Make Your Emotions Assets, Never Liabilities.
Don’t “manage” your emotions: use them to propel you towards what you want.
From burning anger to deepest love: Emotions are the most immediate physical responses from our body to essential signals from the outside world. They arise before and without thought, reasoning, or choice. Welcome our today’s guest: Emotions, from the Latin emotio -0nis: “Impulse that induces Action”
We could say that Emotions are reactions to external stimuli or to feelings themselves. The human emotional-system is our natural guidance system, developed through evolutionary trial and error over millions of years. It is most useful when we don’t try to fight it (far more useful, I would say)
Long story short: Emotions are not always reliable. In some situations, they help us cut through appearances and illusions, working as a kind of internal radar. But, and here comes one realization that pretty much changed my life: “The map is not the territory.”
The emotion that I am starting to experience now is not speaking a fact; it is not making a statement: It is (only) building up for signaling something; it is DATA, not INFORMATION. We need to learn to treat them as such; data, not information.
Emotions are full of wisdom, bringing both shortcuts and shortcircuits with them, as they are not fully compatible read-ready for our prefrontal cortex.
Now,…imagine trying to correct troubling emotions->feelings->thoughts: That chain guides us to focus unnecessarily on them and on solving them. What is the point of trying to solve a thought (that arose from emotion) as it would be a fact? Or trying to change it from negative to positive? that is a sure way for suffering. Again, is data not yet information…
There’s no such thing as a solution to a feeling.
The more we can create space between stimulus and reaction, the greater control we will have over ourselves. Conversely, as a growing (and already big) body of research shows emotional rigidity, which is getting hooked by emotions->feelings->thoughts driving behaviors that don’t serve us: is associated with a variety of psychological dysfunctions, to name a couple: depression and anxiety.
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.” -Viktor Frankl.
What’s then the “solution”, sorry the Antidote?
Emotional skillfulness frees us from emotional compulsion. We create problems when emotions compel us to act one way or another. However, if we become proficient in knowing our emotions, we are no anymore compelled to act; we instead could behave in rational ways that are ideal for us and to everybody else.
From Asian wisdom, the way Shunryu Suzuki put it, is as wise as funny: “Leave your front and back door open. Allow your thoughts to come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.”
- Neglecting or denying your emotions is harmful.
- Believing your emotions mean one specific thing that is permanent, as I feel sad = Something bad is happening, is harmful.
- Denying altogether or taking them blindly without observation is detrimental to us.
An emotion is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our emotion, but the attachment to it that could cause distress, pain, or suffering. Assigning to an emotion “A” meaning implies believing that it’s true (that meaning we preattached). Without inquire, an emotion (or a thought) could remain attached to us, often for years.
In conclusion, storing or letting emotions flood are not good ideas. As Susan David said: Bottling and brooding are short-term emotional aspirin we reach for avoiding the confrontation of our emotions.
Finding ways to use your emotions to Fuel you, not to Rule you. How:
To create that little piece of space between emotion and thought/behavior, there are 3 areas of opportunity:
- Tweak your beliefs. In a certain way, what people refer to as “mindset”. If sadness arises, do not use your go-to thought: something is off. Wear another mindset for a little while, hold the thought for 2 seconds, get curious as to what else could that be signaling….
- Tweak your motivations: Try Something along the lines; from “I have to go to the gym today” to “I want to go to the gym 3 times a week”. Be playful to find something part you like or enjoy in a given ‘duty’.
- Tweak your habits. One great habit to break, we all engage in, is the habit of thought-blaming (treating thoughts as facts). Remember emotion is data, not directly a fact. Stop treating emotions and thoughts and as facts, imagining scenarios from them rather than experiencing them at the moment. Improve that habit; your life changes immediately.
By learning to make tiny changes in each of these areas, we empower ourselves to make profound, lasting change throughout our lives. Good luck :-)