The Health Curve

Beyond Mental Health: The Power of Emotional Well-Being - with Katya Constant, Leadership Coach

• Season 1 • Episode 7

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Mental health often gets a lot of attention — but what about emotional health?

Emotional well-being is about understanding and managing your feelings day to day — and it’s not quite the same as mental health. In fact, nurturing emotional health can be a hidden superpower for building resilience, managing stress, bouncing back from setbacks, and forming healthier relationships.

In this episode, host Jason Arora is joined by Katya Constant, a former finance professional turned leadership and emotional health coach. Together, they break down what emotional health really means, why it matters, and how tuning into your emotions can even strengthen your physical health — with chronic emotional stress known to weaken the immune system and drive unhealthy coping habits.

If you've ever wondered why your feelings matter or how to stay calm in the middle of life’s chaos, this conversation provides an accessible introduction to the principles of emotional well-being.

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to The Health Curve. I'm your host, Jason Aurora. In this episode, we're diving into a topic that's often misunderstood, sometimes dismissed, and yet deeply impacts every single one of us. Emotional health. Now, when you hear that phrase, you might think of therapy sessions or self-help books. Maybe you picture something a little vague or even fluffy. But emotional health isn't a luxury or a buzzword. It's a vital dimension of human wellbeing, just as real and biological as your blood pressure or your cholesterol levels. In this episode, we're joined by Katia Constant, a coach and practitioner who's made it her mission to help people understand, feel, and manage their emotions in a healthier way. Together, we unpack what emotional health actually means, how it works in the body, how it differs from mental health, and why so many of us are disconnected from it in the modern world. You'll hear about the science behind emotional regulation, the systems in the brain and body that govern our feelings, and why emotional health has been central to ancient healing systems for millennia, even if Western medicine is only just catching up. If you've ever felt burnt out, anxious, disconnected, or just wondered why certain feelings seem to take over, this conversation is for you. Let's get into it. Katya, thank you so much for joining us. Why don't we start with a bit about your journey and what got you into this space?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. And happy to be here. Thanks for having me. So my journey, I would say it's quite a long journey that had a tipping point about a year ago. I think the journey leading up to that was one of, in effect, leaving a slightly dualistic life where I felt like I had my what I should be doing trajectory and that what I actually want to be doing, which was largely kind of undiscovered, unexplored. So there was a left brain. I should be good at math. I should be getting a certain kind of career. I should be living my life in a certain way. And I was following those footsteps. And just increasingly, as I got older, as my 20s rolled on and my 30s rolled in, I started feeling dissatisfied, started getting burned out at work. A lot of my relationships were not of the quality that I would like them to be. And I definitely started feeling some of the physical impacts of that as well. So the burnout, back pain, digestion problems. Initially, I started on a bit of a healing journey myself. So I started working with a psychotherapist. I got into Buddhist meditation, started exploring some of the other healing modalities that we're going to be talking about later today. So I left my career in finance and got into the space more professionally rather than as a recipient of some of the healing benefits and have been practicing as a coach since then.

SPEAKER_00:

And when we talk about emotional health, what exactly are we talking about?

SPEAKER_01:

The way I define emotional health is our ability to identify, express, and process and regulate emotions appropriately. So it's our awareness of what are we feeling and our ability to name that. Our ability to feel that in a way that isn't overwhelming. So we can experience an emotion and know that it's going to end and it's going to be okay. And regulate ourselves, whatever the emotion is. So if it's pain, if it's fear, if it's something really negative, we're able to bring ourselves back from that rather than relying on something external. and that we're able to communicate that whole process in a healthy way to others. So it's a lot of self-awareness, emotional regulation, resilience.

SPEAKER_00:

How is this different to mental health?

SPEAKER_01:

Mental health, I feel, is a slightly overused term these days, but the way I think about mental health is it's perhaps slightly broader. It's certainly a related term, but it is slightly different. So I think it describes one's cognitive, emotional, and psychological well-being and really looking at that whole sort of system. So it talks about how we think, how we feel, how we behave, how we handle stressors, how we relate to others, how we make decisions. So there's definitely overlap there. I guess the part of this that we're not focusing explicitly on when we talk about emotional health is the cognitive part. So we're focused less on your sort of cognitive ability, problem solving, things like that, and really focusing on the emotional component of that.

SPEAKER_00:

What are some of the common misconceptions people have about emotional health? Because the word emotion is a very loaded word, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think there's certainly a bit of a, over the last couple of decades, maybe there's on one hand, greater interest in this area, but on the other, also a bit of a backlash in the sense that, you know, I think there's this kind of stoic view of like, we don't need to talk about this, we should just get on with life. And you can actually create problems by examining all of this too much and talking about it too much. So I think there's definitely this kind of feeling that this is a fluffy, flimsy, unnecessary area and that our current generation is too sensitive and too concerned with all of this and thinking about all this too much. And that all of these kind of healing therapies, all of this are just kind of a money-making layer and creating the problems that it then solves rather than addressing something real.

SPEAKER_00:

A lot of what we know about emotional health today is sort of rooted in ancient wisdom, right? And this has shown up all over the world in different cultures, different geographies. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Like, where does this come from in terms of human history and humans understanding themselves and each other better?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I mean, I think we, by we here, I mean sort of Western society specifically, tend to think that this is somehow a new field that we've recently discovered and that we're just now starting to get evidence about and all that. That's definitely not the case. humans since the beginning of time have been concerned with well-being, purpose, fulfillment, all these sorts of things. And I would argue that most ancient civilizations, a lot of which still exist in some form today, actually had a much, much better understanding of emotional health specifically, but also its connection to physical health, which we'll talk about later. So for example, Chinese medicine at its very center is this concept of qi, life force. And they talk a lot about the yin-yang balance and the critical link between the physical and emotional. And most Chinese medicine practices like acupuncture, tai chi, qigong actually really aim to restore harmony between the mind and the body, recognizing the criticality of that. In India, sort of the Ayurvedic tradition, again, is really rooted in the mental and physical interdependence. A chakra system is a physical and mental system that looks at the imbalances between the two. and yoga and meditation practices are very much about harmonizing mind and body. Same for Buddhism, same for a lot of other indigenous and shamanic traditions that really believe in spiritual healing, emotional healing as being the absolute focus and the physical being almost like symptomatic or just a manifestation of some of those deep spiritual issues that we're experiencing. And I would say, you know, all these traditions would look at our ailments and suffering as a whole at that level, and therefore any sort of remedies, treatments, et cetera, would be from that standpoint. Western society is the only one, I believe, that looks at these as separate, as physical, as separate to the emotional, and is only recently starting to rediscover some of those links.

SPEAKER_00:

And of course, ancient societies were much better at looking at human health more holistically and seeing ill health as a measure of imbalance in the body. And it took into account things like emotional health Whereas in modern Western medicine, we obviously look at intervention when someone gets sick and looking at what is happening in the body when the person gets sick, what happens leading up to the sickness, but in a more linear way. And Cartesian dualism refers to this philosophical concept where the physical body is governed by physical laws and the mind is immaterial and not subject to physical laws.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I would say that by and large, Eastern and a lot of sort of maybe Southern traditions look at the human system as a whole and actually often looking even beyond that system at sort of interpersonal connection, intergenerational connection, things like that. Whereas Western medicine, in part because of scientific evolution and sort of Cartesian dualism, looks very much at like each of the pieces individually. So the Western medical system is sort built on specialization. So each doctor looks after a separate organ and really, even at the physical level, fails to look at the interconnection between the different physical parts, let alone thinking about the connection between the physical and the other realms that we're talking about. So I think these are kind of the main influences, like this fixation on science, data, sort of laboratory-based sort of insights, specialization, reductionism to parts. dismissal of anything that's unscientific it cannot be measured perfectly i think that's led us to where we are and i would also add that you know the pharma industry and its development over the last several decades has also helped this trend develop in that you know pharma industry has a focus on medicating the symptoms rather than curing the pharma industry makes money the more medicine that it sells so it's really interested in that long-term revenue stream rather than in fixing the root cause and therefore not having medicine to sell. And I think the prominence of the pharma industry has also really directed the split over the last few decades.

SPEAKER_00:

So this concept has clearly been around for a very long time, and it's shown up in different cultures all over the world, over the generations. And maybe in parts of society today, we've lost it a bit. Why should people care about emotional health today? Why is it an important concept and how does it actually impact us?

SPEAKER_01:

I think there's two reasons to care about this. One is I think there's value in this standalone. So being able to express and regulate and feel your emotions in a healthy way is a big part of our ability to enjoy life and to build relationships with other humans that we can actually enjoy and experience to the full. So before we even look at the links to the physical, I think there's a lot of value standalone in being able to express one's emotions and feel them fully. There's a lot of talk now about longevity and extending this, extending that. So I think it's kind of that perspective. So being happy and being able to feel happy has standalone value. And then the second link, which we'll spend more time on today, is that there's a very strong link between the emotional realm and the physical realm within our body. So when our ability to feel, express, and sort of deal with our emotions is not functioning well, it leads to disease, it leads to various chronic conditions, it leads to addiction, leads to all sorts of very physical issues that we are starting to really experience a lot as a society, and Western medicine is not well-equipped to handle that. So I think understanding this link actually makes us better equipped to reduce disease incidence, improve our physical health, and live longer lives. healthier and happier lives.

SPEAKER_00:

Tell us more about the biology behind this. What exactly governs our emotional health biologically?

SPEAKER_01:

Well, so again, a lot of people think that emotion is this kind of separate, fluffy thing that happens somewhere. But an emotion is actually a biophysical process. So just to kind of follow what happens, it's a series of internal and external activity. So something happened externally, that external event activates a response. So for example, you see a loved one after a long time away, so something positive. Your brain then gets engaged, so the amygdala, which is your emotional processing center, rapidly assesses the situation. So it assesses, is this good, is this bad, what do I need to do, and triggers a response. The prefrontal cortex then helps to regulate and interpret those emotions, adding some degree of logic and control into that process. And finally, the hippocampus links those emotions into memories. So that's what happens in the brain. Then there's also nervous system activation, So depending on what your brain has decided, this emotion is good, bad, scary, not scary. It either activates then the sympathetic nervous system, so our fight or flight response. So if the emotion is stress related, then the body releases hormones, adrenaline, cortisol, your heart rate increases, your breathing becomes more rapid and you become tense. or it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, your rest and digestive system. If the emotion is calming, excuse me, you're poppy, you see someone you love, then the vaginous nerve activates relaxation. Heart rate slows and reduces the stress hormones. Hormonal release we just talked about. So that's sort of a byproduct of what happens with the nervous system. But it's a very, very physical process that literally flows through your body. And just to kind of recap, the main hormones that we're talking about are cortisol and adrenaline. So these are your stress responses. dopamine and serotonin. These are your pleasure and well-being hormones. And finally, oxytocin, which is sort of the love hormone. And then finally, we have sort of a physical expression and sensation. So you might have tears, you might feel kind of relief, you might feel chest tightness or butterflies in your stomach. So there's some physical kind of side of the way you actually experience those emotions. So once that all kind of flows through your body, There are kind of two options for what happens. If you process the emotions in a healthy way, so if you're sad, you cry. If you're, say, angry, you move the anger or you talk about it or you otherwise acknowledge this is happening, I'm feeling like this, and you let your body experience it fully. That whole process actually takes 90 seconds and the emotion filters through your body, comes out, and you're done. If an emotion is suppressed, then it can actually get stored in your body, in your muscles, in your fascia, in the nervous system, sort of patterns, which then contributes to tension, chronic stress, trauma, and sort of other patterns that we'll talk about later. So the key is really to allow that process to unfold in a healthy way. And you can only do that if you're comfortable feeling whatever it is that you're going to feel, the good and the bad.

SPEAKER_00:

So there are real things happening in the body here when you experience an environmental stimulus that... creates this cascade right in your body where you're processing an emotion and then that emotion shows up you know on the outside somehow tell us a bit more about how this tends to impact human beings in their day-to-day lives it may seem obvious to some people but i would bet that it's not so can you tell us a bit more about that how it impacts physical health you know social bonding all these sorts of things

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. Well, first, I just want to say that, generally speaking, this link is very important. So it doesn't only impact us in bad ways, right? That the link between the emotional and the physical is what has helped us survive as a species. So emotions help us react, adapt, and thrive in different situations. There's a reason that they haven't been kind of evolved out of human beings and that we still have them. Emotions are warning signs, which can alert us to kind of good and bad things. They can alert us to threats. So if we feel anxiety, fear, or disgust, for example, that it's our sort of systems way of alerting us that something is there that we should look out for. They can help us strengthen social bonds. So love and affection, encourages bonding, support, protection, guilt, and shame, reinforces social norms and prevents harmful behavior. Empathy and compassion promotes cooperation and trust. And finally, emotions such as joy and curiosity help us as a species adapt and innovate and actually move forward. So these are all the helpful functionings, I guess, of emotions. And again, I would also say that not all stress, for example, is bad. So there is an appropriate time to experience stress in response to certain situations. So if there is a real threat, you should feel stressed and you should act from that place. But I think what we're trying to explore is what happens when the reaction that you have Or I guess the severity of the emotional response and therefore the behavior that corresponds to that is sort of misfired. So you misidentify something for a threat, which is not actually a threat. And in effect, you overuse the stress response and start to experience chronic stress. So this is just, I just want to frame that kind of a healthy functioning is like core to who we are. And it's really only when that processing and how you then act on those emotions, when that's not working well, that that's what leads us to problems.

SPEAKER_00:

We'll get back to this conversation in just a moment. But if you're finding this episode helpful, here's a quick ask. Take a second to follow or subscribe to the Health Curve podcast wherever you're listening. And if someone in your life would benefit from this episode or any of the others you've heard, please send it their way. All right, let's get back to it.

SPEAKER_01:

One topic that is getting more attention today, but I would still say for most people, it's deemed a little bit kind of taboo and something that probably doesn't apply to me, is the role of trauma. So here we're really talking about various adverse, mostly childhood experiences, chronic stress and its impact on the body. So first, I just want to qualify by saying what I mean by trauma and really distinguish between capital T and sort of small t trauma. So capital T trauma is major traumatic events that really should not have happened, like death, violent assault, war, things like that. Small T trauma, which is actually what most of the time we are talking about, is really everyday stressors that can have a big effect nevertheless, either individually or cumulatively. And these are things like conflict, bullying, emotional neglect, or stress. And trauma in both of those cases is not actually the event itself. So it's not like someone died. That is the trauma. Trauma is the way that it impacts you. And specifically, trauma impacts us by limiting our response flexibility. So Gabor Mate and many other authors talk a lot about this concept of response flexibility as being almost a measure of the health of our emotional system. Do we just jump into a response or can we appropriately assess situation? and choose the right response to it. And are we flexible in the way that we respond? Can we choose to respond sort of aggressively or calmly? I mean, what is the degree of control that we have over that? That is a really good test for how healthy our emotional regulation is. And a traumatic event restricts our ability to respond flexibly in the future. So that's what trauma is.

SPEAKER_00:

When we talk about stress and trauma, what is the difference between The good stress that helps us grow and the bad stress that is related to trauma.

SPEAKER_01:

In terms of good and bad stress, there is a very important survival role that stress has played for us as a species, which is it's an appropriate response to a real threat. It activates our system. It drives us to action. It makes us focus. It gives us energy. When we are being chased by a predator, It's a very helpful response. And that is what has helped us survive. But the problem is now we have that response when we get a text message, the same degree of severity. And that's not the right use of that part of our system. And when it's overused, it leads to all sorts of chronic conditions with our immune system, with our cardiovascular system, and the list goes on.

SPEAKER_00:

And we'll come back to how we can train ourselves to deal with these external stresses better and how to deal with our emotions better. And there are lots of different tools out there for people. But, you know, as we were discussing earlier before the podcast, this is often an invisible problem in people's lives until it shows up in some tangible way. And it can show up in broken relationships. It can show up in problems at work, but it can also show up in people's physical health.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, absolutely. So I think some of the like just the quick things that you can pick up on that are probably an indicator that something's not working quite right in this area are things like how well your immune system functions so if you find yourself constantly getting ill and that you're more susceptible than others to you know common cold things like that that you're going from one illness to another that would definitely warrant an investigation into your emotional health because the reality is that chronic stress experiencing excessive anger ultimately excessive cortisol production suppresses your immune function. It increases inflammation and lowers wide blood cell activity. So all these things weaken your system when overused to the extent that we do that now. So if you find yourself constantly getting sick, something to look into. Another area that I think is often impacted by this is your digestion. So there's like such a high incidence now of irritable bowel syndrome, IBS, or kind of milder forms of that. Again, often a very good indicator that you have excessive stress levels and that you're not managing or that you're getting too stressed in response to things that aren't actually that stressful and you're not managing the stress that you are experiencing very well. So looking at, I guess, the quality of your digestion. I think another area I personally experience is actually skeletal health. So if you experience a lot of lower back pain, Quite often, that's also an indicator that you're carrying excessive stress in your system, that you're not releasing because your muscles are overly tense. You're locking up in certain places. Your posture is bad. You're sitting badly. You're storing the emotions in your system in the way that's actually directly impacting physical pain that you feel. I would also look at circulation. So I, again, for a while had poor circulation. I found that that really had to do with cortisol excess production and stress response over overstimulation. I'm not saying it's the only cause and it's the definitive solution, but there's definitely a link that's worth exploring.

SPEAKER_00:

That's really interesting to hear how poor emotional health manifests itself in poor physical health. Let me ask you this. How does our emotional wiring develop?

SPEAKER_01:

So I would say that between the ages of zero and seven is when we lay the foundations for how we respond to the world around us in an emotional sense and for how healthy our ability is to process those emotions appropriately. There's sort of a few phases, I would say between kind of zero and two. So when we're with babies, we tend to just kind of mirror the world around us. We have no understanding yet of our own emotions. And we are really, really closely tied to how our caregivers are reacting to things and experience their reaction almost as if it were our own. Between the age of sort of two and sort of four or five, children become aware of their own emotions. They start to learn how to name them and experience them and process them but they're still at that age really unable to fully self-regulate and they still when they experience an emotion they think that it's it is forever and that it's never going to end and they find it very overwhelming and it's between the ages of kind of five and seven onwards that children learned fully to self-regulate and to be able to have like a standalone experience of I feel sad it's going to be okay because my mom's going to come back I'm okay

SPEAKER_00:

Well, that's absolutely fascinating how early on we start learning to regulate our emotional health. Let's change direction slightly and get into some community questions around this important topic. Are women or men better at managing their emotions and why?

SPEAKER_01:

So I think there's an evolutionary component here, which is, I guess, if you look at the structure of kind of hunter-gatherer societies when physical differences were a much bigger determinant of the roles that we played in our groupings. Men tended to be the ones that were kind of out there fighting with each other, conquering land, procuring food, whatever else, whereas women tended to be the ones that kind of stayed back and looked after sort of the children, looked after sort of the home, the community, et cetera. And so I think through that distinction of functioning, women were just better equipped to work with emotions, to handle emotions, to use them in the way they build that kind of social fabric with the rest of the community. Looking at society today, to be honest, I'm not certain that that's still the case. I mean, you could probably say there's a predisposition, but equally, I know a lot of women, myself included, who actually feel quite masculine in many ways and actually have as great difficulty dealing with emotions as men do. So I think as the structure of our society has moved away from what it used to be, I think some of those evolutionary differences are also slowly eroding, but they are still there to some extent. I think there's also a bit of a cultural norm component to this, which is reinforcing it. So I do think that there's a stigma around men talking about their emotions and going to see a therapist or saying that they're struggling, whatever else, which is perpetuating some of those differences in a way that they might not be if some of that wasn't in place. And equally, I think there's still cultural expectation for women to play a certain role, to be sort of a child bearer, to resolve conflict, to mediate, to be the peacemaker, that again is probably perpetuating some of those differences, more so than biology. I think it's more of an expectation and sort of gender roles that we're continuing to play now.

SPEAKER_00:

What is the difference between a personality quirk and poor emotional regulation?

SPEAKER_01:

I would actually say that a lot of the aspects of our personality are are actually adaptations to things that have happened to us along the way. That most of us, until we start doing some sort of deeper self-awareness work, are actually some degree out of touch with who we really, really are deep down. Because as things happen to us as we go through childhood, but also the rest of life, we pick up defense mechanisms, various behaviors that become still ingrained in us. They become part of our personality. But a lot of them really, I would say, are kind of the nurture rather than the nature side of things. I just want to kind of caveat with that, that a personality is not a fixed thing that we're born with. And what we often think of as our personality is actually something that has evolved to protect us and to help us survive in whatever environment we were exposed to. But I would ask the question of sort of like, how is this showing up in your life? Where is it coming from? Is it damaging? Do you realize that it's damaging? And are you in control of it? Can you change it? If this is an unhelpful adaptation that comes from unhealthy emotional processing early in life, then this will be something that you initially are kind of overwhelmed by, you're not in control over, and it's something that just kind of takes over you. But through examination, you can change.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, Katya, to end this session, it's only fitting, I think, that I ask how recent events like the COVID pandemic or our over-engagement with social media have impacted our collective emotional health?

SPEAKER_01:

They both have been absolutely terrible, and social media in particular. I can speak to also just my own example that I realized that it's probably one of the biggest daily stressors in my life is my phone and the notifications that I get and my sort of sense of urgency that I get from that. So social media, but I would just always say technology more broadly and like sort of connectivity and the pace of life that comes with that. I mean, social media, I think, has just brought so much attention to where we are, how we look, what others are doing. There's this huge need to compare ourselves to others, to seek that validation, to feel that, you know, if we haven't made that perfect post on holiday somewhere, then our life is miserable. So I think it's made people a lot less secure. in themselves, a lot less connected. And it has made them look to the external world for validation that much more, which is not healthy. So I think it's really, really damaging to everybody that's been exposed to it, but especially to children who have been exposed to it from an earlier age and sort of don't know how to live outside of that.

SPEAKER_00:

Katia, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a real pleasure. We've covered a lot today. We're going to revisit a lot of these concepts and go deeper in future episodes. So thank you again so much.

SPEAKER_01:

I love doing it. Yeah, thanks for having me.