
The science behind it
Harvard research shows this: an emotion takes just 90 seconds to process in the body.
Ninety flipping seconds.
Your nervous system is built for this - it's a perfect machine. But most of us never let the process finish.
Instead, we interrupt it - overanalyzing, suppressing, distracting.
Which means the emotion stays stuck in the body, fueling patterns of stress, fear, anxiety, insecurity, and self-doubt.
Every time we suppress, we reinforce the belief that certain emotions aren’t safe. That belief shrinks our resilience, shrinks our presence, and keeps us caught in survival mode.
What it looks like in practice
In the workshop, we gave our emotions a stage.
We yelled in the car with the windows rolled up.
We shook until our bodies felt like inflatable tube guys at a car lot.
We let sound, movement, and breath carry the emotion all the way through.
(Most were off camera, but you can enjoy seeing me do all of this as a guide).
For a full 90 seconds.
And when the wave was complete, something shifted. Shoulders softened. Breathing slowed. Energy lightened.
This is what happens when you stop managing emotions and start moving through them.
✨ If you want to watch me guide the group through this practice (yes, yelling and shaking included), you can catch it in the replay here.
It was supposed to be LIVE Only, but my AI notetaker had other plans...so now I get to share the experience with you
At the end of the day, this isn’t about yelling in your car or shaking in your garage.
It’s about remembering that you are safe enough to feel it all.
When you stop outrunning your emotions and start letting them move through, you create space for something bigger: peace, clarity, presence, and a kind of freedom you can’t fake.
This is the work we do inside The RISE Collective - a 12-week experience where women shed old patterns, reclaim their voice, and learn to live from a regulated, grounded place. The next cohort begins October 9th, and I’m keeping it small and intimate, as always.
If you feel a pull to go deeper into this kind of work, I have 4 spots left, you can learn more and apply here.
Here’s to feeling fully.
Here’s to healing deeply.
And here’s to coming home to yourself - again and again.
With love, always,
Jessica