How do we control our emotions? We see it all around us, emotional control is a key factor of great leaders, and therefore those who have more control, are often not just happier, but more successful too. So it is no surprise that this desired skill is one of the most researched skills out there. So how do we get it? It takes time and a walk down memory lane to understand why we behave the way we do in certain situations. But it is possible to desensitize your triggers and control your emotions, In this article, we will show you how to find the reason behind your emotions and how to deal with impulsive emotions by engaging the parasympathetic response through science-backed methods.
Slow Is The Way To Go
In the last article we’ve gone over how emotions are made, but not how we can control our response to the feelings that arise and the environment around us. To do this we need to understand the process of what happens when our brain receives hormone signals. ultimately all signals need to go to the amygdala where the signals are processed, consolidated, and stored in memory in order to form an appropriate emotional response to your surroundings or thoughts. With every hormone signal that is sent back from our organs to our brain, we have two choices in how we perceive them, the fast and slow pathways (see image down below). The fast pathway sends sensory information straight from our hypothalamus to our amygdala. This pathway is used for events that result in basic emotions such as fear in which immediate action is required. The slow pathway sends signals from the hypothalamus through the frontal cortex, where we reason, and then to the amygdala. The slower route is used to create more refined emotions such as jealousy (Stangor & Walinga, 2014).
What we ultimately want to do is have our emotions take the slow route in order to reason and behave appropriately in our situations. Of course, when we are caught off guard this is much harder to achieve. However, as we learned from the last article, we have one trick up our sleeve and that is disrupting the cycle by engaging the parasympathetic response.
Regulation Not Repression
A quick reminder before we get to the answers. The objective isn’t to handle every situation perfectly every single time. We are humans, we make mistakes and slip up sometimes. The aim is to be more stable than our past selves, not perfectly stable by repressing emotions. Think about it this way, a slip-up is what it is, a slip-up. You slip up and fall on the spot you were standing, it’s not a setback because you didn’t slip backward, so keep this in mind when evaluating your progress in the future. Okay, now let’s dive right in and see some practical advice to desensitize our triggers.
There are two parts to getting emotions under control, out-of-the-moment and in-the-moment. Out-of-the-moment is the most important as it makes in-the-moment responses less prone to impulsive reactions. After all, prevention is better than cure.
Part One: Out-Of-The-Moment
So, let’s start with a couple of questions you can ask yourself when a situation has happened in which you are unpleased with your reaction. Asking yourself these uncomfortable questions shows that more often than not we are reacting to our past, not our present. This realization opens up the space to see the present for what it really is, oftentimes not as bad as what we made it out to be.
Grab a pen and paper, and really take your time with this so you can fully imagine the situation. Go as deep into why as you can to see what the reason was you felt you needed to say or do what you did.
1: Archive Analysis
Try to think of your earliest memory of the emotional reaction you would like to combat. Perhaps, you say things you don’t mean while you are flooded with hormones. Maybe you curse a lot when angry, or you put yourself down. When did you first notice you started doing this? Sometimes getting to the original event that created the trigger can explain the cause of the trigger better.
2: Identify the invisible
Look at your past arguments what are they about? What do they have in common? Ask yourself what made you say or do those things. What were you feeling at that moment? If you say hurtful things to your partner are you actually scared that they might leave you? If you constantly beat yourself up that something isn’t good enough are you worried that you aren’t good enough? Really ask why. Then once you answer, repeat the question till you get to the core. Be your own stereotypical annoying movie therapist for this exercise.
Again take this step seriously and give it some thought. We can’t debunk the myths we believe if we haven’t identified them.
3: Rethink to Reframe
Most of our self-talk is learned from people’s opinions of us and our drive to belong creates a desire to meet people’s conditions. These conditions and expectations are then internalized and as someone says something about our work we may take it to mean something offensive, hurtful, or lacking about our personality.
Take a moment to think about why you believe it. Is it actually true? This may sound silly at first but bear with me. We often know consciously that we should not think about ourselves in that way, yet our subconscious still does. Try and see where you might have gotten this idea. Did someone you looked up to tell you these expectations, and conditions? If so, who? What made that individual special to you? or was it society through movies/music/culture?
And then, you guessed it, reframe the situation. ‘My parent is saying such and such because when they were growing up they were told it is this way, my parent wouldn’t say it if they weren’t looking out for me.’
The aim is not to dismiss the parent’s words as not painful, and therefore dismiss our less-than-nice behavior towards others. No, But instead to understand the roots. Often times the roots of our insecurities come from our impressionable days when we were kids. This means that a lot of the unhealthy ideals we still hold onto today may not be our fault because we were young when we learned them. Yet, how we deal with them now, does become our responsibility.
Reframing requires you to access your frontal cortex, which requires you to be in a calm state. So what do you do when you are flooded with emotions? You counteract the trigger by engaging your parasympathetic nervous system, and here is how you do that.
Part Two: In-The-Moment
Say you are completely submerged 500ft below your sea of hormones and you can’t see that your boss doesn’t hate you. What can get you to the surface is some physical exercises. No, I’m not telling you to hit the gym, although, physical exercise is a great tension releaser and can help raise your emotional tolerance. What we’re talking about is breathing exercises. Don’t leave this page just yet if you’re not one for the airy fairy things. The reason this works is that slowing down your breathing slows your heart rate, therefore, slowing the rate at which hormones in your bloodstream are flooding your brain.
Breathe
No, you don’t have to do breathing exercises in public, or worse, in front of the person who triggered you. There is a more subtle way of handling flooding in public. Hormones impair our rational thinking, but by knowing this we can prepare ourselves for it. You know how people say things that have the complete opposite effect such as chill, calm down, or relax?
The Focus Word
Well, as annoying as they are it can actually help, but only if we are the ones telling ourselves. Because let’s face it the only problem we have with those words is that we associate the words with the people who put us in that situation trying to justify/ or deny their involvement in our emotions or get out of the consequences we feel they deserve. So forget those specific words, but come up with one word that you associate calmness with. Maybe it’s the sea, maybe just the word calmness, or a reminder like breathe. Whatever word it is keep it one or two words so that your rational brain can think of it in flooded times. A calming word can help you get out of a situation the same way breathing can. (Toussaint et al, 2021)
Additionally, there are other scientific facts that can quickly engage your parasympathetic nervous system. Let’s see how to activate that resting state we long for.
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
There is EFT tapping therapy, tapping certain areas of the body firmly signals the vagus nerve to activate the rest state. (Fox, 2013)(Stapleton, 2019)
Diving-reflex
You can try cooling down. This means quite literally dunking your face in cold water or putting an ice pack in the back of your neck. What this does is, it alerts the parasympathetic nervous system to kick in to conserve the energy that you were spending on stress to ensure survival. Although survival might sound extreme, in moments of stress our body believes it needs to survive so using this idea we can also induce environmental stressors to engage the parasympathetic Nervous System to start doing its job but this time for our benefit. (Speciale, 2020)
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
Although there are more techniques I wanted to finish up with another scientifically proven method which is to tense your muscles, also known as progressive muscle relaxation. When stressed we tense our muscles without noticing, deliberately exaggerating this and then continuously releasing the tension can help us be aware of our body posture’s message to us. (Toussaint et al, 2021)
Practice Makes Progress
Once the edge is off things will feel a little easier to manage. Be proud you handled the peek. So how do you make this your default setting, the key to succeeding at this, and dismantle the trigger.. practice. I know, I know but just as purely eating less and moving more gets you to lose weight, nothing will desensitize you more than actually practicing this mindset. Repeating what you have learned will reprogram the schema in your brain not to feel like any comment is meant as a personal attack. Which will disengage the amygdala from sending signals to the hypothalamus which means no hormones flood your system and you can stay calm and collected.
The Takeaway
Let’s wrap this up. We need our frontal cortex to work in order to consciously control our emotions. There are two ways to do that. Disengaging the trigger altogether by identifying and reframing to help reveal the thoughts you started believing. Then followed by engaging the parasympathetic nervous system to break the fast pathway and redirect the signals through the frontal cortex (the slow pathway). You can do this by breathing intentionally slower and deeper, or through using a focus word, EFT tapping, the Diving Reflex, and progressive muscle relaxation. Lastly, practice, practice, practice this mindset by thinking of scenarios in which you would need this strategy and then going through the steps and calming methods to prepare and desensitize. Once we feel more in control of our emotions we can start to discover our core values to make faster and better life decisions so we can live the life we want.
Related Articles
References:
Fox, L. (2013). Is Acupoint Tapping an Active Ingredient or an Inert Placebo in Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)? A Randomized Controlled Dismantling Study. Energy Psychology Journal, 5(2). doi:10.9769/epj.2013.5.2.lf
Speciale, A. (2020). Can the mammalian dive response override posttraumatic stress disorder? Journal of Evolution and Health: An Ancestral Health Society Publication, 5(1). doi:10.15310/j35152613
Stangor, C., & Walinga, J. (2014, October 17). 11.1 the experience of emotion. Introduction to Psychology 1st Canadian Edition. Retrieved April 10, 2022, from https://opentextbc.ca/introductiontopsychology/chapter/10-1-the-experience-of-emotion/
Stapleton, P. (2019). The science behind tapping: A proven stress management technique for the mind & body. Retrieved November 24, 2021, from https://books.google.ae/books?hl=en&lr=&id=L2L6DwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=eft tapping&ots=dWoAedZlEF&sig=ubjW9byjUkVE9J8F5NqpO_zEuWY&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
Toussaint, L., Nguyen, Q. A., Roettger, C., Dixon, K., Offenbächer, M., Kohls, N., . . . Sirois, F. (2021). Effectiveness of Progressive Muscle Relaxation, Deep Breathing, and Guided Imagery in Promoting Psychological and Physiological States of Relaxation. Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 2021, 1-8. doi:10.1155/2021/5924040
Leave a Reply