Where do emotions come from? What happens in the brain during high stress and anxiety? Why is feeling your negative emotions the key to reducing their intensity and frequency? In this podcast episode, Billy and Brandy Eldridge speak about emotional resolution with Cedric Bertelli. Meet Cedric Bertelli Cedric Bertelli is the Founder and Director of the Emotional Health Institute. He began his studies around the understanding of emotional functioning in 2009 in France and has continued his work in the United States since 2011. In collaboration with several other professionals, he developed the Emotional Resolution™ method (or EmRes™), which is designed to permanently release disruptive emotional patterns within minutes. In addition to working with clients individually, Cedric trains mental health professionals and educators across the United States on Emotional Resolution. Visit the Emotional Health Institute and connect with them on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube. Visit Cedric Bertelli’s website and connect with him on Instagram. In This Podcast Summary * What are emotions? * What happens in the brain during high stress? * Why must you feel your emotions? What are emotions? Emotional difficulty and emotions in general … are obsolete predictions from the brain. An emotion that keeps on coming back is a prediction from the brain. (Cedric Bertelli) In life, people have experiences, and the brain uses those experiences to update its predictions about the future. That is what learning is. In this sense, an emotional difficulty is a prediction from the brain that has not yet been updated. The brain is having the same emotional response to different situations. How does one update a “stuck” prediction? We know today that at the origin of every single one of our disruptive emotional patterns [such as] depression, anxiety, anger, stress … is a [similar] event. It is always a moment of very high stress, like trauma. (Cedric Bertelli) Some things that are traumatic for babies and children are not traumatic for adults, but trauma experienced as a child can follow someone’s development into adulthood if it is not resolved. What happens in the brain during high stress? When the body cannot handle the amount of stress in a moment, there is a short period of disassociation. In other words, a cognitive shutdown. What you and I are aware of consciously [and] cognitively would represent about 2000 bits of data and information per second. [This] is what the cognitive [brain] can manage … the subconscious brain can gather about four hundred billion bits of information per second. (Cedric Bertelli) The conscious mind, so as not to overload us, filters information down into a much smaller portion so that we can function without being overwhelmed. Therefore, when we experience trauma and the prefrontal cortex shuts down for half a second or more, we experience that heightened sense of experiencing life because the prefrontal cortex is not active to filter out s...