Rethink your emotions

As the summer is about to end, it may be a good time to get the last moments of the summer vacation and sun and prepare for the next round of learning. For many people, this is an emotional time combining anxiety, anticipation, and pleasure. Many people use the vacation to shake off the stress and get ready for the hard work ahead. In this article, we try to rethink some common emotions and experiences. This is also something we can do with our kids. For more reading, I refer you the articles here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Be aware of your own emotions

Quite often people become too busy to address what they feel and why they feel it. The stresses and urges of our everyday lives tend to be repetitive to the point we stop noticing them. To be able to react effectively, we should first notice what is going on. Excitement and anxiety, greed and fear can draw our focus as we become aware of something. Sadness, apathy, boredom may be easily mislabeled as the result of the stressful daily routine or not noticed at all. People can often be irritable, aggressive and confrontational without being aware of it.

There are several ways to notice our emotions. After a vacation, we get a fresh perspective on our daily routine, and so do our friends and partners. Some of them may notice that we behave in a particular way, or attribute some non-verbal clues to particular feelings. We will notice something about other people and this will make us think. Alternatively, we can get a feedback from the people around. Or maybe we will notice that our behavior does not correspond to the situation.

Usually when we show strong reaction, or when our reaction does not correspond to the situation, there are strong feelings involved. We should be able to evaluate these feelings and maybe reuse them in a more effective way.

Quite often we will need to write a diary in order to track our emotions. If we noticed an emotion but did not write it down or focused long enough to memorize the situation, we may soon forget the event. The diary does not need to be big or formal. We can send ourselves an email when something meaningful happens and review later on.

Evaluate the particular emotion

When we have an emotion, we can check its validity. Psychologists call this “valence.” There are many criteria to consider.

Does the emotion correspond to the situation? If not, maybe we react not to the particular situation but to some traumatic memory. We can check which memory triggered the effect by continually asking ourselves “why else would a person react this way?”

Some emotional responses work well and help us. Other emotional responses may be used to work long ago but do not work anymore. Are the emotion and the reaction it triggers useful? Can we think of an alternative more useful reaction? Should there be a different emotion triggering THAT response? As we get more life experience and role models we can copy, we may come up with better alternatives.

Is the emotion beautiful? Some emotions, like love and compassion, tend to correspond to our moral code and spiritual orientation. Others, like envy, tend to feel ugly. There is nothing wrong with having ugly emotions, but it is in our nature to prefer the beauty.

Find the root cause

As we try to explore our emotions, we may discover the events that trigger particular responses. People often push our “buttons” without noticing it, and we respond more strongly than we should. This is something to work with.

Quite often we think our response is the only reasonable response in a given situation. Usually, this is not so, and other people can often come up with many alternative responses. Why did we choose a particular emotional response and reaction? Probably it served a particular function in some earlier stages of our lives.

Sometimes the response we choose does not correspond to the situation. We might be responding to some memories of earlier events, or fantasies that we had. People change, situations change, social norms change. When we are beginners in some new field we use shortcuts and make mistakes that can no longer be tolerated as we gain experience.

Adjustment

Each person comes with his own bag of skills, fantasies and fears, painful memories, and aesthetic preferences. We can change the particular responses we do not like without looing our authenticity.

We act in profoundly different ways in different environments. A person may exhibit different qualities with the management and with simple employees, with close friends and people they barely know, at work and in social situations. We may feel that we are fully authentic and consistent and react in the same in all situations, but this is probably a misconception.

One of the easiest ways to change is borrowing qualities from one area in our lives into another. We can adopt at work some self-regulation qualities we learn at home and use at home the determination we discovered at work. We can try to access our future self as we imaging ourselves several years from now, and borrow some qualities for our use now and here. Sometimes, we should search in our memories for what made us passionate and effective years ago, and try to revive the spark. If we have mentors and role models we can copy their behavior.

If we want to introduce a change that is entirely new for us, we should expect difficulties and stress. Quite possibly we would be better off by introducing a new and change-supportive environment in our life, for example as a hobby or social activity, and then apply the new skills to other areas in our lives.

Effective actions

There are several simple actions that work most of the time for most emotions. They are easy to understand and to implement.

• Timeout. The first emotional response may be a bad one. The fight-or-flight behavior is too aggressive for the modern life. Take a short timeout. The delayed emotions may be more appropriate.
• Create a toolbox of alternative responses. There is nothing worse than being helpless and unprepared. Having only one available response is dangerous. If makes sense to prepare several alternative responses for the most common situations in our lives.
• Challange anxiety. Some people regularly imagine the worst possible outcome. Is this outcome really common and likely? Are we letting our imagination take us in the wrong direction?
• Cultivate optimism. Most crisis situations offer threats and opportunities. By focusing on opportunities rather than threats, we can usually generate more balanced and effective reactions.
• Change perspective. Viewing the situation through a perspective of the other people involved or the perspecive of our role models, we can choose reactions that are more balanced, effective and creative.

Start young

Learning to manage emotions boosts children’s wellbeing. Various educational systems are adding specific curricula to deal with the subject. This means that there is a sort of consensus in the pedagogic community that this is important.

I quote:

Studies show that those who are reluctant to understand and express their feelings experience higher levels of anxiety, depression, and certain psychiatric disorders. They also report lower levels of well-being and social support.
At school, children experience a wide range of emotions every day. In addition to the stress of managing their studies and homework, they face a number of social struggles, such as conflicts with friends, romantic relationships, and bullying.

Since childhood and adolescence are some of the most stressful and emotionally charged periods of our lives, we should at least provide our children with some tools to manage their feelings, thoughts, and responses. The earlier the better.

It’s not a catastrophe if we acquire new tools when we are middle-aged. In some sense, the life experience makes learning easier. However, we will regret the opportunities we missed earlier in our lives.

Be flexible

Some people misinterpret self-discipline and emotional self-regulation as a rigid behavior. I quote:

Rigid behavior is a defense mechanism in the effort to maintain a strong, consistent, positively valued sense of self. People who are strongly preoccupied with being in control may be struggling against more powerful temptations toward self-indulgence than most of us face.

This is a costly mistake. The rigid behaviors can have a high cost. We may start losing creativity since creativity often requires playfulness and spontaneity. We may start losing productivity, as our productivity is different at various hours of the day and in different situations.

Rigid thinking may cause obsessive control behaviors. If we write everything down and review our notes, it takes time and effort and diverts our focus from what is needed. The people and event that will drive our focus away might stress us. We may turn down opportunities and choose to ignore threats.

Perfectionism is not more considered a positive personal quality. We should avoid all-or-nothing thoughts and behaviors as they can be potentially dangerous.

Flexible people often embrace the simplest “good enough” solutions and implement slow and adaptive improvement plans. Flexible people accept the things they cannot change and try to find the areas where the smallest effort provides the biggest improvement.

Choose when to express your feelings

Smiling is considered to be one of the most prominent, positive and helpful responses. In most situations we handle, a simple smile can improve our lives. However, even smile can get us into trouble. Basically, we are expected to be roughly as expressive as people around us. When everybody is laughing, we are expected to laugh, but when the people around us are serious we should also be adequately serious and responsible. We may laugh within but not show it if it can be interpreted as self-centered and egocentric behavior. I quote:

to reap the rewards of emotions while controlling the costs, it is necessary to be able to successfully regulate emotional experience and expression.

Anger escalation is much more dangerous than an inappropriate smile. If we respond in anger to someone’s angry response, we may make that person angrier. As a result, the anger in the communication may escalate to the point of explosive reactions, which may, in turn, generate retaliation. Typically, anger can be partially diffused by various responses of empathy, distraction, or changing the perspective on the situation. Simply acknowledging the feelings of a person may make the situation better for all parties involved.

We should embrace moral behaviors, but be careful when expressing moral judgment. It is not good to feel guilty, and it is even worse to make other people feel guilty. People may interpret your moral judgment as an attack on their values and such attack may trigger the fight-or-flight response.

Accept winnings we cannot control

With some practice it get easier to accept the bad things we cannot control. For most people this is the best alternative in the worst situations.

Interestingly, most people do not train accepting good things that we cannot control. Sometimes good things happen to us many years after the actions we take. Sometimes they simply happen. When good things result from the actions we take, there is a deep feeling of reward usually associated with dopamine. When we cannot attribute the good things to our behavior, we often feel helpless.

The good things we cannot control may generate different sorts of wreckless behaviors. Some people get overly optimistic and think good things will start happening from now on. Others feel that the situation is unfair and try to balance it. Sharing the fortune with other people is perhaps the most positive kind of wreckless behavior, and the one that is anticipated by others. Failure to share the good fortune may result in deep resentment.

Quite possibly, the best thing is simply accept the new situation and analyze the alternative responses in the most objective way we can master.

Summary

This article is rather long, so I want to rephrase and summarize some of the main points:

• Rethink emotions. It is a good idea to check our emotions by ourselves, with our children and with others.
• Awareness, evaluation, adjustment. To modify our emotional response we need to understand them, see if they are appropriate, and find a way to make them better.
• Start young. Children should learn emotional self regulation. It is probably not to late to start at any age, but better to start young.
• Be flexible. It is very hard to generate a perfect change. Try to embrace “good enough” instead.
• Choose your fights. Sometimes it is best to express the emotions and sometimes to hide them. Sometimes things happen for no reason we can control. Focus on achieving the maximal result with the minimal erf.