You’ve had symptoms of RED-S / REDs (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport) for years, but your doctor brushed them off, so you didn’t take them seriously. Now you’re frustrated, because if you’d known that you were potentially damaging your health, you could have done something about it sooner!  Is that a normal way to feel?

Sport psychologist Marissa Norman doesn’t categorize feelings as “normal” or “abnormal,” but she would feel the same way! However, she suggests that it may be worth considering if there may be other, deeper feelings underlying your annoyance or frustration.

 

Read the transcript

[Tina]  I feel so annoyed at my doctor for wasting all these years I could have been fixing the problem. Is this normal for me to be just so frustrated with someone that I put my trust in?  

[Marissa]  So when it comes to emotions, I don’t necessarily believe that there are normal and abnormal emotions, or good or bad emotions. You are feeling what you are feeling, right? It is what it is. With that being said, if I felt like my doctor was wasting my time where I could have been making moves, I too would feel very similar to you. I would feel very frustrated; I would feel very annoyed. But I don’t think it’s helpful to just stop there.

 I think it’s helpful to dig a little bit deeper and explore our emotional experience because our emotions give us a lot of good information. It helps us understand what’s important to us, understand ourselves as individuals. So if we are feeling annoyed, let’s think about that. What does feeling annoyed feel like for you? How are you experiencing annoyed, frustration in your body?  Where are you noticing that? That would be the first kind of thing to reflect on. Feeling, or this current feeling, of feeling annoyed and frustrated, is it a familiar feeling? Where else might you have felt that way before? What is that bringing up for you? By feeling annoyed and frustrated, what function does that emotion have for us and what is that emotion allowing us to not have to feel, not have to think about, not have to consider? This isn’t always the case, but for some of us, for some of our emotions, under an emotion like frustration or feeling annoyed, there is another emotion just right under it that feels a little less safe, a little less comfortable to experience or to express to others. I would encourage you to think for yourself, is there another emotion there and if so what is that emotion? Why is that emotion so uncomfortable for me to express or even acknowledge right now? 

So this process, yes, have your emotions. Whatever comes up, comes up, but sometimes it’s helpful to explore that a little bit further. And doing so helps us cultivate more of this self-awareness and can also be really helpful in that healing journey to move us forward in the right direction. 

[Tina]  Yes, that is such an important point and something that is a difficult thing to have with yourself, but much needed. Thank you for that; I think that’s really well said.

check it out

Recovering from RED-S is hard. It’s even harder if you’re working through it alone. Even if you have professional support, they’re not available 24-7, and that can lead to going down search engine rabbit holes that have the potential to derail everything.

Our online resource, RED-S: Realize. Reflect. Recover, will answer all those questions swimming around in your head about recovery. It will give you the opportunity to connect with the experts you’ve come to know here, and to surround  yourself with a community of others who are going through it too.

THANK YOU! to Athletic Greens and Tracksmith for supporting this YouTube series and RED-S: Realize. Reflect. Recover.

Go to athleticgreens.com/reds to get five free travel packs of AG1 and a free one year’s supply of vitamin D3+K2 with your subscription!

When you go to https://tracksmith.com/tina and use the code TINA15 at checkout, you’ll get free shipping and Tracksmith will donate 5% of your order to Rising Hearts, the Indigenous-led nonprofit founded by Jordan Marie Daniels.

more about Marissa:

Marissa Norman, Psy.D, CMPC, is a Sport Psychologist in the New Jersey area. She has her own private telehealth practice, and  works with youth to professional athletes from mental skills training to mental health services. She’s a former college track and field pentathlete who loves to laugh, to eat, and adventure. You can find Marissa at https://www.topformpsychology.com/team-sport-psychology.

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