We can not selectively numb emotions. When we numb the negative ones, we also numb the positive ones.
Viktor Frankl was a Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at the University of Vienna Medical School who survived the Nazi death camps. From his experiences in hell on earth, he pioneered an idea that other psychologists would go to develop around not succumbing to your emotions and choosing how you respond to what life throws at you. His wife, father, mother and brother all died in Nazi concentration camps. Only he and his sister survived, but he never lost the qualities of compassion, loyalty, undaunted spirit and thirst for life.
The last of the human freedoms is to choose your own attitude in any given situation, to choose your own way
Dr Susan David is a psychologist on faculty at Harvard Medical School, co-founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, CEO of Evidence Based Psychology, and author who calls this approach Emotional Agility.
Between stimulus and conscious response there is a space. Frankl realised that it is in that space from emotions to conscious reaction, in that choice, is where we get our growth and freedom.
Our emotions respond imperceivably quickly in our subconscious. If a big scary dog comes at you from the side, your peripheral vision will pick it up, your emotions will react, your sympathetic nervous system will kick in and you will start running before you even turn your head towards the dog.
Then your conscious mind will realise you are running from a dog. It will take 500 milliseconds for your cerebral cortex (conscious mind) to be aware, whilst your amygdala and limbic (emotions) system have been hard at work for a whole 300 milliseconds saving your life.
When we are rigid, when we are hooked by our emotions, feelings and worries, there is no space between stimulus and response. The amygdala shuts down the cortex and you respond with your first emotion.
That person irritated me so I lashed out physically or emotionally. My partner wanted to have a serious conversation so I left the room. They cut me off in traffic so I road raged at them.
Emotional Ability is essentially about developing skills. They don’t push all emotions aside because you can not, the amygdala gets there twice as fast as the cortex gets the information.
We need to see our emotions in their rightful place, where they do not give directives, but instead use our values to make choices. We want to respond rather than react. We need to think then respond. You can still rage at the guy if you wish but make sure that you consider the ramifications of those actions. Some of our reactions are necessarily driven by anger or negative emotions.
Some of our reactions in the world are simply going through life on autopilot. That is another way that we are not emotionally agile.
We need to be sensitive to the world around us. We need to be mindful. Recognise what is coming through the world and make changes to our responses in a proactive and effective way.
Emotional agility sounds like Stoicism to me
The Stoic philosophy subscribes to similar ideas.
It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters
Some people misinterpret Stoicism. They think that it’s ‘stiff upper lip’, being emotionless. Some believe that it is anti happiness.
Stoicism and Emotional Agility are not against happiness, but when we start connecting with false ideas around happiness, happiness as a goal, people actually become more unhappy over time.
More correctly, when we aspire to be successful so that we get happiness then we tend to get depressed. When we decide to be happy, success comes as a result.
Happiness is a journey. Not a destination. A path full of obstacle that are overcome breeds happiness.
If we shy away from the obstacles, we become less able to deal with the world as it is. We think that everything has got to be positive and easy all the time. We chase happiness and think that we always need to be in a good mood. So we stop being able to be authentic and connected. It is these social connections that help breed happiness. They also help keep our minds working properly into later age.
Changing your thoughts to happy ones is not the idea behind Emotional Ability. The concept is to enjoy the process.
When you have bad days or negative emotions, don’t try to push those aside or bottle them up or marinate in them for days or weeks or months. These are all ineffective ways of dealing with our emotions.
We often fixate on our emotions. We do this with good intentions. We are trying to understand them.
What we need to realise is that there is no right or wrong emotion. There is nothing wrong with feeling what you are feeling.
We used to force left handed people to write with their right hand but we learnt that there is no proper hand with which to write. We have to learn that there is no proper emotion for any situation.
We need to learn to open our hearts to the full range of emotional experiences. This is very different from what we should fix, what we should control, what we should push aside.
When you push aside emotions that does not mean that those emotions don’t still own you. There is a fascinating concept in psychology called Amplification. The idea behind it is that when we push aside our difficulty thoughts and emotions, they come back bigger and stronger.
You are feeding them in a backroom. Until they get too large to be contained in that room and they burst back in. Like a wild animal, you need to recognise them, deal with them and let them drift away.
People would’ve had this experience – maybe you were on a diet and you banned yourself from your favourite food. Maybe chocolate brownies? Bought from the Jewish bakery in Brick Lane?…
Anyway, you do not want to think about chocolate brownies. What do you do? You dream about them.
The stuff that we try to push aside gets amplified. It’s the beast in the backroom. There is a psychological rebound effect that happens.
How do you manage your emotions?
Even if you know that you should respond and not react, even if you have the knowledge that you should have emotional ability, we are all human and dealing with 60,000 years old genes that are going to make us react.
Prof Steve Peters calls this The Chimp Parodox. We all have a ‘monkey mind’, in and around the brainstem including the amygdala, that developed before the forebrain that’s job is to react and keep us alive.
You need to just allow yourself to be. Recognise the emotion. Be mindful. Then respond in the way your best self would want. Or as close to it as you can muster in the moment.
You can feel the emotion but be conscious of the messages that you are conveying to the persons around you. Colleagues. Partners. And especially children.
This cuts both ways. Sometimes it is fine and better to convey these emotions . We have display rules. Girls can not get angry and aggressive. Boys should not cry. We start very early on to shape the experiences that are allowed or not allowed . This can lead to people not being able to feel their emotions in a way that is connected and authentic.
What happens when people struggle to recognise emotions in themselves because they may have been suppressed?
They get the Amplification Effect. When we push aside our difficult emotions that does not solve the difficult situation. We are not actually dealing with the situation, we are just avoiding.
When persons have that bottling way of being, over time and at its most extreme, it can lead to situations where people try to manage their emotions in maladaptive ways. Using alcohol is one example where we feel sad but we can not name the sadness so we try to manage it by numbing ourselves and forgetting.
A more practical solution would be, for example, someone is experiencing stress at work, what we’ll often do is label these emotions in very broad brush strokes. We’ll say, “I’m stressed!”.
There is a difference between being stressed and being overwhelmed. There is a difference between “I’m stressed” and “Gee, I wish my team could’ve come through for me”. There is a difference between stress and “I’m in the wrong career”.
When we label our emotions in a more precise way it allows us to understand the causes of our emotion in a more accurate way. This allows us to take steps to dealing with the situation. It activates the Readiness Potential in the brain and starts shaping our goals.
If you are telling yourself, “I am stressed” and take that at face value you may think you need to delegate more. But if your stress is actual not being in a fulfilling career then no amount of delegation will help. You will have a sense of grief and sadness. The internal monologue you have with yourself will need to be completely different.
If you identify the thing that is the root of this thing that you are calling stress, it allows you to work out
- How to stop the stress
- What you value in a career.
- How you can start making changes
- What your vision is
If you just think, “I’m stress” and don’t find the root then you will never make any changes.
Emotional Agility Improves Happiness and Success
We know that these ideas around emotional agility are crucial to psychological health and wellbeing, and our relationships. When we push aside emotions, it impacts on our relationships.
It also effects your productivity. For instance, if you push your emotions down and keep working at the task at hand, because you are too busy to get angry, your ability to problem solve will be reduced. The ability to tackle the work you are trying to do will be impeded. Your creativity will be reduced and will become robotic.
How do you evaluate deeper emotions?
When you say, “I’m stressed” or “I’m sad” or “I’m angry”, what you are doing is describing your whole being. All of you. One hundred percent of you is this emotion.
But you are not your emotion. This is a central tenant of mindfulness. You can put yourself outside your thoughts and emotions, and witness them. Your thoughts and feelings are just another thing that is passing through your conscience.
You are your dreams. You are your values. You are your intentions. You are a whole lot of other things than that one emotion. When we say “I am” it allows no space between stimulus and response.
A very suble and effective way around this is, instead of saying “I am sad” or “I am angry”, notice the feeling or thought for what it is, simply a feeling or thought.
“I am noticing that I am feeling sad”. “I am noticing that I am feeling angry”.
“I notice the thought that I’m inferior or not good enough”.
This technique distances you from the idea that the emotion is a fact. You are not your thoughts and feelings.
Another way to gain emotional ability is to recognise that our emotions have a function that underpins the emotion. That underneath our emotions is something that we value.
If you are away from your family on a business trip and you say, “I feel guilty”, what that starts to imply is that is a fact; that you are a bad parent and/or partner. However, if you question what that guilt is sign posting to you, you may realise that you feel this way because you value being with your family, and in that moment you are feeling the lack of that. What that then allows you to do is to, not quit your job because that will breed different problems and emotions; to be able to ask to yourself, “In this context, what are ways that I can be present and connected? How can I bring my values to this situation instead of getting stuck in this guilt?”
It’s time to reframe values
Often when we talk about values they are presented in a very abstract way. They are things written on walls in businesses and they feel very abstract. These are not how you should think of values.
Values are qualities of action. If you value your health, you get to choose what you eat and that chose can move you towards your value or away from your value.
What about willpower?
If you look at how people actually make sustainable changes to their lives, when a person says something like “I have to lose weight because my wife is nagging me” or “I have to…” anything, it is a victim goal. It is not a want or desire. The ‘have to’ goal ramps up temptations. You want the forbidden fruit more.
When a person is able to identify the value that underpins the goal, not the ‘have to’ goal but ‘why do I want to’ goal, it has been proven that it down ramps temptations and creates sustainable behaviour changes.
You can only get to the ‘why’ if you are able to be open to yourself and your experiences.
Do all emotions have the same value
All emotions are valuable. Society may tell us that joy and happiness are valuable, and there is no point being misarable, but all emotions are valuable.
You do not get to have a meaningful career, you don’t get to raise a family, you do not get to leave the world a better place without some stress and discomfort. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.
Viktor Frankl knew this after coming through the most discomfort imaginable and writing his Man’s Search For Meaning. Some of our negative emotions might tell us that we do not like something that is happening in society at the moment.
All emotions have value but that does not make them valid and factual. It does not mean that you are right simply because you are ‘having feels’. Emotions are information, not directives. They are a collection of data, they are not telling you what to do.
You choose how to react. You own your emotions. They do not own you.
What about a lack of emotions?
Emotional Agility is not just about controlling your increases in emotions but can also involve recognising when you are emotionally inert. Just because you are not bored, doesn’t mean that you are feeling the full range of emotions that you need.
Just because you are busy and stressed doesn’t mean that you are challenged. You can have a lot on your plate, not enough hours in the day, but not be growing as an individual. When stress is values aligned that is what contributes to success and happiness.
Working at a level you can easily handle, in terms of mental or physical challenge, is referred to as being overcompetent. Overcompetence is a very strong risk factor for disengagement in the work place.
I certainly can relate to this. I have started new jobs, felt challenged and really enjoyed the new challenges. Then I start to feel like I have a bit of a handle on my work. I am not an armless, legless man swimming.
I enjoy the period of feeling confident, but if nothing new comes along, this only last a few weeks, I fall into a state of busy boredom. The work is easier, and I may not have enough time to get it done so I’m not idle, but it is not challenging me.
We can also be over challenged. This is when you do not know what is going on around you, there is too much uncertainty.
It is known that you only improve, have the greatest levels of connection and success if you are operating around or just over your level of comfort. Whether it’s training to run a marathon, lifting weights or studying a language people know that they need to practice at a level that is just a little bit over what they are used to.
I can not remember where I read or heard it but I got the idea in my head that ideally you practice 4% out of your comfort zone to see maximal improvements. The same applies for personal and professional development. This way you will never be overcompetent or over challenged.
This applies out of work too, including in your relationships. You are overcompetent when you know ‘too much’ about your partner. You know what they are going to order at dinner. You know what their opinion of a movie will be. You know what they are going to want to talk about when you see them next.
Over challenged in a relationship is when you are walking on egg shells. You do not know what to expect. You know whatever you want to bring to the relationship (conversations, experiences, etc) is going to be run over by whatever they want to do or talk about. Both of these will lead to disengagement with the relationship.
Being at the edge of your ability in a relationship is about trying to expand the depth or the breadth of your interactions. Depth could be conversations that you’ve stopped having with your partner about meaningful stuff like hopes, dreams and fears, instead of just the kids sports schedule, who’s turn it is to wash up or the latest work gossip. Breadth can be conversations about stuff you may have discussed before but you expand on them or exploring new experiences together.
We all want an easy life and a bit of downtime. Emotional Agility is not about stress and depth of analysis for the sake of it. It is about being on the edge of your potential so that it expands. It is intentionally connecting with who you want to be in the world.
What does a healthy relationship with your emotions look like?
Emotional Agility is about being compassionate with yourself. Recognising that you are doing the best you can with who you are and what you’ve got, the resources you have been given. It could be a conversation with someone else, an inner monologue journalling.
Life is not a competition. We are all not running in an ultra marathon where the idea of being compassionate to yourself and each other is a taboo. Where the idea of being compassionate is seen as weak or lazy.
Persons who are self compassionate are more honest with themselves. They are less lazy because they create a space inside themselves where they can fail and they still love themselves.
Often when a person messes up and they know they have done something wrong, they will put themselves down and belittle themselves. They probably would not do this with someone else, especially if it was a child. If your young child made a mistake at school, they came and told you, you would not berate them and yell at them, yet we do this to ourselves. We need to stop doing that to have emotional wellbeing.
Emotional wellbeing also involves being courageous with our emotions. It is allowing ourselves to feel the emotions and go to uncomfortable places in our minds. Our emotions may tell us that we are in a relationship that is not working for us. They are a compass. They do not define you but they point you in a direction.
Emotional agility involves being compassionate, curiously exploring our emotions, courageous with them, and making choices that are connected with our values. That is what emotional health and wellbeing look like. This is the bedrock of success. Not how much money you have in the bank, but lifelong wellbeing, connectedness in our relationships, ability to love and lead in effective, sustainable ways.
Enjoy!
Scott
PS. If you know anyone who could learn to better appreciate their emotions for what they are and show some more emotional agility, please share via the Social buttons around this post.
Hear more:
https://lewishowes.com/podcast/susan-david-the-art-of-emotional-agility/