freestyle

Emotional Regulation: An extremely underrated trading practice Like many of you I’m a very cerebral person that defaults to the intellect over feelings/emotions. In some ways it can be helpful for trading, but in other ways can neglect that our bodies keep score, especially with the amount of frustration we deal with daily. Ultimately unfelt emotions are stored in the body and continue to affect our mood, oftentimes as an inexplicable pressure or decrease in mood when unnoticed. I’ll give an example: Last week I started to feel really off, I lost interest in hobbies and just wanted to sleep. My trading week had been going fine and I hadn’t had any serious issues personally. I thought to myself for a while that perhaps I was just exhausted from overworking and that I needed to be under stimulated and experience boredom. For three days I would just get in bed 2 hours earlier than normal and let myself dopamine detox, it helped a bit but what I started to notice was a dull pressure in my body. I knew that I needed to feel those feelings once I realized this and so I did. I closed my eyes and felt the sensations rise up in me, surprising emotions. I felt sadness, I felt anger and as far as I knew nothing major was the cause. I really had no idea… To be frank, I know what to do but I just forget. It was a long while after the last time I even did this because I’ve just never let myself take a breather, whether it’s work or occupying my mind all the time. As a result of a few minutes, the weight lifted in me. Emotions can dissipate in less than 5 minutes, often much faster like a minute when you let yourself experience them in the body- no thoughts, just sensations, no judgement. They say people can ignore the feelings for a lifetime or feel them for two minutes and let them go, don’t underestimate how much we go through with the constant emotional turbulence in dealing with the market. Afterwards I was feeling back to normal and being motivated outside of work, like myself again after those few days of being out of it. It was a just a great reminder to check in with myself regularly and I wanted to at least put that idea out there for other traders. Don’t take my word for it, I’ve just studied this material and hired multiple coaches/performance consultants in the last 7 years… this is something virtually all of them share in their own technique/method. You’ll want to learn some sort of method, many out there… just find one that lets you sit with the feelings and feel them. I credit @kimanncurtin for really helping me understand this through my time with her coaching.