Emotionally Fit with Dr. Emily Anhalt

Chris Messina has over a hundred thousand followers on Twitter, but he wasn’t thinking about that when he accepted a challenge from his partner to be more vocal about his sexual desires, and updated his profile to include a personal goal of giving her more orgasms. Cut to the following day when people were shocked to see that this tech leader credited with inventing the hashtag had posted something so personal in such a public way. But for Chris, this event was a turning point for him in speaking more freely about sex without fear or shame. In this Taboo Tuesday, Chris talks to Dr. Emily about his journey to accepting himself as a sexual being and navigating a world where many people are not comfortable talking about sex openly.

For Dr. Emily, a difficult realization of adulthood was that every decision we make means having to grieve the loss of every decision we can no longer make as a result. In this Emotional Push-Up, Shoshana Berger, global editorial director at the design firm IDEO, joins Dr. Emily to talk about how growth and grief are intertwined and how learning to grieve is an important skill for ongoing emotional health.

One important hallmark of mental health and emotional development is the ability to exist in the gray. In this Emotional Push-Up, Dr. Emily is joined by author and illustrator, Jordan Sondler, to discuss why we tend to label things as right or wrong, good or bad, black or white, when the truths of life almost always fall somewhere in between.